Wael B. Hallaq () is a Palestinian-American scholar of Islamic studies and 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,Mohammad Hassan Khalil. Review of The Origins and Evolution of Islamic Law by Wael B. Hallaq. Journal of Near Eastern Studies Vol. 69, No. 1 (April 2010), p. 153. Quote: "Wael Hallaq is widely recognized as a leading scholar of Islamic law."David S. Powers. Wael B. Hallaq on the Origins of Islamic Law: A Review Essay. Islamic Law and Society 17 (2010) p. 126. Quote: "Wael B. Hallaq is one of the most prominent, talented, prolific, and influential scholars in the field of Islamic studies, living or dead."Anver M. Emon. The Origins and Evolution of Islamic Law (review). University of Toronto Quarterly, Volume 76, Number 1, Winter 2007. p. 343. Quote: "Having already established himself as one of the pre-eminent scholars of Islamic law..." and has been described as one of the world's leading authorities on Islamic law.The 500 most influential Muslims (2009) Eds., John Esposito and Ibrahim Kalin, p. 98.
Hallaq has published more than a dozen books and 80 articles on topics including law, legal theory, philosophy, political theory, and logic. Much of his writings during the last decade and a half have focused on an ethical critique of the modern project. 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 hails from a Christian background.
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 (after ca. 900 AD) abandoned creative legal reasoning, this supposedly leading to a generalized stagnation of the law. Hallaq argued that this narrative was a product of European colonial discourse that attempted to justify the colonization of Muslim lands and the destruction of indigenous Muslim legal and educational institutions.Wael B. Hallaq. On Orientalism, Self-Consciousness, and History Islamic Law and Society, 18, 3-4 (2011): 387-439
Early life and career Wael Hallaq was born to a Palestinian Christian family in Nazareth in 1955. He graduated with a bachelor's degree in Political Science and History from the University of Haifa, then he earned a Master's degree and a Ph.D. from the University of Washington.
Hallaq joined McGill University as an assistant professor of Islamic law in 1985, after completing his Ph.D. studies in 1983 in the departments of History, Political Science, Near Eastern Studies, and the Law School. He became a full professor in 1994, and was awarded the distinguished James McGill Professorship 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 recent research has dealt with the constitutional practices of Islamic governance between the ninth 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 Radical Separation of Powers: A History of Islamic Constitutionalism (2026); Restating Orientalism: A Critique of Modern Knowledge (2018); 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); An Introduction to Islamic Law (2009), and A History of Islamic Legal Theories (1997).
Professor Hallaq's work is widely debated and translated, with numerous books, dissertations, and articles devoted to the study and analysis of his writings.See, for example: (1) https://www.academia.edu/124392710/De_la_Critique_de_l_Orientalisme_%C3%A0_la_Critique_de_la_Modernit%C3%A9; (2)
https://www.academia.edu/85346670/Orientalismus_als_Symptom_2022_German_trans_of_Restating_Orientalism_2018_; (3)
https://www.academia.edu/42680801/%D8%AF%D8%B1%D8%A7%D8%B3%D8%A7%D8%AA_%D9%81%D9%8A_%D8%A7%D9%84%D9%81%D9%82%D9%87_%D8%A7%D9%84%D8%A5%D8%B3%D9%84%D8%A7%D9%85%D9%8A_%D9%88%D8%A7%D8%A6%D9%84_%D8%AD%D9%84%D8%A7%D9%82_%D9%88%D9%85%D8%AC%D8%A7%D8%AF%D9%84%D9%88%D9%87; (4) Al-Mustaqbal al-`Arabi, 43/503 (2021); (5) https://themaydan.com/tag/muhanna-al-hubail/; (6) https://www.academia.edu/36439957/Nebevi_Hadislerin_Sahte_Bir_Problem_%C3%87ev_Rahile_KIZILKAYA_https://www.academia.edu/37499316/Dhuwayb_Qadaya_Usul_al_Fiqh_pdf.; (7) Abd al-Hamid Raqi, “Risalat al-Shafi`I min Manzur Wael Hallaq,” Al-Mudawwana, 6 (2023-24), 219-46; (8) Bin Hibri Halim and Baji Muhammad, “Epistemulujiyyat al-Ma`rifa al-Diniyya `Inda Wael Hallaq,” Majallat al-Hikma lil-Dirasat al-Falsafiyya, 12, 1 (2024), 941-962; (9) Abdelrahman al-Hajjam, “`An Wael Hallaq: Muhawala li-Fahm Su’ al-Fahm,” Hikma Yamaniyya, Sept. 1, 2023; (10) Kamel Ramadani and Abdelmajid Amrani, “Wael Hallaq and Re-reading Foucault's Theory of the Author and the Debate of Discourse, Knowledge and Power,” Majallat Ishkalat fil-Lugha wal-Adab, 10, 3 (2021), 358-70. 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. In 2024, he won the prestigious King Faisal International Prize for his lifetime contributions to the study of Islamic law and modern legislation.
Dozens of his major articles and all his books (with the exception of Radical Separation of Powers) have now been rendered into Arabic and Turkish, and many are translated into several other languages including Chinese, Indonesian, Japanese, Persian, Urdu, Hindi, 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.Shaw, David. "Restating Orientalism: A Critique of Modern Knowledge." ARIEL 51, no. 1 (2020): 167+. Gale General OneFile (accessed February 18, 2021). https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A613049759/ITOF?u=columbiau&sid=ITOF&xid=db4772e4. In this book, Hallaq argues that Said’s canonical work, however timely when it was published, is a stunted critique of Orientalism, because Said the secular liberal could not locate the problem beyond politics and representation. Hallaq insists that Orientalism’s epistemic foundations, shared by all fields of academic knowledge, represent and in fact capture Enlightenment thought—which is characterized by domination, extractionism, and unprecedented forms of racism and structural genocidal violence.
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."About Hallaq’s most recent book, Radical Separation of Powers, Professor Muhammad Qasim Zaman of Princeton wrote: “The breadth of Hallaq’s analysis of Islamic constitutionalism and the philosophical depth that he brings to it open new vistas on political thought in pre-modern Islam. His brilliant readings of key texts in Islamic political theory serve to peel off thick layers of misrepresentation, bringing those texts alive and allowing us to view them with fresh eyes. Along the way, he offers a trenchant critique of both Orientalism and liberalism. This book will have a transformative impact on the study of Islamic political thought, but its arguments speak to a much wider audience, which, too, will be in Hallaq’s debt.”Published in London, Oneworld Academic, 2026.
Courses taught
Over the last four 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 interests focus on two distinct projects, one aiming at a critique of the Enlightenment and modern conception of freedom while the other is a critique of modern philology, offering a kind of textual-ethical practice that he calls “dialectical philology.”
Publications
Authored Volumes Radical Separation of Powers: A History of Islamic Constitutionalism (London: Oneworld Academic, 2026).