Asifa Quraishi-Landes, Assistant Professor of Law, has received a fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.
Quraishi-Landes received one of just 181 fellowships awarded to scholars, artists and scientists chosen from thousands of applicants in the United States and Canada. Often characterized as "mid-career" awards, Guggenheim Fellowships are intended for men and women who have already demonstrated exceptional capacity for productive scholarship or exceptional creative ability in the arts.
The award will support progress on a book manuscript that seeks to articulate a way out of the current conflict between secularism and Islamism in Muslim-majority countries. Quraishi-Landes will sketch a constitutional framework that responds to both the Muslim impulse for a sharia-based government, as well as secular desires for a non-theocratic system that can respect international human rights. Her book is tentatively titled "Islamic Constitutionalism for the 21st Century: Not Theocratic. Not Secular. Not Impossible."
"This Fellowship gives me the opportunity to finish a project that I’ve been working on for years – now with new excitement and relevance in light of the 'Arab Spring'," says Quraishi-Landes. "My goal is to sketch a theory of Islamic constitutionalism that operates outside the box of the usual constitutional discourse about Muslim governments, opening up possibilities for new – and I think more workable – constitutional structures that others seem to have missed."
Quraishi-Landes specializes in comparative Islamic and U.S. constitutional law. She holds a doctorate from Harvard Law School and degrees from Columbia Law School, the University of California at Davis, and the University of California at Berkeley, and has served as a law clerk for the United State Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.
"Asifa Quraishi-Landes' work exemplifies our law-in-action model at the University of Wisconsin Law School. She is well known for the creative and energetic approach she brings to her research and teaching. We are thrilled to have her work recognized with the Guggenheim fellowship and delighted that her very important scholarship has been acknowledged and supported in such a significant way," says Dean Raymond.
For more information, view Asifa Quraishi-Landes' Guggenheim Fellow Profile.
Submitted by Law School News on February 6, 2013
This article appears in the categories: Articles
