ILSP: SHARIAsource is very pleased to announce that Mariam Sheibani will be joining us for the 2018-2019 academic year as a Visiting Fellow. We are excited to support her project Islamic Law in an Age of Crisis and Consolidation: ‘Izz al-Dīn Ibn ‘Abd al-Salām and the Ethical Turn in Medieval Islamic Law. While this year’s pool was competitive, Mariam’s work stood out for its relevance and clarity of thinking. We are very much looking forward to having her here this fall after she receives her PhD from the University of Chicago and begins her career as a young scholar.
Mariam Sheibani is a PhD candidate in Islamic Thought in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago. Her research and teaching interests are in Islamic intellectual and social history, with a focus on law, ethics, gender, and contemporary Islamic thought. Her dissertation, which she will be defending this summer, examines how Muslim jurists from the eleventh to fourteenth centuries addressed salient questions concerning legal philosophy and ethics, leading them to develop competing legal methodologies and visions of the law. In particular, she traces the development of a teleological, analytical, and socially responsive legal discourse that originated among Shāfiʿī jurists in Khorasan and continued to evolve in Ayyubid Damascus and Mamluk Cairo in subsequent centuries. Prior to her doctoral studies, she earned a BA in Public Affairs and Policy Management, an MA in Legal Studies, and an MA in Islamic Thought. She has studied and done research in Turkey, Jordan, Egypt, and Morocco. As an ILSP fellow, she will be undertaking research on legal maxims and Shāfiʿī legal history.