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Contact

Postal address
Historisches Seminar der LMU
Mittelalterliche Geschichte
Geschwister-Scholl-Platz 1
80539 München

Email: hossameldin.ali@hotmail.com

Curriculum vitae

2006–2011: University of al-Azhar in Cairo (Islamic sharia and Law); 2011–2013: University of Ain Shams in Cairo (Comparative law, Islamic law, and public law); 2013: Master of Arts; 2013–2022: Council of State in Egypt (Administrative judge); 2022–2025: Doctoral scholarship from Gerda Henkel Foundation and PhD student at the University of Konstanz; from 1 October 2025: research assistant at LMU Munich, Chair for early and classical medieval history.

Main areas of research

Islamic law; knowledge transfer; legislative systems, esp. Mālikī law; slavery, landholding, water law, Islamic documents; Norman Sicily; Muslims and Christians.

PhD-project

“The Legal Infrastructures of Landholding in Muslim Sicily”

Supervisors: Prof. Dr. Daniel König (LMU Munich), Dr. Alex Metcalfe (Lancaster University)

Through an examination of Sicilian Arabic legal sources authored by the two Mālikī jurists Ibn Yūnus al-Ṣiqillī (d. 451/1059) and ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq al-Ṣiqillī (d. 466/1073–74), the study first seeks to show how a Sicilian legal infrastructure developed from the 3rd/9th century onwards and how was it related to the flow of legal ideas that connected the Mašriq and Ifrīqiya to Sicily. The dissertation’s central objective is to reconstruct the evolving legal framework governing landholding in Muslim Sicily during the Aghlabid, Fāṭimid, and Kalbid periods, spanning the period from the Muslim conquest in the ninth century to the eve of Norman domination in the eleventh century. The legal development of land tenure is analysed across three distinct phases: first, the phase of land acquisition during the initial conquest; second, a period of institutional consolidation in the latter half of the 4th/10th century, marked by the full integration of Mālikī jurisprudence in Sicily; and third, a period of decline coinciding with internal unrest and the advance of the Norman conquest in the latter half of the 5th/11th century.

Publications

- (with Alex Metcalfe) “The Jurists of Muslim Sicily: from the Byzantines to the Normans,” In: Ṣiqilliyya. Studi sulla Sicilia medievale in onore di Adalgisa De Simone, ed. Giuseppe Mandalà, Roma: Istituto per l’Oriente “Carlo Alfonso Nallino”, 2025, in press.
- (with Theresa Jäckh) “Water Communities in the Plain of Palermo. A Neglected Islamic Document from Norman Sicily,” Der Islam 102.1 (2025), pp. 130–167. https://doi.org/10.1515/islam-2025-0005
- Review of Texts, Scribes and Transmission: Manuscript Cultures of the Ismaili Communities and beyond, ed. Wafi A. Momin, London: I.B. Tauris, 2022, Al-Masāq 36.2 (2024), pp. 208–210. https://doi.org/10.1080/09503110.2024.2364434
- “Before 1044: ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq al-Ṣiqillī on the Purchase of Christian and Muslim Females in Sicily,” Transmediterranean History 5.2 (2023), https://doi.org/10.18148/tmh/2023.5.2.73