Wael B. Hallaq

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.