Ahmed El Shamsy, Visiting Fellow, ILSP: SHARIAsource, Harvard Law School will delve into the seemingly frivolous issue of male grooming practices to shed light on how the early Muslim community positioned itself and its law vis-a-vis the Jews and Jewish law.

Ahmed El Shamsy (PhD Harvard, 2009) is an associate professor of Islamic thought at the University of Chicago and a senior scholar at the Islamic Legal Studies Program at Harvard Law School. He studies the intellectual history of Islam, focusing on the evolution of the classical Islamic disciplines and scholarly culture within their broader historical context. His research addresses themes such as orality and literacy, the history of the book, and the theory and practice of Islamic law. His first book, The Canonization of Islamic Law: A Social and Intellectual History, traced the transformation of Islamic law from a primarily oral tradition to a systematic written discipline in the eighth and ninth centuries. He is now completing his second book, a study of the reinvention of the Islamic scholarly tradition and its textual canon via the printing press in the early twentieth century.