Research Profile

Constitution of the categories of Islamic Law and efforts to interpret them as systems of cognition; history of universalism and exclusion in the ritual, the law and in mysticism; the historical changes in the regional and universal horizons of Islamic Law; the consciousness of historical changes as part of all intellectual constructions and perceptions; acceptation or refusal of Islam as a universal religion in Western nations.

Teaching Profile

History and present of Islamic Law; the transformation of Islamic Law as applied and defined by the national states; the role of religious traditions in the constitution of modernity; the political and legal dimensions of the religious ritual; the relation between Islamic law and mysticism in the last three centuries.

Selected Publications

Contingency in a Sacred Law: Legal and Ethical Norms in the Muslim Fiqh (Leiden: Brill, 1999).

The Islamic Law on Land Tax and Rent: The Peasants’ Loss of Property Rights as Interpreted in the Hanafi Legal Literature of the Mamluk and the Ottoman Periods (London et al.: Croom Helm, 1988).

Muhammad Husain Haikal – Europa und der Orient im Weltbild eines aegyptischen Liberalen (Beirut/Wiesbaden: Steiner, 1967). Arabic translation 2010.

“Le contrat salam: Droit et formation du capital dans l’Empire Abbaside (XIe et XIIe siècle),” Annales HSS 61 (2006), 863-899.

“The relationship between the constitution, the shari’a and the fiqh in the adjudication of Egypt’s Supreme Constitutional Court,” Zeitschrift fuer auslaendisches oeffentliches Recht und Voelkerrecht. Heidelberg Journal of International Law 64 (2004), 881-896.

“Apostasy as Objective and Depersonalized Fact: Two Recent Egyptian Court Judgments,” Social Research 70 (2003), 687-710.

“Signs as Evidence: The Doctrine of Ibn Taymiyya (1263-1328) and Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya (d. 1351) on Proof,” Islamic Law and Society 9 (2002), 168-93.

“Vom Wort- zum Indizienbeweis: Die Anerkennung der richterlichen Folter in islamischen Rechtsdoktrinen des 13. und 14. Jahrhunderts,” Ius Commune 28 (2001), 1-46.

“Wahrheit und Geltungsanspruch: Zur Begruendung und Begrenzung des Qadi-Urteils im islamischen Recht,” La giustizia nell’Alto Medioevo (secoli IX-XI), Spoleto: Centro Italiano di Studi sull’Alto Medioevo, 1997, 975-1074.

“The Valorization of the Human Body in Muslim Sunni Law,” Princeton Papers in Near Eastern Studies 4 (1996), 71-112.

Contact

Harvard Divinity School
45 Francis Avenue
Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138
USA

Email: bjohansen@hds.harvard.edu
Homepage: http://www.hds.harvard.edu/faculty/johansen.cfm