Samy Ayoub

Samy Ayoub specializes in modern Middle East law and law and religion in contemporary Muslim societies. He focuses on issues concerning the interaction between religion and law, and the role of religion in contemporary legal and socio-political systems within a global comparative perspective. He has pursued training in both law and Islamic Studies in Egypt, Scotland, and in 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, an undergraduate minor in Law and Religion and will launch the Law and Religious Traditions Workshop in Fall 2026 with support from the Bech-Loughlin First Amendment Center at UT Law, 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), makes a significant contribution to the study of law and society by offering a new account of the emergence of legal modernity in Egypt. Focusing on the transformation of Islamic law, courts, and legal authority between 1875 and 1955, the book challenges the assumption that modern legal systems required the disappearance of Islamic institutions. Instead, it demonstrates that Islamic courts remained central to everyday legal life, even as their jurisdiction, procedures, and institutional foundations were progressively reconfigured. Placing adjudication and institutional practice at the center of analysis, and drawing on extensive archival research, the book shows how legal change unfolded through the interaction of court cases, procedural reforms, and debates among legal actors. It advances an integrated framework that brings together doctrinal, institutional, and socio-legal perspectives to explain how Islamic law and state law coexisted, overlapped, and were reorganized within a shifting political landscape. In doing so, the book reconceptualizes legal modernity as a process of creative destruction rather than a linear transition. It also offers a new account of disestablishment, moving beyond constitutional texts and doctrinal debates to foreground courts, jurisdiction, and legal practice. More broadly, it reframes key historiographical debates and provides a historically grounded perspective on contemporary disputes over sharīʿa and the state, highlighting the enduring significance of institutional transformations in shaping the relationship between law, religion, and political authority.

Dr. Ayoub earned his PhD from the School of Middle Eastern and North African Studies and the James E. Rogers College of Law at the University of Arizona. He holds a BA in Islamic jurisprudence from Al-Azhar University in Cairo (2006), where he received systematic training in Ḥanafī jurisprudence, and an MSc in Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies from the University of Edinburgh (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

Islamic Law and Political Violence

Arabic Readings in Islamic Texts

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

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.