Wael Hallaq

Who is Wael Hallaq?

Wael B. Hallaq is a non-Muslim Arab scholar of Islamic law and Islamic intellectual history. He is currently the Avalon Foundation Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University at the Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies. After a Ph.D. from the University of Washington, he joined The McGill University Institute of Islamic Studies in 1985, to become an assistant professor in Islamic law. In 1994, he earned full professorship, and in 2005 became a James McGill Professor in Islamic law.

A prolific author and lecturer, he is a world-renowned scholar of Islam, with numerous contributions to the field of Islamic legal studies. His work has been translated into several languages, including Arabic, Indonesian, Hebrew, Japanese, Persian, and Turkish. In 2009, and despite his background, Hallaq was named among the 500 most influential Muslims in the world. His recent work explores the paradigmatic structures of Islamic political and ethical thought, which he uses as a foundation for a thorough critique of modern ethico-political paradigms that, he argues, are dominant since the Enlightenment