Mahade Hasan
Graduate Student
Mahade Hasan, a Ph.D. student in Near Eastern Languages and Cultures with a concentration in Islamic Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), dedicates his scholarly endeavors to the recontextualization and pragmatic application of classical Islamic legal theories (uṣūl al-fiqh) as undertaken by modern reformists to cater to the exigencies of contemporary society. His scholarly inquiry delves into the confluence of traditional legal doctrines with ancillary non-revealed sources, such as juristic preference (istiḥsān), custom (ʿurf), the principle of choosing the lesser burden (al-akhdh bi-l-akhaff), and the preemptive closure of means (sadd al-dharāiʿ), particularly within the oeuvre of underexplored scholars such as ʿAbd al-Ḥamīd Ibn Bādīs, ʿAbd al-Wahhāb Khallāf, and Shāh Walī Allāh Dihlawī. Moreover, his research extends to an exploration of the susceptibility of written transmission to corruption (taṣḥīf) in Islamic manuscripts during the medieval and pre-modern periods, scrutinizing the methodologies and strategies employed by scholars to ameliorate these textual vulnerabilities and examining the pedagogical, scribal, and exegetical practices that safeguarded and perpetuated the Islamic classical heritage. His scholarly oeuvre, which traverses a wide spectrum of Islamic studies, encompasses legal theory, linguistic analysis, and pedagogical methodologies.
At UCLA, he aspires to harness avant-garde philological and methodological approaches to propel his research forward, while simultaneously engaging in public scholarship to transcend the academic-public divide and amplify the societal relevance of his scholarly endeavors.
