Adnan A. Zulfiqar is Associate Professor of Law at Rutgers Law School where he engages in interdisciplinary scholarship in law, history and religion. His most recent work looks at the history of collective duties in Islamic law, shifting juristic discourses on jihad and revolution in the Middle East and the challenges of codifying criminal law in the Global South.
Prior to joining Rutgers, Adnan was a Sharswood Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania Law School, a Harry F. Guggenheim Fellow and a CASA Fellow (Damascus, Syria). He has previously helped draft and implement criminal codes and commentaries for the Republic of the Maldives and the Federal Republic of Somalia. He also worked as an attorney at a global law firm in Washington, D.C. and a legislative staffer in the United States Senate.
In 2019, Adnan was selected as a Wallace Johnson Fellow by the American Society for Legal History (ASLH) to support his first book, Duties to the Collective, that explores how premodern Muslim jurists used collective obligations (fard kifaya) to promote cohesion within the empire. In March 2020, Adnan launched the Mapping Covid Fatwas Project, in collaboration with Harvard Law School, to examine juristic responses to the pandemic.
Adnan currently serves on the Editorial Board of the Arab Law Quarterly, is a Fellow at the Truman National Security Project and on the Legal Advisory Committee of the ACLU in Philadelphia. He was previously Chair of the Section on Islamic Law at the American Association of Law Schools (AALS) and on the Annual Meeting Committee of the American Society for International Law (ASIL).
Adnan earned his J.D. (law,) M.A. and Ph.D. (Near Eastern Languages & Civilizations) from the University of Pennsylvania, his M.L.S. (International Affairs) from Georgetown University and his B.A. (Religion and Anthropology) from Emory University. He has spent many years living, studying and researching in various parts of the Middle East, including Syria, Yemen, Iran, Jordan and Morocco.