Religious Studies
[PAST EVENT] The Disputed Formality of Traditional Islamic Legal Education
Location
Reves Center for International Studies, Reves Room200 S Boundary St
Williamsburg, VA 23185Map this location
Access & Features
- Open to the public
Dr. Devin Stewart, Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Arabic and Islamic Studies at Emory University, is William & Mary's 2024 Kraemer Middle East Distinguished Scholar-in-Residence. His lecture, The Disputed Formality of Traditional Islamic Legal Education, is sponsored by the Reves Center for International Studies and the Center for Comparative Legal Studies and Post-Conflict Peacebuilding at the Law School. The talk is free and open to the public. Lunch is included.
Dr. Stewart received a B.A. magna cum laude in Near Eastern Studies from Princeton University in 1984, completed the CASA program in Arabic at the American University in Cairo in 1985, and earned a Ph.D. with distinction in Arabic and Islamic Studies from the University of Pennsylvania in 1991. He has been at Emory since 1990 and has conducted research in Egypt and Morocco in 1992, 1996, 1998, and 2000. He has taught widely in the areas of Arabic, Islamic, and Middle Eastern Studies, including courses on the Qur'an, Islam, History of the Middle East, Great books of the Islamic world, and advanced seminars on Egyptian Arabic dialect and medieval Arabic texts. His research has focused on Islamic law and legal education, the text of the Qur'an, Shiite Islam, Islamic sectarian relations, and Arabic dialectology. His published works include Islamic Legal Orthodoxy: Twelver Shiite Responses to the Sunni Legal System (University of Utah Press, 1998) and a number of articles on leading Shiites scholars of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries. His work on the Qur'an includes "Sajfi in the Qur'an: Prosody and Structure" [Journal of Arabic Literature 21 (1990): 101-39] and "Rhymed Prose" ( Encyclopaedia of the Qur'an, forthcoming). His studies on Arabic dialects include "Clitic Reduction in the Formation of Modal Prefixes in the Post-Classical Arabic Dialects and Classical Arabic Sa-/ Sawfa." Arabica 45 (1998): 104-28, "Impoliteness Formulae: The Cognate Curse in Egyptian Arabic" Journal of Semitic Studies 42 (1997): 327-60 and other studies. At present, Dr. Stewart is working on a major investigation of manuals of Islamic legal theory (usul al-fiqh) authored between 800 and 1000 C.E., a study of rhyme and rhythm in the text of the Qur'an, and several other projects.
The Kraemer Middle East Distinguished Scholar-In-Residence is offered yearly, and provides the opportunity for a scholar specializing in Islamic law and governance to spend a short period of time at William & Mary sharing their expertise with the university community. The Scholar-In-Residence is open to all geographical areas and sub-disciplines, provided the Scholar's background, interest and topical focus are on or clearly related to Islamic law and governance.
The Kraemer Middle East Distinguished Scholar-in-Residence was established with a generous gift from Carole A. and Richard C. Kraemer '65.
Contact
[[international,The Reves Center]]