About My Research

I am a graduate student at the University of Oxford, working on my PhD on medieval Islamic legal history in the Faculty of Oriental Studies.

My Master’s thesis was on the debate over scholasticism in the medieval Muslim curriculum, which occurred in Damascus from 1200-1350 (see the Writings page for an abstract).

My DPhil research focuses on the madhhab’s (Muslim school of law) role in the regulation of law. I am looking at how the correlated concepts of tarjih (giving preponderance to some legal opinions over others) and taqlid (binding legal precedent) developed at this time. I argue that it was the systemization of previous legal opinions through tarjih that was the essential factor for the development of the doctrine of precedent (taqlid), without which the madhhabs could not have developed or survived. Tarjih, and thus taqlid, gave the madhhabs the coherency needed for continuity of doctrinal transmission and social regulation as an institution. Finally, I argue that the mukhtasar (compendium) genre of the fourth to fifth centuries developed primarily as a format by which this process of tarjih took place in legal literature, and not merely as a didactic tool. Towards this all, my thesis takes as a case study the famous Compendium of the Hanafi jurist, Ahmad b. Muhammad al-Quduri (d. 428/1037)

I was recently asked about the importance of such research for the modern world, asides from its value of historic curiosity. In short, it was largely in that age that the institutions of Sunni Islam were formulated. These institutions survived and were the basis of much of Muslim society until the premodern period, and have large ramifications for issues of Muslim thought, law and society in this age.