Felicitas Opwis

After receiving her doctorate in Arabic and Islamic Studies from Yale University, Felicitas Opwis worked at Yale Law School, Wake Forest University, and since 2005 at Georgetown University. In her scholarly inquiries Felicitas Opwis addresses the religious sciences of Islam and the historical, social, and political environment in which Islamic thought is articulated. Her main research field focuses on Islamic jurisprudence, and in particular how the formulation of Islamic legal theory is related to intellectual discourse in other fields of Muslim learning, and to the political and social environment. She investigates how Islamic jurisprudents tackle the perpetual dilemma of achieving legal change without changing the scriptural foundations of the law. Through close comparative analyses she looks at how and why legal principles, such as public interest and juristic preference, change over time. Felicitas Opwis has published several articles and book chapters on questions of legal change in Islamic jurisprudence. These publications deal with the construction of authority within schools of law; re-interpretation of particular legal principles; whether or not a “reformation” has occurred in Islamic law; and the development of the concept of public interest/maslaha. She recently published a monograph on 11th century CE Muslim jurisprudence, investigating the interplay between ethics, law, and legal change, which ushered in the ethical turn in legal reasoning. At Georgetown, she teaches on the religious sciences of Islam, conceptions of justice, and transformations of religious authority in modernity.