Dr. Felicitas Opwis – Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies

Dr. Felicitas Opwis

Georgetown University
Islamic Studies

External Fellow (FRESCO Programme)
July 2021 – December 2025

Last Update: 08.11.2024

Curriculum Vitae

After receiving her doctorate in Arabic and Islamic Studies from Yale University, Felicitas Opwis worked at Yale Law School, Wake Forest University, and since 2005 at Georgetown University. In her scholarly inquiries Felicitas Opwis addresses the religious sciences of Islam and the historical, social, and political environment in which Islamic thought is articulated. Her main research field focuses on Islamic jurisprudence, and in particular how the formulation of Islamic legal theory is related to intellectual discourse in other fields of Muslim learning, and to the political and social environment. She investigates how Islamic jurisprudents tackle the perpetual dilemma of achieving legal change without changing the scriptural foundations of the law. Through close comparative analyses she looks at how and why legal principles, such as public interest and juristic preference, change over time. Felicitas Opwis has published several articles and book chapters on questions of legal change in Islamic jurisprudence. These publications deal with the construction of authority within schools of law; re-interpretation of particular legal principles; whether or not a “reformation” has occurred in Islamic law; and the development of the concept of public interest/maslaha. She is currently finishing a monograph on the interaction between ethics and law, looking at how ethical norms translate into legal categories. At Georgetown, she teaches on the religious sciences of Islam, conceptions of justice, and transformations of religious authority in modernity.

Selected Publications

“The Ethical Turn in Legal Analogy: Imbuing the Ratio Legis with Maṣlaḥa” Journal of Arabic and Islamic Studies 21 (2021): 159-182.
“Syllogistic Logic in Islamic Legal Theory: al-Ghazālī’s Arguments for the Certainty of Legal Analogy (Qiyās).” In: Philosophy and Jurisprudence, ed. Peter Adamson. Berlin: de Gruyter, 2019, pp. 93-112.
“Ibn ʿĀshūr’s Interpretation of the Purposes of the Law (Maqāṣid al-Sharīʿa): An Islamic Modernist Approach to Legal Change.” In: The Objectives of Islamic Law. The Promises and Challenges of the Maqāṣid al-Sharīʿa. Eds. Idris Nassery, Rumee Ahmed, and Muna Tatari. Lanham: Lexington, 2018, pp. 111-130.
“Attributing Causality to God’s Law: The Solution of Faḫr ad-Dīn ar-Rāzī.” In: Islamic Philosophy, Science, Culture, and Religion: Studies in Honor of Dimitri Gutas. Eds. Felicitas Opwis and David Reisman. Leiden: Brill, 2012, pp. 397-418.
Maṣlaḥa and the Purpose of the Law: Islamic Discourse on Legal Change from the 4^th/10^th to 8^th/14^th Century. Leiden: Brill, 2010.

FRIAS Project

Language and Hermeneutics in the Islamic Sciences

Although Islamic Scripture, i.e., the Qur’an as God’s literal word and the recorded sayings (Hadith) of the Prophet Muhammad, has been textually stable since early Islamic history, the interpretation of its meaning has not. This project looks at the linguistic analysis presented in works on legal theory (uṣūl al-fiqh), which usually start with a detailed presentation of the hermeneutics of understanding language. It analyzes discussions of what constitutes a command (amr) and, thus, obligation to act (wājib). Is it the linguistic form of the imperative (ifʿal) or is command established also by non-imperative modes? Is the meaning of a word derived from the utterance or from its contextual setting? Such hermeneutical differences lead, for example, to debates over whether the Qur’anic prohibition of wine (khamr) is limited to inebriating substances made from grapes or applies to all things intoxicating, including whiskey and heroin. The answers jurists provide are not uniform or static, but rather in constant flux, influenced by other scholarly fields, specifically the Arabic linguistic tradition, theology and exegesis, philosophy and literary usage (adab) as well as the changing historical environment. The objective of project is to trace trends and shifts in hermeneutical approaches to interpreting language, normative texts, and ideas across disciplinary boundaries. How do changes in one field influence and are influenced by the others?