Dr. Ayoub’s 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 project, Erasure: Law and Legal Modernity in Colonial Egypt, 1800-1950 (Under Contract, OUP, 2025) is a study of state regulation of legal practice in Egypt from 1800-1950. It offers a comparative analysis of the Egyptian government ordinances of Jewish, Christian, and Islamic legal norms during this period. Relying on––among similar texts––the al-Aḥkām al-Sharʿiyya fī al-Aḥwāl al-Shakhṣiyya lil-Isra’īliyyīn (Legal Rules of Jewish Family Law), published in Arabic in Egypt 1912, this project examines the origins of religious courts as domains of family law. Using the concept of judicial specification (takhṣīṣ al-qaḍāʾ), an authority granted to the Muslim ruler to (re)-organize the judiciary, the Egyptian government adapted the function of Islamic courts to follow that of the Jewish and Christian courts, restricting the former’s scope to the domain of personal status law. One of the objectives of this project is to demonstrate the centrality of the institutional apparatus––the Ministry of Justice, provincial Islamic courts, al-Azhar, Jewish and Christian religious courts, and Supreme Islamic Court––in fostering any practical relevance of Islamic law as a justice system before it was swallowed by secular National Courts in 1955.
Dr. Ayoub earned his PhD in Islamic law from the School of Middle Eastern and North African Studies and the James E. Rogers College of Law at the University of Arizona. He earned a BA in Islamic jurisprudence from Al-Azhar University in Cairo, Egypt, in 2006, where he received systematic instruction in Ḥanafī jurisprudence. He also received an MSc. in Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies from the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, UK, in 2008.
