Ahmed El Shamsy is Professor of Islamic Thought and department chair in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago. He studies the intellectual history of Islam, focusing on the evolution of the classical Islamic disciplines and scholarly culture within their broader historical context. His research addresses themes such as orality and literacy, the history of the book, and the theory and practice of Islamic law. He has published books on the formation of Islamic law (The Canonization of Islamic Law: A Social and Intellectual History, 2013) and on the effect of print on Islamic thought (Rediscovering the Islamic Classics: How Editors and Print Culture Transformed an Intellectual Tradition, 2020). He is now at work on a history of Sunnism.
Post History
Authored Works
- What else can we learn from the manuscript of al-Qaʿnabī’s recension of the Muwaṭṭaʾ?
- Legal language in al-Qaʿnabī’s recension of the Muwaṭṭaʾ
- Al-Qaʿnabī’s recension of Mālik’s Muwaṭṭaʾ: Paths and vectors of transmission
- Al-Qaʿnabī’s recension of Mālik’s Muwaṭṭaʾ: The single surviving copy
- How not to reform the study of Islamic law: A response to Ayesha Chaudhry
- Comparative law, the role of the judge, and the law theorized
- Fatwas: diverse in form, diverse in reach
- Different genres, different approaches
- :: Muwaṭṭaʾ Roundtable :: Al-Shāfiʿī’s Recension of Mālik’s Muwaṭṭaʾ
- Teaching Islamic law through primary sources