Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) in Paris
E-mail: christian.mueller@irht.cnrs.fr
Biography
Christian Müller is research professor (directeur de recherche) at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) in Paris, where he heads the Arabic section of the Institut de la Recherche et d’Histoire des Textes (IRHT). He earned his PhD at the Freie Universität Berlin with Baber Johansen in 1997 and obtained the habilitation at the Universität Halle-Wittenberg in 2007.
Engaging with the study of Islamic law for over 25 years, his academic interests range broadly across the history of Islamic law, from early Islam to the premodern period. His recent book “Recht und historische Entwicklung der Scharia im Islam” (De Gruyter 2022) provides a new understanding of law’s history by exploring the practical significance of Islamic legal thought, documents and legal orders from a strictly chrono-dimensional approach. His publications, mainly in German, English, and French, also include two monographs on eleventh-century judicial practices in Muslim Spain based on fatwa literature (Brill, 1999) and on the documents of the Haram al-Sharīf in fourteenth-century Jerusalem (Harrassowitz, 2013). He was founder and head of the European Research Council’s (ERC) project “Islamic Law Materialized” (ILM, 2009–13), which focuses on Arabic legal documents dating from the eighth to the sixteenth century. ILM produced the database “Comparing Arabic Legal Documents” (CALD), currently available online. He is also co-editor of “The Documents in Islamic Law in History” (DILiH), a blog hosting publish research data and posts issued from CALD since 2021. His current project on juridical casuistry, “Mapping Islamic Legal Rules and Practices” (MILRaP), will be submitted to the ERC next year.