The Tokat Institute for Advanced Islamic Studies is pleased to announce Dr. Rami Koujah as the recipient of its inaugural Dissertation Award for his Princeton University dissertation, “Rights, Responsibility, and the Legal Construction of the Human: An Intellectual History of Personhood in Islamic Law.”
Dr. Koujah’s dissertation distinguished itself through its ambitiously wide-ranging intellectual history of Islamic conceptions of personhood and its sustained engagement with multiple legal schools and competing theories across the spectrum of Islamic thought. The study challenges prevailing assumptions in contemporary scholarship by demonstrating that Islamic law articulates a responsibility-centered, rather than rights-centered, account of personhood.
Grounded in meticulous analyses of both primary and secondary sources, and especially attentive to discourses internal to juristic debates, the dissertation offers a compelling and methodologically rigorous model for the comparative study of personhood across globally religious and legal traditions.
