Muhammad Hassan Ali is a legal practitioner and writer specializing in constitutional law, fundamental rights, Islamic law, and commercial law. He earned his first law degree from the University of London in 2017 and is currently pursuing an LL.M. from Harvard Law School (Class of 2025). With over seven years of professional experience primarily in litigation, he has clerked for three Justices of the Supreme Court of Pakistan, contributing to several landmark judgments on constitutional law, fundamental rights, and commercial law.

Mariam Sheibani is an Assistant Professor of Islamic Thought at the Department of Near Eastern and Judaic Studies at Brandeis University. She received her PhD in Islamic Thought from the University of Chicago and postdoctoral training at Harvard Law School. Her research and teaching focus on Islamic intellectual, religious, and social history, particularly the theory and practice of Islamic law, ethics, and Sufism.

Prior to joining Brandeis University, she taught at The University of Toronto, Harvard Divinity School, and the University of Chicago. She also served as Associate Academic Director and Head of Research at Cambridge Muslim College. Since 2018, she has been  Research Editor for the Islamic Law Blog based at Harvard Law School.

Her forthcoming book, An Islamic Legal Philosophy: Ibn ʿAbd al-Salam and the Ethical Turn in Islamic Law, examines how Muslim jurists from the eleventh to fourteenth centuries addressed salient questions of legal philosophy and ethics. Her other publications and ongoing research projects investigate the construction of early Islamic law, classical doctrines of Muslim family law, and Islamic ethics and traditions of spirituality.

Dr. Marwa Sharafeldin is an Egyptian scholar activist. She is currently a Visiting Fellow in the Program on Law and Society in the Muslim World at Harvard Law School. She is also the Senior Advisor in Musawah the Global Movement for Equality and Justice in the Muslim Family. Dr. Sharafeldin has a PhD in Socio-Legal Studies from the Law Faculty in the University of Oxford and a Masters in Development Management from the London School of Economics. Her work covers the intersection between Islamic law, international human rights law, and feminist activism. 

Her publications include “Islamic Law Meets Human Rights: Reformulating Qiwama and Wilaya for Personal Status Law Reform Advocacy in Egypt”; “Gender and Equality in Muslim Family Law”; “Challenges of Islamic Feminism in Personal Status Law Reform in Egypt”. She co-founded and served on the Executive and Advisory Boards of several international, regional and national feminist organizations such as Musawah, the Global Fund for Women, the Young Arab Feminist Network, and the Network for Women’s Rights Organisations in Egypt. Dr. Sharafeldin is also a technical expert for the publication of several regional and international reports such as the UN’s Progress of the World’s Women Report and the UN’s Gender Justice and Law Arab Region Report. She believes in the power of art for social transformation, and is a story collector,  performer and  writer.

Ali Rida Rizek is a Research Editor at the Program in Islamic Law. He received his PhD, Arabic and Islamic Studies – University of Göttingen, 2021) is a scholar of social and intellectual history of Islam, with special focus on Twelver Shi’ism. His research focuses on the history of Islamic law, Qur’anic studies, Arabic literature, and classical Islamic education and his dissertation (2021) examines the life, work, and impact of two early Imami legal scholars, namely Ibn Abī ʿAqīl al-ʿUmānī and Ibn al-Junayd al-Iskāfī (both flourishing in the 4^th/10^th century). Rizek has taught at the American University of Beirut (AUB), the Lebanese American University (LAU), the University of Leiden, the University of Göttingen, and the University of Bayreuth in Germany and has published studies on hadith, legal history, and the classical Islamic ethical discourse. He received his BA and MA in Arabic Language and Literature from the American University of Beirut (AUB) in Lebanon. 

Sultan Mehmood is an Assistant Professor of Economics at the New Economic School of Moscow and a research affiliate at the Harvard Law School’s Program in Islamic Law. He is also a faculty research fellow at Centre for Economic Research in Pakistan (CERP) and Pakistan Institute of Development Studies (PIDE) in Pakistan.

