Intisar Rabb

Gold Star father and constitutional rights advocate Khizr Khan spoke at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government and Politics on Wednesday evening about immigration, civil rights, Islamophobia and the future of the United States....Intisar Rabb, a professor of law at Harvard Law School and the director of the Islamic Legal Studies Program, spoke at the forum as well and asked Khan several questions. “It’s powerful to focus on and encourage us to not only read the Constitution, but to live its values,” Rabb said. “What is your favorite clause or the one part of the Constitution that you might point someone to? Particularly if they’re more interested in 140 characters or less?” she asked, alluding to President Trump, provoking laughter from the crowd.

As far as the Rev. Terry Jones knows, they were his ideas first. “We are asking for the immediate halting of all Muslim immigration and the removal of all illegal aliens from the United States,” the controversial Florida pastor told a Detroit radio station back in 2011. “We are asking for the monitoring of all the mosques in America.” ... Sharia is not a codified document like the U.S. Constitution, say religious and legal scholars, but rather a broad and variably interpreted set of ideas and principles for how to live life as a Muslim. It offers an array of guidance, including on prayer practices, marriage, diet and finances. It also draws on tens of thousands of texts and scholarly interpretations, meaning that there is no universally approved body of Islamic law, said Intisar A. Rabb, an Islamic legal scholar at Harvard University.

“Western civilization is in a war,” former Republican presidential candidate (and now former Trump-VP hopeful) Newt Gingrich said during a live FOX News interview with Sean Hannity, hours after a man drove a truck into a crowd in Nice, France, and killed 84, while injuring 202...This is not the first time that Newt Gingrich has proven that he knows nothing about Islam and our United States Constitution. ..“In fact, for most of its history, Islamic law offered the most liberal and humane legal principles available anywhere in the world,” Harvard Law Professor Noah Feldman once proclaimed in a New York Times Magazine article on the anti-sharia hysteria sweeping across the Republican party today...any mainstream Islamic religious scholar will tell you that there is no sin­gle monolithic definition of Sharia as it exists today any­where in the world. Very generally speaking, the concept of Sharia has come to be defined as “the ideal law of God according to Islamic tradition,” according to Professor Intisar Rabb, director of the Islamic Legal Studies Program at Harvard Law School. But as Professor Rabb has also made clear: “Sharia has tremendous diversity..."

The Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study has announced its fellows for 2015-2016. The more than 50 men and women include creative artists, humanists, scientists, and social scientists, each pursuing “an ambitious individual project within the Institute’s multidisciplinary community.”...Twelve of the new fellows are Harvard faculty members; their names and the titles of their projects appear below....Christine A. Desan, professor of law, whose teaching covers the international monetary system, the constitutional law of money, constitutional history, political economy, and legal theory. She is the co-founder of Harvard’s Program on the Study of Capitalism...Annette Gordon-Reed, professor of law and of history, Pforzheimer professor at the Radcliffe Institute, whose 2008 book The Hemingses of Monticello won a Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award for nonfiction...Intisar A. Rabb, professor of law and director of Harvard Law School’s Islamic Legal Studies Program, who studies criminal law, legislation and theories of statutory interpretation, and Islamic law.

A simple google search for the word “sharia” illustrates the magnitude of the gap Harvard Law School (HLS) professor Intisar A. Rabb wants to fill. Up top, there’s a 2,000-word overview from the Council on Foreign Relations, along with the usual Wikipedia link. But even on that first page of results, there’s also a far less neutral take from a Christian missionary website, and an alarmist article on sharia law in Dearborn, Michigan, that on further investigation turns out to come from the satirical news site National Report.

A host of new faculty members arrived at Harvard Law School this academic year, and over the summer, Dean Martha Minow announced two new faculty who will join HLS in 2015.