Joseph Schacht

Joseph Franz Schacht (German pronunciation: [ˈjoːzɛf ʃaxt] ^ⓘ, 15 March 1902 – 1 August 1969) was a British-German professor of Arabic and Islam at Columbia University in New York. He was the leading Western scholar in the areas of Islamic law and hadith studies, whose Origins of Muhammadan Jurisprudence (1950) is still considered a centrally important work on the subject. The author of many articles in the first and second editions of the Encyclopaedia of Islam, Schacht also co-edited the second edition of The Legacy of Islam and authored a textbook titled An Introduction to Islamic Law (1964).