Samy Ayoub

Samy Ayoub specializes in modern Middle Eastern law and law and religion in contemporary Muslim societies. His work focuses on the interaction between religion and law and the role of religion in contemporary legal and sociopolitical systems from a global comparative perspective. He has pursued training in both law and Islamic studies in Egypt, Scotland, and the United States.

Dr. Ayoub was elected President of the International Society for Islamic Legal Studies in Münster, Germany, for the 2025–2028 term. He was selected as a Fellow at the Program on Law and Society in the Muslim World at Harvard Law School (Fall 2021) and as a Fellow at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study (2018–2019). He previously served as President of the Islamic Law Section of the American Association of Law Schools (2018–2019) and is a member of the editorial boards of the Journal of Law in the Middle East (published by LexisNexis) and Arab Law Quarterly.

Dr. Ayoub is the founder of the Islamic and Jewish Law Workshop and the Law and Religion Lecture Series in the College of Liberal Arts at the University of Texas at Austin. He currently co-directs, with Bruce Wells, the undergraduate minor in Law and Religion, and launched the Law and Religious Traditions Workshop in Fall 2026 with support from the Bech-Loughlin First Amendment Center, the School of Civic Leadership, and Middle Eastern Studies.

Before joining the University of Texas at Austin, Dr. Ayoub was a postdoctoral faculty fellow (2014–2015) at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he was nominated by the student body for the Margaret T. Getman Service to Students Award.

Dr. Ayoub’s first book, Law, Empire, and the Sultan: Ottoman Imperial Authority and Late Ḥanafī Jurisprudence(Oxford University Press, 2020), is based on his dissertation which won the 2015 Malcolm H. Kerr Dissertation Award. This book investigates authoritative Ḥanafī legal works from the Ottoman world of the 16th – 19th centuries CE, casting new light on the understudied late Ḥanafī jurists (al-mutaʾakhkhirūn). In particular, Dr. Ayoub interrogates the process by which the Ḥanafī legal tradition incorporated Ottoman sultanic authority in the process of lawmaking. This book has been translated into Arabic as الفقه والدولة و السلطان.

Dr. Ayoub’s second book, Creative Destruction and Legal Modernity in Egypt: Law and Courts, 1875–1955(forthcoming: Oxford University Press, 2027), offers a new account of the emergence of legal modernity in Egypt. Focusing on transformations in Islamic law, courts, and legal authority between 1875 and 1955. Drawing on extensive archival research, the book highlights how legal change unfolded through court practice, procedural reform, and debates among legal actors. It advances an integrated framework that explains how Islamic and state law coexisted and were reorganized within a shifting political landscape, reconceptualizing legal modernity as a process of creative destruction. More broadly, the book reframes key historiographical debates and offers a historically grounded perspective on contemporary discussions of sharīʿa and the state, emphasizing the enduring role of institutions in shaping the relationship between law, religion, and political authority.

Dr. Ayoub earned his PhD through a joint NELC/Law program in Near Eastern Studies and the James E. Rogers College of Law at the University of Arizona. His scholarly formation reflects a distinctive interdisciplinary breadth, combining rigorous training in Near Eastern Studies with extensive legal education. At the James E. Rogers College of Law, he studied with Kay Kavanagh, James Anaya, David Marcus, David A. Gantz, and Leslye Obiora. His legal training focused on public international law, international human rights law and Indigenous peoples, as well as gender and law and the regulatory state. He holds a BA in Islamic Studies from Al-Azhar University (2006), where he received systematic training in Ḥanafī jurisprudence, and and an MSc in Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies from the University of Edinburgh, Scotland (2008).

Teaching Areas: Comparative Middle Eastern Law, Law and Religion in the Modern Middle East, Islamic Law, Islamic Legal Theory, Islamic Ethics, Islam and Politics, The Qur'an, Islamic Commercial Law, Late Ottoman Empire, Modern Egypt

Courses Recently Taught

Islamic Law and Society

Comparative Middle Eastern Law 

Rule of Law in Muslim Societies

Modern Islamic Political Thought                                                                        

Islamic Ethics

Late Ottoman State & Society

Publication Highlights:

Book

Law, Empire, and the Sultan: Ottoman Imperial Authority and Late Ḥanafī Jurisprudence

(Oxford University Press, 2020) 

Edited Volumes:

Islamic Law and Empire. (2018) Leiden: Yearbook of Islamic and Middle Eastern Law (Special issue, Vol. 19).

Selected Articles

Steven T. Collis, Samy Ayoub, John Greil (2026). “Religious Diversity in Schools and Islamic Perspectives on Antidiscrimination Law and Religion” In  THE OXFORD HANDBOOK OF ANTIDISCRIMINATION LAW AND RELIGION (edited by Mark Graber & Ioanna Tourkochoriti, Oxford University Press, 2026).

Ayoub, Samy (2025). “Peace as a Legal Presumption in Islamic Law: Territoriality, Nationality, and the Promise of International Law,” Islamic Law and Society 33(1-2) (Published online 03 Oct 2025), 100-144.

Ayoub, Samy (2025). “The Obscure Appellate: The Egyptian Islamic Supreme Court, 1897-1955.” Die Welt des Islams,65(2-3), 191-213. (Published online 06 Aug 2024)

Samy Ayoub and Ari Schriber (2025), “A Sense of Justice: Coloniality and the Islamic Legal Tradition,” Die Welt des Islams (Special Issue): 151-160. (Published online 31 July 2024)

Ayoub, Samy (2023). “Creativity in Continuity: Legal Treatises (al-rasāʾil al-fiqhiyya) in Islamic Law.” Journal of Islamic Studies, 34 (3), 305-339.

Ayoub, Samy (2022). “The Egyptian State as a Mujtahid: Law and Religion in the Jurisprudence of the Egyptian Supreme Constitutional Court.” Arab Law Quarterly, 36, 1-30.

Ayoub, Samy (2022). “A Theory of a State: How Civil Law Ended Legal Pluralism in Modern Egypt.” Journal of Law and Religion, volume 37, issue 1, 133-152.

Ayoub, Samy (2020). “Casting Off Egyptian Ḥanafism: Sharīʿa, Divorce, and Legal Reform in 20th Century Egypt.”Die Welt des Islams 60 (4), 1-35.