Mariam Sheibani is a Research Fellow at Harvard Law School’s Program in Islamic Law and Lecturer at Harvard Divinity School.  Her research interests are in Islamic intellectual and social history, with a focus on law, ethics, gender, and contemporary Islamic thought. She serves as Lead Blog Editor for the Islamic Law Blog (formerly the SHARIAsourceBLOG) based at Harvard Law School.

Her first book project, Islamic Legal Philosophy: Ibn ʿAbd al-Salām and the Ethical Turn in Medieval Islamic Law, examines how Muslim jurists from the eleventh to fourteenth centuries addressed salient questions of legal philosophy and ethics, leading them to develop competing legal methodologies and visions of the law. In particular, she traces the development of a purposive, analytical, and socially responsive legal discourse that originated among Shāfiʿī jurists in Khorasan and continued to evolve in Ayyubid Damascus and Mamluk Cairo in subsequent centuries. The study centers on a prominent Damascene heir of Khorasani Shāfiʿism, ʿIzz al-Dīn b. ʿAbd al-Salām, a pivotal figure in the development of Islamic legal philosophy, ethics, and legal maxims (qawāʿid fiqhiyya). Learn more about her book project and other current research projects.

She received her PhD in Islamic Thought from the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago.Prior to her doctoral studies, she earned a BA in Public Affairs and Policy Management, an MA in Legal Studies, and a second an MA in Islamic Thought. 

Dana Lee is a research fellow at the Program in Islamic Law for the 2019-2020 academic year. She is currently working on her first book project based on her dissertation entitled, At the Limits of Law: Necessity in Islamic Legal History, Second/Eighth through Tenth/Sixteenth Centuries. 

She received her Ph.D. from the Near Eastern Studies Department at Princeton University in 2019 and previously received a J.D. from UCLA School of Law.

Sohaib Baig was a Research Fellow at the Program in Islamic Law between 2020-2021. He is interested broadly in connected intellectual and social histories of Islam across South Asia, the Indian Ocean, and the Middle East in the early modern and modern period.

Sohaib’s book project is based on his dissertation, entitled “Indian Hanafis in an Ocean of Hadith: Islamic Legal Authority between South Asia and the Arabian Peninsula, 16th – 20th Centuries.” It examines how Indian Hanafis from Sindh and Delhi maneuvered across imperial geographies to pursue hadith scholarship and engage multiple legal schools (madhhabs) in the Indian Ocean. It analyzes how such transregional exchanges produced immense debate on the authority of the Islamic legal school and the usage of hadith as legal evidence, leading to the formation of new Islamic legal institutions in the modern period.

He completed his PhD in the Department of History at the University of California, Los Angeles. Sohaib has conducted archival research in Pakistan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Bosnia and Herzegovina, the Netherlands, and the UK.

Abdul Wahab Niaz is an LL.M Candidate at Harvard Law School. Prior to attending HLS, he worked as a law clerk to Chief Justice Umar Ata Bandial at the Supreme Court of Pakistan, and also rendered services in the dispute resolution and corporate advisory team of a leading Pakistani law firm. His research interests in Islamic law center around studying judicial islamization of laws in Pakistan and exploring Islamic constitutionalism in muslim-majority countries. At PIL, he is interested in working on digitization of Islamic law resources and also exploring the intersection between law and technology in our digitized world.

Niaz holds BA.-LL.B (Honours) from Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS).

Lily Moens is a JD candidate at Harvard Law School.

Abdelrahman Mahmoud is a PhD Candidate in the History and Middle East Studies program at Harvard’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.

Shanzay Javaid is an LL.M. candidate at Harvard Law School. Her areas of focus include issues in cyberlaw and regulation of tech space, as well as commercial and contract law. She is also interested in research of Islamic law and the digitization of its sources to provide accessibility world-wide. Before coming to Harvard, she worked as a transactional lawyer and served as a legal advisor for a UK-based tech company in Pakistan

Ariq Hatibie is a 1L at Harvard Law School interested in human rights and international law. He has worked for the European Commission on investor-state arbitration issues, collaborated with the International Crisis Group on a transitional justice project for the Yazidis of Northern Iraq, and conducted research in the fields of public health, nuclear diplomacy, and peacebuilding. At Harvard, he is an articles editor for the Human Rights Journal, and is part of the Advocates for Human Rights.

Ariq holds a BA in Global Affairs from Yale University and an MSc in Global Governance and Diplomacy from the University of Oxford.

Saleh Ismail is a J.D. Candidate at Harvard Law School.

Reema Doleh is a J.D. Candidate at Harvard Law School. She received her B.B.A from Baruch College in Finance.