Wael B. Hallaq is 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. He has published over eighty books and articles on topics including law, legal theory, philosophy, political theory, and logic. 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 is Christian. 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 abandoned creative legal reasoning, this leading to a generalized stagnation of the law. Hallaq further argued that this narrative was a product of colonial discourse that attempted to justify the colonization of Muslim lands and the destruction of indigenous Muslim legal institutions.

Early life and career

Wael Hallaq was born to a Palestinian Christian family in Nazareth in 1955. He graduated from the University of Haifa, then he earned a masters degree and a Ph.D. from the University of Washington. Hallaq joined McGill University as an assistant professor of Islamic law in 1985, after receiving his Ph.D. from the University of Washington in 1983. He became a full professor in 1994, and was named a James McGill Professor in Islamic law in 2005.

Research and publications

Hallaq's teaching and research deal with the problematic epistemic ruptures generated by the onset of modernity and the socio-politico- historical forces subsumed by it; with the intellectual history of Orientalism and the repercussions of Orientalist paradigms in later scholarship and in Islamic legal studies as a whole; and with the synchronic and diachronic development of Islamic traditions of logic, legal theory, and substantive law and the interdependent systems within these traditions. Hallaq's writings have explored the structural dynamics of legal change in pre-modern law, and have examined the centrality of moral theory to understanding the history of Islamic law and modern political movements. For the past decade and a half, his work has increasingly focused on the critique of the modern project, including the paradigmatic structures of knowledge that drive it. His current research attempts to map the constitutional practices of Islamic governance between the eighth and eighteenth centuries, with a view, among other things, to constructing a heuristic for a critique of modern constitutional arrangements. Hallaq's major works include Restating Orientalism: A Critique of Modern Knowledge (2018) and Reforming Modernity: Ethics and the New Human in the Philosophy of Abdurrahman Taha (2019), Authority, Continuity, and Change in Islamic Law (2001), The Origins and Evolution of Islamic Law (2005), Shari`a: Theory, Practice, Transformations (2009), and An Introduction to Islamic Law (2009). Professor Hallaq's work is widely debated and translated, with several books and dissertations, and numerous articles, devoted to the study and analysis of his writings. His life and work have been featured in many symposia, talk shows, and documentaries by major media outlets. In 2015, his Impossible State (2013) won Columbia's distinguished Book Award for the two years prior, and since it appeared in Arabic in 2014, it has commanded much attention in academic circles and mass media in the Muslim world. In 2007, he won the Islamic Republic of Iran's best book prize for his Origins and Evolution, and in 2020, a Nautilus Book Award for Reforming Modernity. In 2021, he was awarded the TÜBA Prize, given by the Turkish Academy of Science in recognition of innovative and path-breaking scholarship in the Humanities and Social Sciences. Later in the same year, he was elected an Honorary Member of this Academy. Dozens of his major articles and all his books have now been rendered into Arabic and Turkish, and many are translated into several other languages including Indonesian, Japanese, Persian, Urdu, Hebrew, Italian, German, French, and most recently Albanian, Russian, and Bengali. In 2018, Hallaq published Restating Orientalism: A Critique of Modern Knowledge published by Columbia University Press. Aziz Rana of Cornell Law School, author of The Two Faces of American Freedom, describes the text as "a brilliant interrogation of Said's famous concept, highlighting the extent which the issue of Orientalism is not simply one of problematic European authors, but instead goes to the heart of how the modern project itself constitutes subjects, knowledge, and power... It is essential reading and will be debated by scholars for years to come." Walter Mignolo, an Argentine semiotician (École des Hautes Études) and professor at Duke University, said of Restating Orientalism that: "'It is becoming increasingly evident among decolonial thinkers that colonial management (with or without colonies, with or without settlers) is a question of controlling and managing knowledge, and that power differential is implicit in agents, institutions, and languages of epistemic governance. Wael B. Hallaq brilliantly drives us, through a meticulous reading of Edward Said’s Orientalism, to the awareness that domination is grounded on epistemic sovereignty and that liberation is unthinkable without epistemic freedom.'" Professor of Near Eastern Studies at Cornell, David S. Powers, noted in 2010: "'During the past decade, Hallaq has turned from the medium of the scholarly article to that of the scholarly monograph. Synthesizing his findings and placing them within a larger conceptual framework, he has written three important monographs published by Cambridge University Press: A History of Islamic Legal Theories (1997); Authority, Continuity, and Change in Islamic Law (2001), and The Origins and Evolution of Islamic Law (2004), a stunning accomplishment for a man of his age. Suffice it to say that when Wael B. Hallaq speaks, historians of Islamic law listen.'"

Courses taught

Over the last three and a half decades, Hallaq has taught a wide range of courses, both graduate and undergraduate, the latter in particular since he joined Columbia. The undergraduate course offerings include modules on key classical texts in translation; Central Questions in Islamic Law; Jihad, Liberalism and Violence; Sufism, Sharia and Politics; and History of Islamic law across the centuries. On the graduate level, he taught seminars – all conducted on the basis of primary Arabic sources – in Quranic exegesis; Hadith; Usul al-Fiqh; Fiqh; Adab al-Mufti; Adab al-Qadi; Logic (Mantiq); Political texts and mirrors for the prince; Sufism; and Nahda writings and modern moral philosophy.

Current research

Hallaq's current research addresses questions around governance in Islamic history from the formative period down to the middle Ottoman centuries, with a specific focus on the Mamluk domain. Of the two volumes projected, one will cover the legal history of Mamluk society and "state," dealing with various aspects of how "law" operated under that empire. The second volume will examine the structures of what might be called the Islamic constitutional conception in the middle period. The idea is to examine the various parts or "branches" of governance and how these parts interacted with, or against, each other. This includes a study of the Islamic "political man," a particular constitution of an archetypal subjectivity that was assumed to sustain the government apparatus. Yet, the discourse of this volume never abandons comparison and contrast with the evolution of political structures in Europe since the fifteenth century, bringing one to bear on the other. The final aim is not only to produce a narrative of Islamic constitutional history, but also a critical heuristic that sheds light on the crisis of modern constitutional arrangements.

Publications