Rachel Marion Scott

Rachel M. Scott is the Chair of the Department of Religion and Culture and Professor of Islamic Studies. She is also a core faculty member in ASPECT (Alliance of Social, Political, Ethical, and Cultural Thought). Her areas of research include 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 numerous journal articles, book chapters, book reviews, 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, and Qur’anic exegesis. For example, she published “Points of Convergence: Islamist Conceptions of Citizenship and the Struggle of Egyptian Christians for Rights as a Religious Group" in Contemporary Islam in 2023 (https://doi.org/10.1007/s11562-023-00516-x) and has a book chapter entitled “Islamic law, Unitary State law, and Communal Law: Divorce and Remarriage in Egypt’s Coptic Community,” forthcoming in Christianity in the Contemporary Middle East: Orthodox, Catholic, and Protestant Communities in Context (ed. Deanna Ferree Womack: Leiden: Brill). 

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).  

• Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, RLCL 1024
• Religious Ethics, RLCL 1044
• Case Studies in Religion and Culture, RLCL 2004
• Islam, RLCL 2324
• Women and Gender in Islam, RLCL 3014 (WGS 3014)
• Islam and the Modern World, RLCL 3604
• Religion in the Middle East, RLCL/IS/ARBC 3644
• Death, Dying, and Mourning, RLCL 4324
• Islamic Political Thought, RLCL/ASPT 5134
• Islamic Conceptions of Justice, ASPT 6204
• Religion and Conflict, ASPT 6204
• Being Modern in the Middle East, ASPT 6204
• Rethinking Secularism: The Post-Secular Turn and its Critics, ASPT 6004
• Anarchism—Transnational Perspectives, ASPT 6204