Wael Hallaq

Wael B. Hallaq
وائل حلّاق
Born	1955 (age 68–69) Nazareth
Nationality	Palestinian[1]
Citizenship	Canadian
Occupation(s)	Professor of Islamic law and Islamic intellectual history
Employer	Columbia University
Notable work	The Impossible State Sharī'a: Theory, Practice, Transformations Restating Orientalism: A Critique of Modern Knowledge

Wael B. Hallaq is the Avalon Foundation Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University, where he has been teaching ethics, law, and political thought since 2009.^[2] He is considered a leading scholar in the field of Islamic legal studies,^[3][4][5][6] and has been described as one of the world's leading authorities on Islamic law.^[7]

He has published over eighty books and articles on topics including law, legal theory, philosophy, political theory, and logic.^[8][7] 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,^[7] although Hallaq is Christian.^[9]

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 abandoned creative legal reasoning, this leading to a generalized stagnation of the law. Hallaq further argued that this narrative was a product of colonial discourse that attempted to justify the colonization of Muslim lands and the destruction of indigenous Muslim legal institutions.^[10]