News

We at the Program in Islamic Law at Harvard Law School mark the passing of Baber Johansen, Professor of Islamic Studies Emeritus at Harvard Divinity School. As HDS recently announced, Prof. Johansen passed away in late January 2026. He leaves behind a legacy as a distinguished scholar of Islamic law historically, and as a scholar who left a lasting impact on the modern study of Islamic law and on the many students and scholars he mentored throughout his career.

Professor Johansen’s scholarly research explored the relationship between legal reasoning, ethics, and social practice in Islamic societies, bringing historical depth and nuance to the study of Islamic law. Through influential works such as Islamic Law on Land Tax and Rent (Routledge, 1988) and Contingency in a Sacred Law (Brill, 1999), he illuminated the interpretive richness and internal diversity of Islamic legal traditions and demonstrated how jurists grappled with questions of authority, morality, and changing social realities.

Across Harvard, Professor Johansen contributed to a wide intellectual community. He joined Harvard Divinity School in 2005 and played a key role in strengthening the study of Islam across Harvard University, including as one-time acting director at the Islamic Legal Stidies Program at Harvard Law School (predecessor to PIL), from 2006 to 2010. In addition, he was affiliated with the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, served as a faculty associate emeritus at the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, and directed the Center for Middle Eastern Studies from 2010 to 2013. Through these roles, he helped deepen the University’s engagement with the study of Islam and fostered interdisciplinary conversations among scholars of law, religion, and history.

Through his many intellectual engagements  at Harvard and beyond, Professor Johansen’s contribution to the study of Islamic law was profound and enduring. His scholarship brought a rare combination of rigor, depth, and intellectual independence that helped shape the field in lasting ways. He challenged students and colleagues alike to think more carefully, more historically, and more critically about Islamic legal traditions, both past and present. May that legacy continue to resonate.

In the coming weeks and months, as we grapple with news of this loss, we invite the larger community to reflect on his scholarly impact and the role he played in building the intellectual community that many of his students and one-time colleagues still inhabit. May he be remembered with the seriousness and care that he brought to his work.

As we kick off the new year, we reflect on the highlights of the past year at the Program in Islamic Law and the SHARIAsource Lab! We’ve brought it all together with a video montage of the year in pictures and a summary of all the progress we made in 2024.

First are the events. We began the year with a Roundtable on Transformation and Adaptation of Ottoman Land Law in 19th-Century Successor States organized by Fatma Gül Karagöz, which featured a series of papers on the interpretation and adaptation of Ottoman land law in the 19^th century, and concluded with a live roundtable. We also kicked off 2024 with the Islamic Law Speakers Series! Last spring, Mohammed Allehbi, gave a talk on “Creating a new Criminal Law: The Military-Administrative origins of Siyasa,” Youcef Soufi joined us for a book talk on his recent publication, The Rise of Critical Islam: 10th-13th Century Legal Debate (Oxford University Press, 2023),  Fatma Gül Karagöz presented “The Transition of Ottoman Land Law: Theory and Practice between 16th-18th Centuries,” and Phillip Wood spoke about his book, The Imam of the Christians: The World of Dionysius of Tel-Mahre, c. 750–850 (Princeton University Press, 2021). The lecture series continued this fall with a book talk by Recep Şentürk on Ādamiyyah: An Islamic Approach to Universal Human Rights (Usul Academy Press, 2025), a presentation by Ali Rod Khadem titled “Islamic Apocalyptic Jurisprudence: End-Times Law in Sunnī and Shīʿī Discourses” (Islamic Law and Society 31 (3), 2024), and a book talk by our PIL-LC Research Fellow, Bahman Khodadadi titled On Theocratic Criminal Law: The Rule of Religion and Punishment in Iran (Oxford University Press, 2024). We hope that these events’ videos—posted on the PIL website and Vimeo channel—will whet your appetite for the series to come this spring.

Then there are the publications. We published the fifth volume of the Journal of Islamic Law: a special issue on “Governing Islam: Law and the State in the Modern Age.” The Islamic Law Blog—which reached almost 100,000 readers in 2024—published nearly 200 new works of scholarship such as short essays and scholarly commentary by experts in the field, resource roundups, and weekly roundups on new scholarship and key news or cases related to Islamic law, including last year’s Roundtable on the Transformation and Adaptation of Ottoman Land Law in 19th-Century Successor States. Some of the Blog’s top essays in 2024 include “Fatwās on Cryptocurrency,” “Experiments in Mapping Islamic Legal Canons,” and “Islamic Legal Canons as Memes.”

