Sharia Workshop with Michael O’Sullivan

"The Legal Exception?: Varieties of Sunni and Shi'i Law among the Gujarati Muslim Commercial Castes."

PLEASE NOTE:

In solidarity with the strike of the graduate workers' union at Columbia University, MEI is postponing the following Sharia Workshop (originally taking place on Thursday, November 18th) to the Spring 2022 semester.
New date will be announced in the future.

Michael O'Sullivan is a Junior Research Fellow at the Center for History and Economics at Harvard. He obtained his PhD from UCLA in 2019, and was previously a postdoctoral fellow at Yale Law School's Kamel Center for the Study of Islamic Law and Civilization.

Dr. O'Sullivan’s paper introduces a variety of topics, including the production of the first Islamic legal treatises in Gujarati; the role of the jamaat council in each community as an interpreter and enforcer of 'sharia'; and competing interpretations of Islamic commercial law in three groups conspicuous for their economic success. 

 In the case of the Memons, he is interested in the relationship between individual jamaats and the ideas of law propounded by the rival Sunni masalik; in the case of the Bohras, the place of medieval Ismaili jurisprudence in the scholarly culture of the jamaat; and in the case of the Khojas, debates between Ismaili and Twelver Khojas over matters of law, hadith, scripture.