Ahmed El Shamsy

Ahmed El Shamsy studies the intellectual history of Islam, focusing on Islamic law and theology, cultures of orality and literacy, and classical Islamic education. He is particularly interested in the changing ways that religious authority has been constructed and interpreted in the Muslim tradition. He is currently working on a book on the early evolution of Islamic law and its institutions in ninth-century Egypt. Other ongoing research projects investigate the formal aspects of medieval Muslim education and the reinvention of the traditional scholarly canon via the printing press in the early twentieth century. His passion is medieval Arabic manuscripts, and he is in the process of editing several texts that he has discovered during research travels in Egypt, Syria, Turkey, and Europe.