CONTEXT: Fellow Spotlight Our
Fellow Spotlight series features interviews with current and previous Program Fellows, highlighting their work with the Program in Islamic Law, their path getting here, and the road going forward. This month we featured one of our previous fellows,
Professor Rabiat Akande. Professor Akande is currently an Assistant Professor at
Osgoode Hall Law School at York University. Her research interests span the fields of legal history (Islamic legal history, comparative legal history, and British colonial legal history), law and religion, constitutional law, and African law and society. A graduate of Harvard Law School, her dissertation explored the history of the struggles over religion-state relations in Colonial Nigeria, tracing the emergence of secular governmentality as a colonial technique of managing religion and religious difference, and its impacts on Islamic law and institutions. She is currently working on a book project based on her dissertation that will be published by Cambridge University Press. During her time at PIL, she worked on our
Sharīʿa Implementation in Northern Nigeria Special Collection, which digitized legislation and judicial decisions on Islamic criminal law in Northern Nigeria. To find out more about her path to becoming a scholar, her work during her time at Harvard, what she is up to now, and what she likes to do for fun, visit our
blog!