Sarah Eltantawi

Dr. Sarah Eltantawi is a specialist in contemporary Islam working in the area of post-coloniality, politics, and Islamic law.  Her work has focused on Nigeria and Egypt. Her book Shari’ah on Trial: Northern Nigeria’s Islamic Revolution (University of California Press, 2017) examines the Islamic legal status and modern political resurgence of the stoning punishment in Islamic law through an analysis of the infamous trial of Amina Lawal at the turn of the 21st century. Her current work, Resist then Replace: Egyptian Revolutions and The Political Theology of the Muslim Brotherhood, (in process) asks why Egyptians revolted against the Muslim Brotherhood government in 2013. The work traces the intellectual and political history of Egyptian modernity and the concurrent rise of “resistance Islam,” analyzing how these contributed to two dramatic revolutions (1952 and 2011) that each became popularly-backed military coups. Topics of additional publications include shi’ite Islamic law, prophetic and companion proto-jurisprudence in Islam’s foundational period, and theoretical pieces on concepts of modernity and post-modernity in the Muslim-majority world, in addition to popular contributions in the international media on a variety of issues concerning the Musilm-majority world as well as Islam in America. 

Dr. Eltantawi has been a fellow at the Center for Public Leadership at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, at Brandeis University as a Scholar in Residence in Religion, Gender, Culture and the Law, at the University of California, Berkeley, as the Sultan Fellow in Arab Studies, and at the Forum Transregionalle at the Wissenschaftskoleg in Berlin as well as the Freie Universität in Berlin. She has also been a visiting professor at the American University in Cairo.

Ph.D Harvard University

MA Harvard University

BA University of California, Berkeley

Contemporary Islam, Islamic Law, Post-Coloniality, Theorizing the Modern Muslim state.