Dr. Issam Eido is a Global Academy Scholar in partnership with the Middle East Studies Association (MESA). He is also an Assistant Professor of the Practice of Religious Studies at Vanderbilt University Department of Religious Studies. A former visiting scholar of Islamic and Arabic Studies at The University of Chicago-Divinity School (2013-2015). Prior to the Syrian uprising, Eido served as a lecturer in the faculty of Islamic Studies in the Department of Quran and Hadith Studies at the University of Damascus. 

Eido’s research focuses on the Qur’an, Hadith Studies, Sufism. His teaching interests focus on Qur’an, Hadith, Early Islamic legal theory, and Arabic Studies. 

Eido received his Ph.D. from the Department of Quran and Hadith Studies at Damascus University in 2010. For more information visit his webpage. 

Yusuf Celik is the lead data scientist for the SHARIAsource Courts and Canons Project, 2020-2021. He  is currently an adjunct lecturer and researcher at the University of Utrecht.

His research is on Philosophical Hermeneutics in the Islamic tradition and Continental philosophy. Yusuf Celik has also been active for years in the field of software engineering. As an independent contractor he has worked for different high profile clients in the capacity of lead developer, consultant, code coach, and Scrum master. He is currently exploring ways to synthesize insights from Philosophical Hermeneutics with new technologies such as Deep Learning.

Celik received his PhD from the University of Edinburgh in 2020 for his dissertation on contemporary Qur’an hermeneutics in Turkey.

Faiz Ahmed (PhD, UC Berkeley; JD, UC College of Law, San Francisco) is currently Joukowsky Family Distinguished Associate Professor of Modern Middle Eastern History at Brown University. Ahmed’s primary specializations are the late Ottoman Empire, Afghanistan, and the British Empire, as well as diasporic communities tied to the region we today call the Middle East. His core research and teaching engage questions of human mobility, travel, and migration; social histories of Islamic law and learning; and the intersections of constitutionalism, citizenship, and diplomacy.

Ahmed’s first book, Afghanistan Rising: Islamic Law and Statecraft between the Ottoman and British Empires (Harvard University Press), was awarded the American Historical Association’s John F. Richards Prize in 2018. His current research explores historical ties and engagements of the Ottoman Empire in the Americas, with a focus on social, economic, and legal connections to the United States and Canada during the long nineteenth century. His published articles have appeared in journals of law, history, and Middle East Studies, including Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East; Global Jurist; International History Review; International Journal of Middle East Studies; Iranian Studies; Jadaliyya; Osmanlı Araştırmaları (Journal of Ottoman Studies); Journal of the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association; and Perspectives on History. Dr. Ahmed is also co-organizer with Brown University colleagues Michael Vorenberg, Emily Owens, and Rebecca Nedostup of the Brown Legal History Workshop and the Brown Legal Studies collaborative.

Mohammad A. Abderrazzaq is a Research Affiliate at the Program in Islamic Law. He has also been a contributing editor for the Sharia Source Project at Harvard Law School. In addition to his research in Islamic legal theory, Mohammad has taught courses on Islam in America, Islamic intellectual history, Islamic law, Islamic history, and Qur’anic exegesis.

His dissertation was a study of the development of maqāṣid juridical theory, which he is preparing for publication under the title The Higher Objectives of Islamic Law: The Development of Maqāṣid Theory from al-Shāṭibī to Ibn ʿĀshūr and the Contemporary Maqāṣid Movement. Mohammad is also an editor for a book series treating the maqāṣid thought of premodern and modern legal figures.

He received his PhD in Near Eastern Studies from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. 

Karina Halevy is an undergraduate student majoring in Applied Math and Computer Science. She’s interested in computational linguistics, data science for social good, education, and tech ethics.

Mary Elston is a scholar of Islam focusing on the modern and contemporary Middle East. Her research interests are in the anthropology of Islam, religious studies, and Islamic intellectual history, with a focus on education, knowledge, politics, and language. 

Her dissertation, “Reviving Turāth: Islamic Education in Modern Egypt,” combines ethnography and textual analysis to examine the politics, texts, and practices of a traditionalist education movement at Egypt’s al-Azhar, the preeminent institution of Islamic learning located in Cairo, received the Alwaleed Bin Talal Prize for Best dissertation in Islamic Studies in 2020. 

Her research in Egypt was supported by the Loeb Dissertation Research Fellowship in Religious Studies, the Frederick Sheldon Traveling Fellowship, the American Research Center in Egypt, the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, and Harvard University Center for African Studies. At PLS, Mary plans to turn her dissertation into a book manuscript, tentatively titled “Constructing Tradition: Islamic Turāth in the Contemporary Islamic World.” Her book will take a social scientific and humanistic approach to debates about tradition, knowledge, and Islamic education in the modern and contemporary Muslim world.

 In May 2020, Mary received her Ph.D. from Harvard University’s Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations.

email: [email protected]

Rabiat Akande was a Research Affiliate at the Program in Islamic Law between 2019-2020 and a Clark Byse Fellow at Harvard Law School. She is currently an Assistant Professor of Law at Osgoode University. 

Her current research explores struggles over religion-state relations in comparative contexts and illuminates law’s centrality to one of modernity’s most contested issues–the relationship between religion, and the state, and society–while also interrogating law’s complex relationship with power, political theology, identity, and socio-political change. These issues are at the forefront of her book project, Constitutional Entanglements: Empire, Law and Religion in Colonial Northern Nigeria (under contract with Cambridge University Press), which traces the emergence of “secularism” as a constitutional idea of ordering religion-state relations in early to mid-twentieth century British Colonial Northern Nigeria, and grapples with the postcolonial legacy of that inheritance.

She received her SJD from Harvard Law School in 2019 and obtained her Bachelor of Laws from the University of Ibadan, graduating with a First Class Honors and at the top of her class and later studied at the Nigerian Law School from which she also graduated with a First Class Honors.

Zahra Takhshid was a Research Affiliate to the Program in Islamic Law and the Reginald Lewis Fellow for Law Teaching at Harvard Law School. She also served as the Islamic Law Fellow at the Institute on Religion, Law, & Lawyer’s Work at Fordham Law School. Zahra is a Faculty Associate at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University  and has been selected as the 2021 Quantum Fellow at the Center for Quantum Networks of University of Arizona in partnership with Yale Law School’s Information Society Project (ISP).

She teaches and writes about torts, contracts, privacy, social media, technology and the law. Part of her scholarship explores how to use tools from torts and contracts in resolving challenges with emerging technological developments. A second strand of her interest is Islamic and comparative law. 

Zahra holds a doctorate (S.J.D.) from Fordham Law School. She earned an LL.M. from the George Washington University Law School where she was the recipient of full tuition Thomas Buergenthal Scholarship. She also has an LL.M. (Summa Cum Laude) and an LL.B. (Magna Cum Laude) from University of Tehran School of Law and Political Science.

Saqib Qureshi is an MTS Candidate at Harvard Divinity School.

Rimsha Saeed is a 1L at Harvard Law School. She received her bachelors in Public Affairs from UCLA and is interested in property and family law, as well as legal issues arising at the intersection of American and Islamic law.