Next are the experiments we’re doing with data science and AI + Islamic law in the SHARIAsource Lab. Led by Professor Intisar Rabb and data scientist Noah Tashbook, Lab members from the law school and graduate schools worked together to build a data set for analyzing Islamic law with digital humanities tools—working on a platform for parsing and displaying legal canons in ways accessible to researchers interested in new ways to access older texts. Our core suite of applications and tools  SHARIAsource-Analytics,  SHARIAsource-Metadata, and SEARCHstrata result from collaborations between scholars, data scientists, and students. We believe that, in the age of AI, these collaborative efforts will revolutionize the field by facilitating new research and insights into Islamic law and history. Curious about the Lab’s most recent activities? Read the recent report on our experiments in mapping Islamic legal canons to get a sense of the work underway and the tools in development. On the fun side of things, we continued #MemeMondays on our @SHARIAsource Instagram account, which rounds up a collection of Islam, Islamic studies, and data science related memes submitted by you and whose reach grew by over 300% in 2024!

Last but not least, we welcomed an exciting slate of new People. We welcome back a new executive director, Rashid Alvi, who is here for a second stint as staff director to help take the Program in Islamic Law and the SHARIAsource lab to new horizons. We also welcomed Research Data Scientist, Noah Tashbook, Digital Humanities Specialist, Irene Kirchner, and new Managing Editor, Cem Tecimer. We bid adieu to last year’s research fellows, Mohammed Allehbi and Fatma Gül Karagöz, and welcomed this year’s PIL-LC Research Fellow (in collaboration with the Library of Congress), Bahman Khodadadi.

All of this has been achieved with the continuing support and engagement of both the local and broader global community members, such as yourself. Thank you— our work is made possible by you. Join us as we revisit the moments that defined last year and look ahead to an even brighter 2025!

Following the passing of our dear friend, colleague, and mentor, Professor Roy Parviz Mottahedeh on July 30, 2024, a memorial service was held on October 25th at Harvard’s Memorial Church. There, family, faculty, students, and members of the broader community from all over the world gathered in remembrance and celebration of his legacy and numerous accomplishments. Ten speakers remarked on his scholarly and personal contributions, recalling his passion for advancing the understanding of Islamic history, culture, and law. The service featured a series of thoughtful remembrances from William Graham, Don Babai, William Granara, Abbas Amanat, and Cemal Kafadar, as well as readings from the Jewish, Christian, Islamic, and Baha’i traditions by Harry Bastermajian, James Barron, Marcy Bieber, Intisar Rabb, and Farzin Vahdat. Concluding with a reception at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies, the gathering offered family, friends, and colleagues an opportunity to honor his memory and lasting impact. You can view the program here.

In September, the Islamic Law Blog published a series also in remembrance and celebration of Professor Mottahedeh’s legacy and scholarship. We shared a condolence message, pointed to the introduction to a festschrift published in his honor the year after his retirement, a tabula gratulatoria from friend and colleagues, and his bibliography of works. We invite you to join us in celebrating Professor Mottahedeh’s life and legacy by reading about his journey and works, and the many books that he has left to educate and inspire us all as well as future generations.

The recently launched Muslim Family Law Hub, co-founded by Fatima Essop, a former research affiliate at the Program in Islamic Law (PIL), is an innovative platform designed to offer comprehensive resources on Muslim family laws from around the world. The Hub aims to serve as a vital tool for scholars, legal practitioners, and the general public by providing accessible information on key legal issues such as marriage, divorce, inheritance, and custody within Muslim communities. It features a robust collection of primary legal texts, case law, academic research, and policy analysis from diverse jurisdictions, making it a unique repository of knowledge. Essop and her team emphasize the need for a resource that not only compiles these materials but also contextualizes them to aid understanding and application in various legal and cultural contexts. By bridging the gap between scholarly research and practical implementation, the Hub aspires to be an essential resource for those navigating the evolving field of Muslim family law, promoting informed legal practice and fostering cross-cultural legal literacy.

Dear Friends,

We are saddened to share the news of the passing of our dear friend, colleague, and mentor, Professor Roy Parviz Mottahedeh on the thirtieth of last month. He was, is, a towering figure in the field of Middle Eastern and Islamic studies, and also a friend to the Program in Islamic Law as a member emeritus of our advisory and editorial boards. Professor Mottahedeh was an inspiring educator and a dedicated mentor to countless students over the course of his lifetime. He was not just an academic par excellence but also a person of immense integrity, kindness, and compassion. 

At Harvard, it was my honor to call him colleague at the Department of History, to which he returned in 1986 (after having completed his undergraduate and doctoral studies here – with a second BA from Cambridge University in between, and after a stint teaching at Princeton University). And it was an enriching pleasure to co-teach a History course with him the Fall after my arrival to Harvard, called Islamic Law and Society: Historians, Biographers, Judges, 750-1258 (Fall 2014). And it was our collective honor—the many colleagues and friends who learned from him and came together to pay tribute to him at a 2016 conference—to see the publication of the edited festschrift volume Justice and Leadership in Early Islamic Courts (2017). As his longtime friend Professor Hossein Modarressi (at Princeton), his longtime student Professor Abigail Balbale (at NYU), and I commented in the introduction to that book:

[He constantly met] scores of students, colleagues, and casual readers from everywhere with insights that are clear and eloquent, critical and colorful. He has  always approached the study of Islamic social and administrative-legal history with a method that vividly brings the source, and those who produced them, to life. … [He] has transformed the ”field through the generations of scholars he has trained, the hundreds of students he has exposed to Islamic history, and the myriad scholarly networks he has constructed. In the forty-six years that he taught at Princeton and later at Harvard before retiring in 2016, he mentored dozens of doctoral students who would go on to establish Islamic social, cultural, and intellectual history at universities around the country and world. … To all, he brought and cultivate the same infectious curiosity and critical insight that permeates his own work.

