“Blasphemy (Sabb al-Rasul) as a Legal Category in Medieval Islamic History”
National Endowment for the Humanities Postdoctoral Research Fellowship
Princeton/University of Bern, Bern
Religion
Sarah Islam’s research focuses on the social and intellectual history of Islamic criminal law and on how relations between Muslims, Jews, and Christians in the medieval context affected the development of jurisprudence and legal institutional norms across all three communities despite internal polemics often arguing otherwise. Her first book project, Blasphemy (Sabb al-Rasūl) as a Legal Category in Early and Medieval Islamic History, examines the evolution of blasphemy as a legal category among capital crimes in Islamic legal history. Her research has been supported by the Charlotte Newcombe Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, the Fulbright Program, and the American Center of Research, where she has been an ACOR-CAORC Predoctoral Fellow (2015–2016) and ACOR-CAORC Postdoctoral Fellow (2022–2023). Her academic work has been published by Sage, Brill, and Oxford University Press.
