Wael B. Hallaq (Arabic: وائل حلّاق) is a Palestinian-Canadian scholar of Islamic studies and the Avalon Foundation Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University, where he has been teaching ethics, law, and political thought since 2009.

[9] Hallaq gained prominence for his doctoral work challenging the notion of the so-called "the closing of the gate of ijtihad," a narrative that was for long accepted in the field as paradigmatic.

The narrative posited that Muslim jurists of the post formative period abandoned creative legal reasoning, this leading to a generalized stagnation of the law.

Hallaq's teaching and research deal with the problematic epistemic ruptures generated by the onset of modernity and the socio-politico- historical forces subsumed by it; with the intellectual history of Orientalism and the repercussions of Orientalist paradigms in later scholarship and in Islamic legal studies as a whole; and with the synchronic and diachronic development of Islamic traditions of logic, legal theory, and substantive law and the interdependent systems within these traditions.

[15] Professor Hallaq's work is widely debated and translated, with several books and dissertations, and numerous articles, devoted to the study and analysis of his writings.

[16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26][27] In 2015, his Impossible State (2013) won Columbia's distinguished Book Award for the two years prior, and since it appeared in Arabic in 2014, it has commanded much attention in academic circles and mass media in the Muslim world.

[29] Dozens of his major articles and all his books have now been rendered into Arabic and Turkish, and many are translated into several other languages including Indonesian, Japanese, Persian, Urdu, Hebrew, Italian, German, French, and most recently Albanian, Russian, and Bengali.

[35] Hallaq's current research addresses questions around governance in Islamic history from the formative period down to the middle Ottoman centuries, with a specific focus on the Mamluk domain.