Dr. Asifa Quraishi-Landes

Visiting Professor (University of Wisconsin – Madison Law School)

Visiting Faculty at Bayan Islamic Graduate School

Bayan Email: aquraishi@bayanonline.org

Asifa Quraishi-Landes specializes in comparative Islamic and U.S.constitutional law, with a current focus on modern Islamic constitutional theory. She is a 2009 Carnegie Scholar and 2012 Guggenheim Fellow.

Quraishi-Landes writes on comparative legal theory and Islamic law. Recent publications include “The Separation of Powers in the Tradition of Muslim Governments,” and “What if Sharia Weren’t the Enemy: Re-Thinking International Women’s Rights Activism and Islamic Law.” Currently, she is working on “A New Theory of Islamic Constitutionalism: Not Secular. Not Theocratic. Not Impossible.” This project seeks to articulate a new constitutional framework for Muslim majority countries that will answer both the Muslim impulse for a sharia-based government, as well as secular concerns that a non-theocratic system is important in order to respect human and civil rights.

Professor Quraishi-Landes holds a doctorate from Harvard Law School and other degrees from Columbia Law School, the University of California at Davis, and the University of California at Berkeley, and has served as law clerk in the United State Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. She has served as a Public Delegate on the United States Delegation to the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women (2010), the Task Force on Religion and the Making of U.S. Foreign Policy for the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, and as advisor to the Pew Task Force on Religion & Public Life. She is currently on the governing board of the Association of American Law Schools’ Section on Islamic Law, the National Association of Muslim Lawyers (NAML), and Muslim Advocates. She is an affiliate of the Muslim Women’s League, past President and Board Member of Karamah: Muslim Women Lawyers for Human Rights, a Fellow with the Institute for Social Policy and Understanding and a member of the “Opinion Leaders Network” for the British Council’s “Our Shared Future” project.