Joseph Schacht

Who was Joseph Schacht?

Joseph Franz Schacht, born in Ratibor, 15 March 1902, died in Englewood, 1 August 1969, was a British-German professor of Arabic and Islam at Columbia University in New York. He was the leading Western scholar on Islamic law, whose Origins of Muhammadan Jurisprudence is still considered a centrally important work on the subject. The author of many articles in the various editions of the Encyclopaedia of Islam, Schacht also edited The Legacy of Islam for Oxford University Press. Other books include An Introduction to Islamic Law.

Some of his work is published in the book Quest for the Historical Muhammad edited by Ibn Warraq.

Muhammad Mustafa Al-A'zami's work On Schacht's Origins of Muhammadan Jurisprudence is a systematic response to Schacht's thesis.