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. He joined McGill University as an assistant professor in Islamic law in 1985, after receiving his Ph.D. from the University of Washington in 1983. He became a full professor in 1994, and was named a James McGill Professor in Islamic law in 2005. He is the author of over eighty scholarly articles and numerous books, including most recently Restating Orientalism: A Critique of Modern Knowledge (2018) and Reforming Modernity: Ethics and the New Human in the Philosophy of Abdurrahman Taha (2019). Among other books, he has also published Authority, Continuity, and Change in Islamic Law (2001), The Origins and Evolution of Islamic Law (2005), Shari`a: Theory, Practice, Transformations (2009), and An Introduction to Islamic Law (2009). Professor Hallaq’s work is widely debated and translated. 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, the Nautilus Book Award for Reforming Modernity. In 2021, he was also awarded the TÜBA Prize, given by the Turkish Academy of Science. Nearly all his major articles and books have now been rendered into Arabic and Turkish, and many translated into several other languages including Indonesian, Hebrew, Japanese, Persian, Urdu, Italian, German, and most recently Albanian and Russian.