Wael Hallaq

Wael B. Hallaq (Arabic: وائل حلّاق) is a Palestinian-American scholar of Islamic studies and the Avalon Foundation Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University, where he has been teaching ethics, law, and political thought since 2009. He is considered a leading scholar in the field of Islamic legal studies, and has been described as one of the world's leading authorities on Islamic law.

Hallaq has published more than a dozen books and 80 articles on topics including law, legal theory, philosophy, political theory, and logic. Much of his writings during the last decade and a half have focused on an ethical critique of the modern project. In 2009, John Esposito and his review panel included Hallaq in a list of the 500 most influential Muslims in the world for his research and publications on Islamic law, although Hallaq hails from a Christian background.

Hallaq gained prominence for his doctoral work challenging the notion of the so-called "the closing of the gate of ijtihad," a narrative that was for long accepted in the field as paradigmatic. The narrative posited that Muslim jurists of the post formative period (after ca. 900 AD) abandoned creative legal reasoning, this supposedly leading to a generalized stagnation of the law. Hallaq argued that this narrative was a product of European colonial discourse that attempted to justify the colonization of Muslim lands and the destruction of indigenous Muslim legal and educational institutions.

Early life and career

Wael Hallaq was born to a Palestinian Christian family in Nazareth in 1955.