Before Harvard, it was with appreciation for his deep insights and lilting prose that I and many others saw him as a lodestar for excellence in research and narrative of Islamic history, when I was a graduate student at Princeton University (which had been his first academic post after the Harvard Society of Fellows). We avidly read his Loyalty and Leadership in an Early Islamic Society (1980)—which deftly brought the latest methods and theories of social history to bear on Islamic historical sources, his Mantle of the Prophet (1985)—which began with a trip to Hamadan in 1977, and which has been heralded subsequently and repeatedly as a “favorite book” by academics and general readers alike (including one Pulitzer-prize winning NY Times writer who knew about good writing), and his Lessons in Islamic Jurisprudence (2003)—an instructive translation of a leading treatise on Islamic legal philosophy and interpretation that I recommend to students and colleagues keen on understanding ways to treat and find the language for Islamic law as law.

And over the years, it was with anticipation and relish that I and many others read every other article he published, which he recently collected into the book of essays In the Shadow of the Prophet (2023).

As we reflect on Professor Mottahedeh’s legacy and numerous accomplishments, we recall and celebrate his passion for advancing the understanding of Islamic history, culture, and law. We invite you to join us in celebrating Professor Mottahedeh’s life and legacy by reading about his journey and works, as well as the academic contributions and words of congratulations that many friends and intellectual interlocutors contributed to the festschrift, in his honor.

Please join us in expressing our sincere condolences to his family, friends, and all who know him. A memorial will likely be held at Harvard University later in the fall. More details will be forthcoming when available.

Warm best,

Intisar Rabb
Professor of Law & History, Harvard University
Faculty Director, Program in Islamic Law

The 2024 Giorgio Levi Della Vida Conference at UCLA’s Center for Near Eastern Studies, held last spring, brought together scholars to explore the early history and development of Arabic, Arab identity, and early scriptural and legal discourses. Organized by Associate Professors Luke Yarbrough and Asma Sayeed from UCLA’s Department of Near Eastern Languages & Cultures and the Islamic Studies Program, the conference featured keynote addresses by long-standing colleagues and scholarly collaborators at Princeton, Professor of Near Eastern Studies, Michael Cook,  and  Bayard Dodge Professor of Near Eastern Studies, Hossein Modarressi, the joint winners of the 2024 Giorgio Levi Della Vida Awards. The two celebrated, prolific scholars have trained generations of students. Continuing the tradition established by CNES Founding Director Gustave E. von Grunebaum, the award winners chose the conference theme and participants.

Participants included Khaled Abou El Fadl (UCLA), Ahmad al-Jallad (Ohio State University), Michael Cooperson (UCLA), Alba Fedeli (University of Hamburg), Mohsen Goudarzi (Harvard University), Maria Mavroudi (UC-Berkeley), Intisar Rabb (Harvard University),  Petra Sjipestejin (Leiden University), Marjin van Putten (Leiden University), Travis Zadeh (Yale University).

PIL faculty director, Professor Intisar Rabb, “explored the interplay between plain meaning canons and ordinary meaning canons when interpreting Islamic law. The first canons indicate that the plain meaning of a text should be adopted unless it is ambiguous, while the second recommend that in the event of ambiguity, a consideration of context may be called for to understand whether a meaning informed by custom or convention is more relevant.”

Read more about the conference  today!

We are excited to share that Jocelyn Hendrickson’s  Leaving Iberia: Islamic Law and Christian Conquest in North West Africa (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2021), published as part of our book series, was a finalist for The Wallace K. Ferguson Prize! This prize is awarded annually by the Canadian Historical Association to the best book in history other than Canadian.

We are excited to share that Jocelyn Hendrickson’s  Leaving Iberia: Islamic Law and Christian Conquest in North West Africa (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2021), published as part of our book series, has received honorable mention for the Peter Gonville Stein Book Award through the American Society for Legal History. This award is given annually to the best book in non-US legal history and “is designed to recognize and encourage the further growth of fine work in legal history that focuses on all regions outside the United States, as well as global and international history.”

We are excited to share that Jocelyn Hendrickson’s  Leaving Iberia: Islamic Law and Christian Conquest in North West Africa (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2021), published as part of our book series, has won the Premio Al Mejor Libro Escrito Por Un/a Profesor/a de la ACH through the Asociación Canadiense de Hispanistas. This prize is awarded annually for the best monograph published in Spanish, English, or French.