TUE 14 OCT 2025 | 12.30-1.30p US EST | Zoom
Islamic Law Speaker Series: Rami Koujah (Harvard Law School)
The Invention of Islamic Legal Personhood: Artifact to Ontology (Harvard University Press)

Dr. Rami Koujah (Harvard Law School) will present “The Invention of Islamic Legal Personhood: From Artifact to Ontology,” a chapter from his forthcoming book, Islamic Legal Personhood: A Genealogy of Rights and Responsibilities (Harvard University Press, forthcoming). This talk explores the conceptual history and significance of “baseline personhood” in Islamic law, focusing on the changed meaning and usage of the term dhimma across the tribal setting of pre-Islamic Arabia, the legal discourses that developed to accommodate the burgeoning market economy of the early Muslim Empire, and the subsequent theorizations of an Islamic jurisprudence infused with a covenantal theology. The talk draws attention to the creative dynamics of Islamic legal reasoning, including the critical role played by shifting epistemic frames between legal logic and the legal imagination. The talk concludes by showing how dhimma emerged in the 11th century as a constitutive element of a metaphysical anthropology, the ontological ground of an Islamic homo juridicus. Professor Mohammad Fadel (University of Toronto) will respond.