Umar Shareef has recently joined IMES as a postdoctoral scholar. He earned his Ph.D. in Islamic Studies this year from Georgetown University, where he also received the “Graduate Student Teaching Award” (2024) and the “Graduate Student Teaching Assistant Award” (2023). He completed his undergraduate degree in Political Science and Arabic from Tufts University, receiving the “Peter Belfer Award” for the best senior thesis and the “Arabic Language, Culture, and Literature Prize” for excellence in Arabic. Awarded as a Benjamin Gilman Fellow in 2016, he has traveled, studied, and conducted research in Jordan, Turkey, and Egypt. He has taught at a variety of institutions, including universities like Georgetown and the University of Illinois Chicago (UIC) as well as several community colleges and high schools. His article publications include “Taqyīd al-Mubāḥ and Tobacco: Between Administrative and Legislative Authority” in Islamic Law and Society. He will soon be publishing another article (forthcoming) on Islam and secularism.

His research examines the intersection of Islamic law, legal theory, and political authority, with a particular focus on how Muslim jurists and rulers historically negotiated the boundaries between divine legislation and state governance. His work explores how Islamic legal concepts, such as taqyīd al-mubāḥ, served as mechanisms through which rulers contributed to the development of Islamic law. This concept refers to the ability of Muslim rulers to limit actions that jurists deemed religiously neutral, neither rewarded nor punished by God, to prevent social harm and secure the public good. By tracing how jurists and rulers discussed and applied this concept from the thirteenth to the twentieth centuries across the Mamluk, Ottoman, and modern Egyptian contexts, his work offers the first sustained historical study of taqyīd al-mubāḥ in any language. It shows how Islamic law developed through collaboration between jurists and rulers, challenging the common view that law was produced solely by scholars. In doing so, his scholarship engages broader questions of authority, hermeneutics, modernity, secularism, and reform in Islam. At George Washington University, he intends to turn his dissertation research into a monograph.