Rachel M. Scott

Rachel M. Scott’s research focuses on religion and politics, particularly Islamic political thought, modern Islamic law, constitutions, the role of religious scholars in Islam, personal status law, Muslim-Christian relations, and, more recently, Muslim-Jewish relations. Her geographical focus is Egypt, and, more recently, Morocco.

Her first book, The Challenge of Political Islam: Non-Muslims and the Egyptian State, was published by Stanford University Press in 2010. Her second book, Recasting Islamic Law: Religion and the Nation State in Egyptian Constitution Making, was published by Cornell University Press in 2021 and has been translated into Russian (Рэйчел М. Скотт. Новый образ исламского права. Boston, MA: Academic Studies Press / СПб.: Библиороссика, 2025). She is currently working on a new book project provisionally entitled Clipping the Wings of the State: Perspectives from the Islamic Tradition.

Professor Scott has also published journal articles, book chapters, review essays, and reference works on a range of topics, including modern Islamic thought, the Muslim Brotherhood and Islamism in Egypt, al-Azhar and religious authority, the Coptic Orthodox Church, Qur’anic exegesis, and secularism. Recent examples include “Rights Renewed as Obligatory Necessities: Consultation, Opposition, and Revolution in the Thought of the Egyptian thinker Muhammad Imara (1931-2020),” The Maghreb Review 51(1), 2026, 27-50; “Islamic law, Unitary State law, and Communal Law: Divorce and Remarriage in Egypt’s Coptic Community,” in Christianity in the Contemporary Middle East: Orthodox, Catholic, and Protestant Communities in Context, ed. Deanna Ferree Womack (Leiden: Brill, 2026); and “The Moroccan Mellāḥ: Governing Jewish Spaces and the Islamic Secular,” Turkish Journal of Islamic Studies 59, 2026, 257-276.

Professor Scott earned her doctorate in Islamic Studies from SOAS (School of Oriental and African Studies), the University of London, her M.Phil. in Modern Middle Eastern Studies from the University of Oxford (St. Antony’s College), and her B.A. in Arabic and Islamic studies from the University of Oxford (Pembroke College).