Mark Fathi Massoud
Professor · Director of Legal Studies
Mark Fathi Massoud is professor and chair of politics and the director of legal studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Most recently, Massoud was a Senior Research Scholar at Yale Law School (Fall 2023), a Berlin Prize fellow at the American Academy in Berlin (Spring 2024), and a Visiting Professor at the University of Oxford Centre for Socio-Legal Studies (2021-2024).
Research Interests
Massoud studies how people build and destroy nations, why and how they create legal systems, and why religion matters in politics. His primary methods include historical and archival research, ethnographic fieldwork, and interviews. He is the author of two books. Shari’a, Inshallah, which earned seven book awards, shows how how activists and officials use religion to build law and national identity. It is based on research in Somalia and Somaliland. Law’s Fragile State, which earned two book awards, argues that colonial officials, authoritarian regimes, and international lawyers each used principles of the rule of law to govern Sudan. Massoud is also co-editor of Out of Place: Fieldwork and Positionality in Law and Society. He is currently writing a book with Kathleen M. Moore (UC Santa Barbara) about religion, law, and ethics in the United States, derived from their collaborative Shari’a Revoiced project.
SHARI’A, INSHALLAH
⭐ WINNER, CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title
⭐ WINNER, DISTINGUISHED BOOK AWARD, Sociology of Religion, American Sociological Association
⭐ WINNER, RALPH J. BUNCHE AWARD, American Political Science Association
⭐ WINNER, HART SLSA BOOK PRIZE, Socio-Legal Studies Association
⭐ WINNER, RELIGION AND INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS BOOK AWARD, International Studies Association
⭐ WINNER, BKFS PRIZE for best book in Middle East Studies
⭐ FINALIST, PROSE AWARD for best book in government and politics, Association of American Publishers
Western analysts have long denigrated Islamic states as antagonistic, even antithetical, to the rule of law. Mark Fathi Massoud tells a different story: for nearly 150 years, the Somali people have embraced shari’a, commonly translated as Islamic law, in the struggle for national identity and human rights. Massoud upends the conventional account of secular legal progress and demonstrates instead how faith in a higher power guides people toward the rule of law.
Book trailer by Erick Msumanje
Born in Sudan and raised in California, Massoud is a first-generation university graduate educated at Notre Dame (BA/MA) and Berkeley (JD/PhD). He has held Carnegie, Guggenheim, and Mellon Foundation fellowships, and visiting positions at Oxford, Princeton, Stanford, and Yale. He has given the Reza Banakar Memorial Lecture in Sweden and the Evans-Pritchard Lectures at All Souls College, Oxford.
Massoud chairs the UC Santa Cruz Politics Department and directs the Legal Studies Program. He is an editor of the Cambridge Studies in Law and Society book series. He is a past trustee of the Law and Society Association and member of the Advisory Council of the NSF Law and Science Dissertation Grant Program.
Mark Fathi Massoud (he/هو)
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