Occupation
Assistant Professor
Contact
ABOUT
Omar Farahat is an Assistant Professor at McGill University Faculty of Law. His areas of interest include legal theory, comparative law, theoretical and theological ethics, and religious forms of regulation relative to modern legal systems. His current research focuses on Islamic legal and moral theories, centered on the analysis of key concepts in Islamic legal theory in conversation with similar debates in contemporary jurisprudence. His first book, The Foundation of Norms in Islamic Jurisprudence and Theology (CUP, 2019) explores the role of divine commands as a normative source in Islamic theology and legal theory. His work on Islamic legal theory and ethics has appeared in the Journal of Law and Religion and the Journal of Religious Ethics. He has presented his research for the Middle East Studies Association, the British Association for Islamic Studies, the Society for the Study of Muslim Ethics, among other venues. He has research forthcoming in The Routledge Handbook of Islamic Law and in Oriens. Omar Farahat completed his Ph.D. at Columbia University in 2016, after which he worked as a Research Fellow at Yale Law School. Prior to that, he obtained a dual law degree from Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne and Cairo University in 2004, an LL.M. from Harvard Law School in 2007, and an interdisciplinary M.A. in the humanities from New York University in 2010. He has practiced law in Cairo, New York, and Paris.
Discipline
Law
Sub Areas
7th-13th Centuries
Arabic
Islamic Law
Islamic Studies
Islamic Thought
Middle East/Near East Studies
Geographic Areas of Interest
All Middle East
Arab States
Fertile Crescent
Islamic World
Specialties
Islamic Legal Theories
Early Islamic Legal Thought And Institutions
Legal And Moral Philosophy
Languages
Arabic (native)
French (advanced)
Persian (intermediate)
Education
PhD
| 2016
| MESaAS
| Columbia University
MPhil
| 2013
| MESAAS
| Columbia University
MA
| 2011
| Draper
| New York University
LL.M.
| 2007
| Law School
| Harvard
Abstracts
The Centrality of Morality to the Classical Ashʿarī Concept of Legal Capacity
"No One Can Specialize the General": Norm, Text, and the Jurist’s Role in Islamic Legal Theory
