Personal Info
- Country of residence: Palestine
Information
Wael Bahjat Hallak was born in the occupied city of Nazareth in 1955. He studied the primary and secondary stages in Nazareth schools, and obtained his high school diploma. He earned a bachelor's degree in Middle Eastern History and Political Science from the University of Haifa in occupied Palestine, a master's degree in Islamic Jurisprudence and Law from the University of Washington in the United States in 1979, and a doctorate in the same specialization from the same university in 1983. He worked as a lecturer at the University of Washington, then as a professor of Islamic Law at McGill University in Montreal, Canada in 1985, and was promoted to full professor in 1994. He assumed the Chair of Oriental Studies at McGill University in 2005, and has been working as a professor of humanities and Islamic studies in the Department of Middle Eastern Studies at Columbia University in the United States since 2009. He became an Avalon Foundation Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University in 2010, and has also taught at a number of universities in Indonesia, the University of Toronto, and the University of Singapore.
The barber was active in a number of movements opposing the Zionist occupation and present in the West, including the BDS boycott movement, and he used to go out in demonstrations against the practices of the occupation.
The barber attracted the attention of researchers and those interested in Sharia when he published his first article entitled “Has the door of Ijtihad been closed?” (1984), followed by another article entitled “On the origins of the debate related to the existence of mujtahids and the door of Ijtihad” (1986). Then his articles continued to be published in specialized journals, including the Journal of Islamic Studies (Studia Islamica), the International Journal of Middle Eastern Studies (IJMES), and the Journal of the American and Oriental Society (JAOS).
Al-Hallaq published more than eighty specialized studies on the origins and foundations of Islamic jurisprudence, the history of Islamic legislation, and the formation of the judicial system in Islam. He participated in the preparation and editing of encyclopedias on Islam, including the Encyclopedia of the Quran, the Encyclopedia of Islam (new edition), the Encyclopedia Iranica, and the Encyclopedia of the Modern Middle East, among others. He supervised numerous university theses and dissertations at universities worldwide, and his works have been translated from English into several languages, including Arabic, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Persian, Turkish, and Hebrew. He received several awards and accolades. His published books include:
Ibn Taymiyyah in Confrontation with the Greek Logicians (1995), Jurisprudence and its Foundations in the Classical and Medieval Eras of Islam (2001), A History of Jurisprudential Theories in Islam: An Introduction to the Principles of Sunni Jurisprudence (2007), and Doctrinal Authority:
Tradition and Renewal in Islamic Jurisprudence. (2007), The Emergence and Development of Islamic Jurisprudence (2007), An Introduction to Islamic Law (2009), The Impossible State: Islam, Politics and the Moral Dilemma of Modernity (2014), Sharia: Theory, Application, and Transformations, and An Introduction to Islamic Law (2017), The Shortcomings of Orientalism: A Methodology for Critiquing Modern Science (2018), Reforming Modernity: Ethics and the New Man in the Philosophy of Taha Abd al-Rahman (2020), The Qur’an and Sharia: Towards a New Islamic Constitutionalism (2023).
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