Ahmed El Shamsy

Assistant Professor

PhD, History and Middle Eastern Studies, Harvard University, June 2009

Dissertation: “From Tradition to Law: The Origins and Early Development of the Shafi‘i School of Law in Ninth-Century Egypt”

Ahmed El Shamsy 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. He is currently working on a book on the early evolution of Islamic law and its institutions in ninth-century Egypt. Other ongoing research projects investigate the formal aspects of medieval Muslim education and the reinvention of the traditional scholarly canon via the printing press in the early twentieth century. His passion is medieval Arabic manuscripts, and he is in the process of editing several texts that he has discovered during research travels in Egypt, Syria, Turkey, and Europe.

SELECTED PUBLICATIONS

“The Wisdom of God’s Law: Two Theories,” forthcoming in a Festschrift volume for Bernard Weiss, ed. Robert Gleave, Kevin Reinhart, and Peter Sluglett (Leiden and Boston: E. J. Brill).

 “Rethinking Taqlid in the Early Shafi'i School,” Journal of the American Oriental Society, Vol. 128, No. 1 (2008): 1-24.

“The Social Construction of Orthodoxy,” in The Cambridge Companion to Classical Islamic Theology, ed. Timothy J. Winter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008).

“The First Shafi'i: The Traditionalist Legal Thought of Abu Ya'qub al-Buwayti (d. 231/846),” Islamic Law and Society, Vol. 14, No. 3 (2007): 301-341.



SELECTED FELLOWSHIPS AND AWARDS

Social Science Research Council Book Fellowship (2011)
American Council of Learned Societies/Mellon Recent Doctoral Recipient Fellowship (2010-2011)
Middle East Studies Association Malcolm H. Kerr Dissertation Award (2009)
American Council of Learned Societies/Mellon Dissertation Completion Fellowship (2008-2009)
Islamic Legal Studies Program at Harvard Law School Visiting Fellowship (2007-2008, 2008-2009)
Social Science Research Council International Dissertation Research Fellowship (2006-2007)