Lecture
Joseph Schacht in the Archives: The Leiden and Oxford Papers
- Date
- Tuesday 6 October 2026
- Time
- Location
-
University Library
Witte Singel 27
2311 BG Leiden - Room
- Vossius Room
Abstract
Joseph Schacht (1902–1969) remains one of the most influential and controversial figures in the modern study of Islamic law. Yet the published works for which he is best known reveal only part of his scholarly activity. His surviving papers, now divided principally between Leiden and Oxford, preserve a much richer record of his research: notes and drafts, correspondence, manuscript materials, offprints, and other traces of projects pursued, abandoned, or transformed in the course of his career.
This lecture offers an introduction to these two archival collections and asks what they can contribute to a reassessment of Schacht as a scholar of Islamic law and intellectual history. Bringing the Leiden and Oxford materials into conversation, it will consider how Schacht worked with manuscripts and earlier scholarship, how his ideas developed across unpublished and published writings, and how correspondence and other archival traces illuminate the scholarly networks within which his work took shape.
More broadly, the lecture will reflect on what becomes visible when a major scholar is approached not primarily through his canonical publications, but through the surviving materials of scholarly practice. The Schacht papers provide an unusually rich case for thinking about the making of twentieth-century Islamic studies, while also preserving sources and unfinished lines of enquiry that may still prove valuable for the study of Islamic law today.
About the speaker
Originally from France, Clément Salah studied Arabic and History at the Sorbonne (BA, 2016) before specialising in early Islamic history (MA, 2018). He recently completed a joint PhD between Sorbonne University and the University of Lausanne (2025), entitled The Genesis of Mālikism in Ifrīqiya (7th–10th centuries): Social, Textual, and Memorial Dynamics. His doctoral work examined the development of Mālikī legal thought through a close study of unpublished manuscripts from Kairouan. He joined The Queen’s College, University of Oxford in 2025 as a Junior Research Fellow. His work broadly focuses on Islamic manuscript culture and intellectual history, with a particular interest in the legal, social, and material history of premodern North Africa.