Welcome! I am a legal and intellectual historian of modern Southwest Asia (Middle East) and North Africa based in Berlin. My research focuses on Islamic legal practice in colonial contexts, with a particular interest in colonial-era Morocco. I am especially interested in retracing notions of public vs. private property, family relationships, and proof-making as they were disputed in courts of the colonial legal field. My research interests also include Muslim anticolonial movements of the interwar period, especially as elaborated in North African Arabic periodicals. I also teach a wide variety of courses in Southwest Asian and Islamic Studies, including modern Middle East history, Islamic intellectual history, and global legal history.
For a list of my publications, see my academic writings page. For select lectures, conferences, and workshops in which I participated, see my events page.
The homepage for my EU Commission-funded project, “Quantifying Islamic Law in the Modern State” (2023-2025) is forthcoming in English and Arabic.
Education
PhD Harvard University
Dissertation: “The End of Shari’a? Adjudicating the Moroccan-Maliki Legal Tradition in Colonial-Era Morocco (1912-1956),” Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations
AM Harvard University
Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations
BA University of Virginia
Middle East and South Asian Languages and Cultures and Religious Studies
Academic Positions
Max Weber Centre for Advanced Social and Cultural Studies, University of Erfurt, Germany: Postdoctoral Research Fellow (2025-Present)
Utrecht University, Netherlands: Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellow and Docent (2023-2025)
University of Toronto, Canada: Arts and Sciences Postdoctoral Fellow and Lecturer (2021-2023)
Harvard University, USA: Doctoral Instructor (2014-2021)
Contact
ari.schriber [at] uni-erfurt [dot] de
Ari Schriber 