Professor Mehmood is engaged in pioneering research on judicial reforms in the Global South, with a particular focus on his home country, Pakistan. His research methodology involves harnessing large datasets and careful attention to legal theory to provide insights into reforming the judiciary, promoting political rights, with a specific emphasis on studying the prerequisites for establishing the rule of law within societies. His work has been accepted or published in prestigious scientific outlets, including Nature, American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, The Economic Journal, and the Journal of Development Economics.

Professor Mehmood will be responsible for assisting in the acquisition and digitization of collections of judgments dating back to the country’s independence in 1947. This effort is part of the larger project to create an online Resource Database for judicial decisions in Pakistan, which will also include the development of related AI and training tools and research papers.

Website: sultanmehmood.info

Twitter: @mrsultan713

Dilyara Agisheva received an undergraduate degree in Middle Eastern Studies and Political Science from UCLA and an M.A. in Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies from Columbia University. As a Ph.D. student at Georgetown University, she specialized in Islamic legal studies and Ottoman history. In August 2021, she defended her doctoral thesis entitled “Entangled Legal Formations: Crimea Under Russian Rule in the Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries.” Her doctoral research was supported by scholarships and grants, including the Heath W. Lowry Dissertation Writing Fellowship of Distinction from the Institute of Turkish Studies and the Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Fellowship.  Dilyara was also the inaugural PIL-LC Research Fellow at the Program in Islamic Law. 

AbdurRahman Bhatti is an engineering student at Princeton with an interest in solving major problems using technology and entrepreneurship. In parallel with his studies, AbdurRahman ran a Techstars-backed augmented reality/fitness startup called Ghost Pacer for five years that generated seven figures in annual revenue. During that time, he also managed a 35-person engineering team and filed for 7 patents across various fields.

Dr. Bahman Khodadadi is the PIL-LC Research Fellow at the Program in Islamic Law at Harvard Law School and the Library of Congress for the 2024–2025 academic year. Prior to this, he served as a Research Associate at the Abdallah S. Kamel Center for the Study of Islamic Law and Civilization at Yale Law School.

Dr. Khodadadi’s expertise lies in Islamic law and Middle Eastern Studies, with a specialized focus on Shiite Islamic jurisprudence. His current research spans a wide array of topics, including Iranian studies, the sociology of law, the history of Islamic law, criminal law theory, and the politico-juridical dynamics within Islamic jurisprudence, particularly in the Shi’a tradition. He completed his PhD at the University of Münster, Germany, in 2021, with his dissertation receiving summa cum laude honors. His book, On Theocratic Criminal Law: The Rule of Religion and Punishment in Iran, was recently published by Oxford University Press, with endorsements from many internationally esteemed scholars.

Dr. Khodadadi has also recently published an article “Nowhere but Everywhere”: The Principle of Legality and the Complexities of Judicial Discretion in Iran, which appeared in the Iranian Studies Journal (Cambridge University Press). His forthcoming article will be published in the Yale Journal of Law & the Humanities (Vol. 35). He has served as editor and peer reviewer for several prestigious journals, including the Journal of Islamic Law (Harvard) and the British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies.

His academic achievements have been widely recognized, earning him the esteemed Harry Westermann Award for the best doctoral dissertation at the University of Münster, as well as two DAAD awards in 2016 and 2023. From 2015 to 2023, Dr. Khodadadi was an active member of the Excellence Cluster: Religion and Politics in Germany, where he contributed to various research projects. In addition to his scholarly work, he is an accomplished author and lecturer, with numerous publications, translated articles, and lecture engagements across Europe, including in Germany, Switzerland, Italy, and Ireland.

Email: [email protected]

Fatma Gül Karagöz is an assistant professor of legal history based at Galatasaray University Faculty of Law. Since working on her MA thesis on the codes of the early modern Ottoman Empire and particularly on the New Code (Kanunname-i Cedid), a compilation of fatwas and codifications on land ownership, Fatma has been interested in land law in the Ottoman Empire. Her works are mostly focused on the property relations on agricultural land and the land usufruct in legal theory and practice. Her current research is based on the application of property law (land law) in the second half of 18th-century Antioch by focusing specifically on the exercise of property rights by women. She received her Ph.D. in Public Law from İstanbul University (2018), MA in Ottoman History from İhsan Doğramacı Bilkent University (2010), and BA in Law from Galatarasay University Faculty of Law (2005).