Remarks for the Memorial of Professor Baber Johansen
Editor’s Note: Following the passing of Professor Baber Johansen earlier this year, Harvard University’s Center for Middle Eastern Studies (CMES) held a memorial service on Friday, October 16, 2026, honoring his life and legacy. Professor Intisar Rabb, Editor-in-Chief of the Islamic Law Blog and Faculty Director of the Program in Islamic Law at Harvard Law School, presented the below remarks for the occasion.
Thank you all for coming and to CMES for organizing this memorial for Professor Baber Johansen. Though I cannot be with you given a transition of a beloved member of my own family, I am grateful for the opportunity to share a few reflections and remembrances of him as a scholar whose work changed how Islamic law is studied and as a colleague whose presence made that work feel like a shared endeavor.
I first came to know Baber Johansen as a student knows a scholar: through a reading list. His books and articles were among the works I read closely to understand the modern academic study of Islamic law, as it has emerged in universities and law schools with increasing depth in the 1990s. Years later, the author on my reading list became my colleague. That still feels remarkable to me. What I remember most clearly now is his scholarship and his role here at Harvard, which helped expand conversations about Islamic law across and outside the university.
In addition to informing my own reading list on Islamic law, the broader truth is that his scholarship helped lay the foundations for the study of Islamic law in the United States and far beyond. In The Islamic Law on Land Tax and Rent, he showed what we could learn by reading jurists’ writings alongside the social and economic realities they addressed. In Contingency in a Sacred Law, he taught generations of us to see how legal norms, ethical commitments, and historical change could coexist within the tradition. He took jurists’ arguments seriously, in all their difficulty and variety. He showed us that the history of Islamic law could be studied with both rigor and imagination. And he, in later years, exhibited interest in modern Islamic constitutions, which change and percolate around the world.
Baber arrived at Harvard almost ten years before I did, having joined the Harvard Divinity School in 2005 as the last stop in his teaching career, which began at the Freie Universität and, before then, the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris. Only a year after his arrival at HDS, he became affiliated with Harvard Law School and took the helm of its Islamic Legal Studies Program as acting director, serving until 2010. He then directed Harvard’s Center for Middle Eastern Studies. His work at the Islamic Legal Studies Program (ILSP) was particularly notable to me; as you know, that Program is the predecessor to the Program in Islamic Law (PIL) at Harvard Law School, which I now direct. In each place, and in each role, he offered thoughtful remarks on the field and connected people and fields that needed to be in conversation.
Baber brought that same spirit to building institutions. The ISLP of course existed before his time there. But Baber enlarged its reach in tandem with other programs at Harvard. He introduced the ʿAbd al-Razzāq al-Sanhūrī Lectures on Legal Interpretation in the Muslim World—a series that excitingly brought judges, scholars, and practitioners into the same room. That series began in 2007 with Judge Adel Omar Sharif of Egypt’s Supreme Constitutional Court, and I can recall attending the event for its next speaker—our friend and colleague Professor Hossein Modarressi of Princeton University. Baber also established public lectures by visiting fellows as a regular part of the Program—a tradition we continue—so that their research could meet an audience and a question.
During his time as ILSP, he also was a believer in scholarly gatherings to highlight important questions of the day. He conducted workshops on themes that included “Teaching Islamic Law at American Law Schools,” “The Constitutional Judiciary in the Muslim World,” and “Islamic Law in the Law of National States in the Middle East and Southeast Asia.” More than events on a calendar, these were invitations to scholars and judges, students and practitioners, to test ideas across different legal traditions and experiences.
In doing this intellectual work, Baber helped foster intellectual community and exchange—between fellow professors and students at Harvard and elsewhere. I had the distinct sense, when I arrived in 2014, that I was entering the sort of community that he took part in shaping—where mutual concern with aspects of Islamic law and history within and outside Muslim world would press forward among professors, students, and visitors committed to research and intellectual exchange.
In more recent years, I would often see Baber at the Faculty Club and occasionally had the opportunity to speak with him about new developments in Islamic law and at PIL. Those meetings offered a sense that chance encounter could open onto exchanges of thought, and that, when it comes to Islamic law and history, there was always another question worth asking about the scholarship and the people behind it.
The Harvard community will miss Baber. But we can also take comfort in what he leaves with us: books that show how to read and interpret primary texts of Islamic law with care; students and colleagues who carry his questions forward; and places of study and intellectual exchange made stronger by his presence. May we honor him by sustaining them—with the rigor, openness, and generosity he gave to this field and to us.
