Affiliates

ILSP Affiliates are members of a broader community of scholars at Harvard  with interest and expertise surrounding issues of Islamic law. These scholars offer a wealth of knowledge and expertise and participate regularly in events and classes on Islamic law that add richly to the student and scholarly communities with interest in Islamic law.

Faculty Affiliates

Khaled Fahmy is Professor of History, The American University in Cairo and Visiting Professor in Modern Middle Eastern History, Harvard University. His research interests lie in the social and cultural history of modern Egypt. Specifically, he has been conducting research in the Egyptian National Archives for the past twenty years on such diverse topics as the history of law (Islamic shari’a), medicine and public hygiene. Fahmy has published a book on the social history of the Egyptian army in the first half of the 19th century (All the Pasha’s Men: Mehmed Ali, His Army and the Making of Modern Egypt—Cambridge University Press, 1997), a biography on Mehmed Ali (Mehmed Ali: From Ottoman Governor to Ruler of Egypt—Oneworld Publications, 2008), and a collection of articles on the history of law and medicine in 19th-century Egypt (The Body and Modernity—in Arabic, 2004). He is currently finishing a manuscript on the social and cultural history of Egypt in the 19th century as well as an edited book on the history of Egyptian law from the Mamluks to the present. Since the outbreak of the January 25 Revolution, Fahmy has been a regular contributor to Egyptian and international media.

William A. Graham is Harvard University Distinguished Service Professor, and Murray A. Albertson Professor of Middle Eastern Studies (Faculty of Arts and Sciences). Graham served as Dean of Harvard Divinity School from 2002 to 2012, when he stepped down to return to research and teaching. His scholarly work has focused on early Islamic religious history and textual traditions (Qur’an and Hadith), and on topics in the global history of religion. His book Divine Word and Prophetic Word in Early Islam was awarded the American Council of Learned Societies History of Religions Prize in 1978. He is the author of Beyond the Written Word: Oral Aspects of Scripture in the History of Religion (1987) and Islamic and Comparative Religious Studies (2010). He has co-authored three books and is also the author of numerous articles and reviews. He is a summa graduate of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and holds honorary doctorates from UNC and Lehigh University.

Baber Johansen was appointed Professor of Islamic Religious Studies at Harvard Divinity School in 2005. Prior to his appointment, he served as Directeur d’études at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (Centre d’étude des normes juridiques), Paris (1995–2005), and Professor for Islamic Studies at the Freie Universität Berlin (1972–1995). In 2006 he was appointed an affiliated professor at Harvard Law School and acting director of its Islamic Legal Studies Program from 2006 to 2010. In 2007 he was affiliated with the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, and from July 2010 to June 2013, he was the director of the Center for Middle Eastern Studies. He is also a faculty associate of Harvard’s Weatherhead Center for International Affairs and a member of its Executive Committee.

Ousmane Kane, a scholar of Islamic studies and comparative and Islamic politics, joined Harvard Divinity School in July 2012 as the first Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Professor of Contemporary Islamic Religion and Society at HDS. Since 2002, he was an associate professor of international and public affairs at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs. He is a member of a number of professional organizations, including the African Studies Association of North America and the Council for the Development of Social and Economic Research in Africa. Kane studies the history of Islamic religious institutions and organizations since the eighteenth century, and he is engaged in documenting the intellectual history of Islam in Africa.

Asim Ijaz Khwaja is the Sumitomo-Foundation for Advanced Studies on International Development Professor of International Finance and Development at the Harvard Kennedy School, and Co-Director of Evidence for Policy Design (EPoD). His areas of interest include economic development, finance, education, political economy, institutions, and contract theory/mechanism design. His research combines extensive fieldwork, rigorous empirical analysis, and microeconomic theory to answer questions that are motivated by and engage with policy. His recent work ranges from understanding market failures in emerging financial markets to examining the private education market in low-income countries. He was selected as a Carnegie Scholar in 2009 to pursue research on how religious institutions impact individual beliefs. Khwaja received BS degrees in economics and in mathematics with computer science from MIT and a PhD in economics from Harvard.

Tarek Masoud is the Sultan of Oman Associate Professor of International Relations at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government. His research focuses on the role of religion in the Muslim world’s political development. He is the author of Counting Islam: Religion, Class, and Elections in Egypt (Cambridge University Press, 2014), the co-author of The Arab Spring: Pathways of Repression and Reform (Oxford University Press, 2015), as well as of several articles and book chapters. He is a 2009 Carnegie Scholar, a term member of the Council on Foreign Relations, a member of the editorial board of the Journal of Democracy, and the recipient of grants from the National Science Foundation and the Paul and Daisy Soros foundation, among others. He holds an AB from Brown and a PhD from Yale, both in political science.

Malika Zeghal is the Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Professor in contemporary Islamic thought and life at Harvard and studies religion through the lens of Islam and power. She is particularly interested in Islamist movements and in the institutionalization of Islam in the Muslim world, with special focus on the Middle East and North Africa in the postcolonial period and on Muslim diasporas in North America and Western Europe. She has more general interests in the circulation and role of religious ideologies in situations of conflict and/or dialogue. She has published a study of central religious institutions in Egypt, Gardiens de l’Islam, (1996), and a volume on Islam and politics in Morocco, Islamism in Morocco: Religion, Authoritarianism, and Electoral Politics (2008), which has won the French Voices-Pen American Center Award. She is currently working on a book on states, secularity, and Islam in the contemporary Arab world.

Affiliated Scholars

Nadia Marzouki is a Andrew Carnegie Centennial Fellow at the Ash Center at the Harvard Kennedy School; research fellow at the Middle East Initiative at the Belfer Center, Harvard Kennedy School. Prior to joining MEI, she was a Research Fellow (Chargée de Recherche) at the CNRS (Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique) in Paris, and a consultant for ReligioWest. Nadia received her PhD in political science from Sciences-Po, Paris in 2008. She has been a Postdoctoral fellow at the Council on Middle Eastern Studies, Yale University (2008-2010), and a visiting scholar at the University of Berkeley (2004-2005) and at Princeton University (2005-2006). Her work examines public controversies about Islam in Europe and the United States. She is also interested in religious conversions to Evangelical Christianity and debates about religious freedom in North Africa. She is the author of L’Islam, une religion américaine? (Paris, Le Seuil, 2013). She co-edited with Olivier Roy, Religious conversions in the Mediterranean World, (Palgrave/Macmillan, 2013). Her most recent book is Islam: An American Religion (Columbia University Press, 2017).

Salma Waheedi is a Clinical Instructor at Harvard Law School’s International Human Rights Clinic. Waheedi is an international lawyer and advocate focusing on gender justice, Islamic law, international development, business and human rights, and comparative constitutional law. Most recently, she was a clinical advocacy fellow at the International Human Rights Clinic, with a joint appointment with Harvard Law School’s Islamic Legal Studies Program: Law and Social Change, where her academic scholarship focused on constitutional jurisprudence in Islamic legal systems and movements for reform in Muslim family laws. Salma also practiced regulatory compliance law at Baker and McKenzie LLP and immigration law at the United African Organization in Chicago, and served as a clinical fellow at Yale Law School’s Transnational Development Project.