"Finding Ethics in Islamic Law" - Guest Lecture by Rumee Ahmed

Spring 2013 Lecture Series on Islamic Ethics

Thursday, March 21, 2013 3:00 PM EDT
Johnson Center, Gold Room

Islamic legal ethics are found in complex relationships between the Muslim community and Islamic source texts, theology, exegesis, jurisprudence, and legal theory. Legal ethics cannot be divorced from these interconnected relationships, so that proposing a change in law requires corresponding changes in multiple related Islamic sciences. Without these corresponding changes, a new law cannot be deemed 'ethical'. Through a case-study of prisoners of war, this presentation will explain the way in which Islamic legal ethics are conceived and how legal change occurs in the Muslim community so that it is both 'religious' and 'ethical'.

Rumee Ahmed (PhD, University of Virginia) is Assistant Professor of Islamic Studies at the University of British Columbia, in the Department of Classical, Near Eastern, and Religious Studies.  His research interests include Islamic law, exegesis, and theology, and is heavily-engaged in text-study across traditions.  He is co-editor of the forthcoming Oxford Handbook of Islamic Law (Oxford University Press), and the author of Narratives of Islamic Legal Theory (Oxford University Press, 2012), which explores the ways in which Muslim jurists use the genre of legal theory and the language of law to argue for competing grand narratives about how the God-human relationship ought to function in society.