Baber Johansen

Professor of Islamic Religious Studies, Harvard Divinity School

Acting Director, Islamic Legal Studies

Research Interests

• Law and Religion in Classical and Modern Muslim World
• Long-Term Changes in Islamic Classical and Postclassical Legal Doctrine
• Modern Muslim Debates on State Models
• The Status of Islamic Law in Modern Arab Legislation and Jurisprudence
• Twentieth-Century Liberal Interpretations of Islam

Subject Areas for Supervising Written Work

• Contracts
• Evidence and Proof
• Islamic Law
• Legal History
• Property

Subject Areas for Accepting Press Inquiries

• Islamic Law

Representative Publications

• Johansen, Baber. "Le contrat salam. Droit et formation du capital dans l’Empire abbasside (XIe et XIIe siècle)," 61 Annales HSS 863 (2006).
  
• Johansen, Baber. "The relationship between the constitution, the sharîa and the fiqh in the adjudication of Egypt's Supreme Constitutional Court," 64 Zeitschrift für ausländisches öffentliches Recht und Völkerrecht 881 (2004).
  
• Johansen, Baber. "Apostasy as objective and depersonalized fact: two recent Egyptian court judgments," 70 Social Research 687 (2003).
  
• Johansen, Baber. "Vom Wort- zum Indizienbeweis: die Anerkennung der richterlichen Folter in islamischen Rechtsdoktrinen des 13. und 14. Jahrhunderts," 28 Ius commune 1 (2001).
  
• Johansen, Baber. Contingency in a Sacred Law: Legal and Ethical Norms in the Muslim Fiqh (Brill, Leiden 1999).
  Full text: AMAZON (Purchase)
  
• Johansen, Baber. "La mise en scène du vol par les juristes musulmans" in Vols et sanctions en Méditerranée 41 (Maria Pia Di Bella ed., Editions des Archives Contemporaines, Amsterdam, 1998).
  
• Johansen, Baber. "Wahrheit und Geltungsanspruch: zur Begründung und Begrenzung der Autorität des Qadi-Urteils im islamischen Recht" in La giustizia nell'Alto Medioevo (secoli IX-XI) 975 (Centro Italiano di Studi sull'Alto Medioevo, Spoleto, 1997).
  
• Johansen, Baber. "The valorization of the human body in Muslim Sunni law," 4 Princeton papers in Near Eastern Studies 71 (1996).
  
• Johansen, Baber. "Legal literature and the problem of change: The case of the land rent" in Islam and Public Law. Classical and Contemporary Studies 29 (Chibli Mallat ed., Graham and Trotman, London, 1993).
  
• Johansen, Baber. The Islamic Law on Land Tax and Rent. The Peasants' Loss of Property Rights as Interpreted in the Hanafite Legal Literature of the Mamluk and Ottoman Periods (Croom Helm, London-New York-Sydney, 1988).
  

Bibliography

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