2015 Coulson Memorial Lecture: Islamic Reform: Democracy or Reinterpretation? SOAS
Channel: SOAS University of London
Date: 24/03/2015

http://www.soas.ac.uk/cimel/
The Coulson Memorial Lecture 2015 titled "Islamic Reform: Democracy or Reinterpretation?" was given by Professor Mohammed Fadel of the University of Toronto at SOAS, University of London on 19 March 2015.

More about this event: http://bit.ly/1xrac2U
The Coulson Memorial Lecture was initiated by the School of Law in memory of Professor Noel James Coulson who was a leading expert of Islamic Law and Chair of Oriental Laws at the SOAS School of Law before his death in 1986. 

"Islamic Reform: Democracy or Reinterpretation?"
Abstract: "Attempts to reform Islamic law in the wake of the encounter with an aggressively imperialistic Europe grew out of attempts at political reform of the Ottoman Empire.  Luminaries of the Nahda such as Rifa'a al-Tahtawi, Khayr al-Din al-Tunisi and Rashid Rida were, in the irst instance, motivated by political reform; it was their concern for political reform that motivated their discussions of law, not the other way around.  Perhaps as a result of the rise of authoritarianism as the all-too-common constitutional norm in the Muslim world, political reform has retreated in signiicance in favor of various theories of religious reform, including, the now all-too familiar call for a 'Muslim Reformation,' that has even been embraced by the leader of the Egyptian coup, 'Abd al-Fattah al-Sisi.  In this lecture, I wish to explore the path of democratic politics as a vehicle for Muslim reform by arguing that Muslim jurists, contrary to the prevailing wisdom of scholarship, did in fact authorize positive law, subject to certain conditions.  The paper will explore their theory of positive legislation and its implications for Muslim democracy and social and political reform in the Muslim world."

Professor Mohammad Fadel - Short Biography:  Mohammad H. Fadel is the Canada Research Chair for the Law and Economics of Islamic Law and Associate Professor at the Faculty of Law, which he joined in January 2006. Professor Fadel wrote his Ph.D. dissertation on legal process in medieval Islamic law while at the University of Chicago. Professor Fadel was admitted to the Bar of New York in 2000 and practiced law with the irm of Sullivan & Cromwell LLP in New York, New York, where he worked on a wide variety of corporate inance transactions, commercial lending transactions, and securities-related regulatory investigations. Professor Fadel also served as a law clerk to the Honorable Paul V. Niemeyer of the United States Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit and the Honorable Anthony A. Alaimo of the United States District Court for the Southern District of Georgia. Professor Fadel has published numerous articles in Islamic legal history and Islam and liberalism. His current research interests revolve around Islamic political theology.