I am a Ph.D. student in Islamic Studies at Harvard University. My research explores the intersections of Islamic law, literature, and religion in Sub-Saharan Africa. Focusing on Sudan, Mauritania, and Guinea, I consider the ways in which texts live in communities, and likewise, communities in texts. My work seeks to rethink how books of positive law (furu` al-fiqh) become part of a scholarly canon, the production of meaning through their transmission, and how both are instructive for reimagining Islamic law and scholasticism in Africa. My dissertation employs ethnography of teaching circles and close readings of unpublished manuscripts to explore a notoriously difficult example of such a work, the fourteenth century law manual, Mukhtasar Khalil. Sitting at the juncture of anthropology and history, the project aims to trace the reception of the Khalil as it evolved, contracted, and expanded by way of hundreds of glosses over nearly seven centuries. I question how, and why, glossing the Khalil became a favorite method for reinterpreting genre and authority in late Maliki legal thought, and how communities continue to reconstruct the text across Islamic Africa today.

I received my undergraduate degree at Swarthmore College and Master’s degree at Dartmouth College, earning the outstanding graduate thesis of 2012 for my work on customary law in highland Yemen. I have conducted ethnographic fieldwork and archival research in Yemen, Egypt, Morocco, Senegal, Guinea, Sudan, where I held visiting research appointments in the University of Khartoum’s Department of Islamic Studies (2014-2015, 2016), and in Mauritania, where I was named a research fellow at the Institut Mauritanien de Recherches Scientifiques (IMRS) (2018-2019). I have also completed formative training in Maliki law, grammar, and tafsir under scholars in Mauritania and Sudan. At Harvard, I am the co-chair of the Islam in Africa Conference Series and the founder of its Islamic Africa research workshop. My research has been funded by the American Institute for Maghrib Studies (AIMS), West African Research Association (WARA), U.S. Department of Education, Dartmouth College, and Harvard’s Center for African Studies, Islamic Legal Studies Program, Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, and Frederick Sheldon Traveling Fellowship.

I can be reached at: msteele@fas.harvard.edu