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Omar Farahat

Assistant Professor

New Chancellor Day Hall
3644 Peel Street
Room 617
Montreal, Quebec
Canada H3A 1W9

514-398-0365 [Office]
omar.farahat [at] mcgill.ca (Email)

A middle aged man with short white hair, wearing glasses and a blazer standing outdoors wit his hands in his pockets.

Focus Law | Droit Fall 2017: Crossing Borders - Interview with Omar Farahat

Biography

Omar Farahat’s areas of interest include Islamic legal theory, comparative law, theoretical and theological ethics, and religious forms of regulation relative to modern nation-state systems. His current research focuses on Islamic legal and moral theories, centered on the analysis of key concepts in Islamic legal theory in conversation with similar debates in contemporary jurisprudence. Particularly, he is interested in the ideas of right, personhood, and social roles in classical legal theory, and the boundaries between legal rules and virtues in Islamic thought.

His first book, The Foundation of Norms in Islamic Jurisprudence and Theology (Cambridge University Press, 2019) explores the role of divine commands as a normative source in Islamic theology and legal theory. His work on Islamic legal theory and ethics has appeared in the Journal of Law and Religion and the Journal of Religious Ethics, Oriens, the Journal of Arabic and Islamic Studies, among others. His research has received funding from the Fonds de recherche du Québec – Société et culture (FRQSC).

Before joining McGill in 2017, Omar Farahat completed his Ph.D. at Columbia University in 2016, after which he worked as a Research Fellow at Yale Law School in 2016-2017. He was also a research fellow at Harvard Law School in the spring of 2020. Prior to that, he obtained a dual law degree from Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne and Cairo University in 2004, an LL.M. from Harvard Law School in 2007, and an interdisciplinary M.A. in the humanities from New York University in 2010. He has practiced law in Cairo, New York, and Paris.

Education

Ph.D., Columbia University, 2016
M.A., New York University, 2010
LL.M., Harvard Law School, 2007
Maîtrise, Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, 2004
Licence, Cairo University, 2004

Employment

Assistant Professor, Faculty of Law, McGill University, 2017-
Research Fellow, Yale Law School, 2016-2017

Areas of Interest

Law and religion, theistic law and ethics, Islamic law, comparative law, legal theory, ethics.

Professor Farahat is always interested in supervising graduate work in these areas.

Recent publications récentes

The Foundation of Norms in Islamic Jurisprudence and Theology

Omar Farahat (www.cambridge.org)

"...a new way of understanding the work of classical Islamic theologians and legal theorists who maintained that divine revelation is necessary for the knowledge of the norms and values of human actions. Through a reconstruction of classical Ashʿarī-Muʿtazilī debates on the nature and implications of divine speech, Farahat argues that the Ashʿarī attachment to revelation was not a purely traditionalist position. Rather, it was a rational philosophical commitment emerging from debates in epistemology and theology..."

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