Team

Dr. Mutaz al-Khatib is an Associate Professor of Methodology and Ethics at the Research Center for Islamic Legislation and Ethics (CILE), Hamad Bin Khalifa University (HBKU). He also serves as the Director of the MA program in Applied Islamic Ethics at the College of Islamic Studies (HBKU) and is the Editor-in-Chief of the Studies in Islamic Ethics book series published by Brill.

Dr. al-Khatib obtained his BA in Islamic Studies from Damascus in 1997 and a BA in Arabic Literature from Al-Azhar University, Cairo in 1998. He earned his MA in 2002 and PhD in 2009 with a dissertation titled The Textual Critical Approach to Ḥadīth: A Study into the Methods of Traditionalists (Muḥaddithūn) & Legal Theorists (Uṣūliyyūn), later published in Beirut (2011).

He was a founding member of the Intellectual Forum for Innovation (1999), served as Editor-in-Chief of the Islam and Contemporary Affairs section on IslamOnline.net (2003–2008), and anchored Al Jazeera’s program Al-Sharīʿa wa-l Ḥayāt (2004–2013). He has held visiting fellowships at the Zentrum Moderner Orient (ZMO), Berlin (2006) and the Forum Transregionale Studien, Berlin (2012–2013), and has been a visiting lecturer at the American University of Beirut, the Islamic University of Beirut, and Qatar University.

Dr. al-Khatib has delivered lectures and participated in academic conferences internationally at leading institutions, including: University of Oxford, University of Cambridge, Princeton University (Institute for Transregional Study of the Contemporary Middle East, North Africa, and Central Asia), University of Florida, University of California, Berkeley (Boalt Hall School of Law), University of Tübingen, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München (Institute for the Near and Middle East Studies), Osnabrück University, and Lund University.

Dr. al-Khatib is also a Principal Investigator (PI) in several funded research projects, including “Indigenizing Genomics in the Gulf Region (IGGR): The Missing Islamic Bioethical Discourse” and “Transforming Islamic Studies in the Age of Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI): Developing AI-Empowered ‘IslamGPT 1.0’” for Arabic sources. Both projects are funded by the Qatar Research, Development, and Innovation (QRDI) Council, formerly known as the Qatar National Research Fund (QNRF).

His research spans Ḥadīth criticism, Islamic ethics, Islamic intellectual history, Maqāṣid al-Sharīʿa (Higher Objectives of Islamic Law), and Islamic legal theory. He has authored several books, including:

• The Textual Critical Approach to Ḥadīth: A Study of the Methods of Traditionalists and Jurists (Beirut: Arab Network for Studies and Publishing, 2011)
• The Justified Violence: Sharīʿa Versus the People and the State (Cairo: Dar Al-Mashriq, 2017)
• Islamic Ethics and the Trusteeship Paradigm (co-editor 2020)
• Ḥadīth and Ethics Through the Lens of Interdisciplinarity (2022)
• Key Classical Works on Islamic Ethics (2024)

Dr. al-Khatib has published over 30 academic articles in both Arabic and English in leading academic platforms.