"Islamic Law in Social Context: The Case of Early Islamic Egypt" with Ahmed El Shamsy

Thursday, November 20, 2014 3:00 PM EST
Research Hall, Room 163

The relationship between societies and their laws is complex. Legal doctrines do not develop in a vacuum: they emerge in particular historical circumstances and appeal to particular social constituencies for a range of different reasons. The fortunes of the doctrines’ adherents, in turn, have a decisive influence on the trajectory of legal discourse and scholarship. This lecture draws out these interconnections between the realms of law, society, and politics in the case of ninth-century Egypt in order to show that the history of law is not peripheral to or divorced from the “real history” of sociopolitical processes. Rather, legal discourses and debates went to the very heart of people’s perceptions of themselves and others, and were central to their understanding of what it meant to be Arab, or Muslim, or Egyptian. As a consequence, legal doctrines and developments not only reflected but profoundly shaped the evolution of Egyptian society and culture.

Ahmed El Shamsy is an Assistant Professor of Islamic Thought at the University of Chicago. He studies the intellectual history of Islam, focusing on Islamic law and theology, cultures of orality and literacy, and classical Islamic education. He is particularly interested in the changing ways that religious authority has been constructed and interpreted in the Muslim tradition. His first book, The Canonization of Islamic Law: A Social and Intellectual History, traces the transformation of Islamic law from a primarily oral tradition to a systematic written discipline. He is now at work on his second book, a study of the reinvention of the Islamic scholarly tradition and its textual canon via the printing press in the early twentieth century.