Rashid Alvi

Rashid Alvi is the Executive Director of the Program in Islamic Law. He has served as a chief strategy officer, manager, and deal advisor with strategic, fiscal, and operations leadership.

He started his career at the law firm of Davis Polk & Wardwell, where he specialized in mergers and acquisitions. He then moved to Wall Street, working at Lehman Brothers and Goldman Sachs, where he advised the Goldman Sachs Investment Partners fund and the GS Principal Strategies desk on their private investments as lead transactional lawyer. He subsequently worked at two healthcare companies as Chief Strategy Officer and V.P. of Operations. In between those positions, he was the Executive Director of the Islamic Legal Studies Program at Harvard Law School, where he helped launch SHARIAsource. Mr. Alvi is also a principal at a boutique business advisory firm.

Mr. Alvi holds a J.D. from Columbia Law School, an M.A. from the University of Southern California, and a B.A. from Binghamton University.

Intisar A. Rabb

Professor Intisar A. Rabb is a Professor of Law, Professor of History, and the Faculty Director of the Program in Islamic Law at Harvard Law School. She has held appointments as a Susan S. and Kenneth L. Wallach Professor at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, as an Associate Professor at NYU Department of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies and at NYU Law School, and as an Assistant Professor at Boston College Law School. She previously served as a law clerk for Judge Thomas L. Ambro of the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, as a Temple Bar Fellow in London with the American Inns of Court, and as a Carnegie Scholar for her work on contemporary Islamic law.

In 2015, in partnership with the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society, support from the Luce and MacArthur Foundations, and collaborations with myriad scholars and institutions, she launched SHARIAsource – an online portal designed to provide universal access to the world’s information on Islamic law and history, and to facilitate new research with the use of AI tools.

She has published on Islamic law in historical and modern contexts, including the monograph, Doubt in Islamic Law (Cambridge University Press 2015), the edited volumes, Justice and Leadership in Early Islamic Courts (with Abigail Balbale, Harvard University Press, 2017) and Law and Tradition in Classical Islamic Thought (with Michael Cook et al., Palgrave 2013), and numerous articles on Islamic constitutionalism, on Islamic legal canons, and on the early history of the Qur’an text.

She received a BA from Georgetown University, a JD from Yale Law School, and an MA and PhD from Princeton University. She has conducted research in Egypt, Iran, Syria, and elsewhere.