Dr. Ari Schriber is Marie Sklodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellow at Utrecht University. His research interests lie at the intersection of Islamic law, Islamic intellectual history, and colonial history of the Middle East and North Africa. Schriber is particularly interested in investigating the evolution of Islamic judicial practice in colonial and post-colonial courts of North Africa. He is currently preparing a monograph focusing on Morocco, entitled: Shari’a of the Colony: Judgeship, Proof, and Islamic Legal Modernity in Morocco, 1912-1965. Drawing on original court records, state surveillance archives, and Islamic scholarship, the book reconstructs twentieth-century Islamic legal tradition in Morocco and its convergence with French colonial legalities. The book's narrative revolves around a single three-decade dispute involving paternity, land, and slavery for which both Moroccan shari’a and French colonial courts claimed competency. In tracing its outcomes, the book argues that court practice--namely, determining “fact” or “truth”--was a pivotal domain of convergence between Islamic tradition and colonial governance. As postcolonial states worldwide continue making claim to religious law, this analysis foregrounds the fragmentation of Islamic legal tradition in postcolonial institutions. 

Schriber's current European Commission-funded project, “Quantifying Islamic Law in the Modern State,” employs statistical text analysis of shari'a court judgements before and after Moroccan independence. Using over 1000 appellate judgements from approximately 1912-1965, the analysis quantifies citations to Islamic legal authorities to reconstruct the authoritative traditions of Islamic law before and after Morocco's codification of Islamic family law in 1957. The analysis likewise tracks the impact of state judicial review, land reform, and the gradual disappearance of Jewish and enslaved litigants in shari'a courts. The data underlying this analysis will be published online in Summer 2025. 

Prior to coming to Utrecht, Schriber was Arts and Sciences Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department for the Study of Religion at the University of Toronto (2021-2023). He completed his PhD (2021) and Masters (2013) in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at Harvard University and holds a BA in Religious Studies and Middle Eastern Studies from the University of Virginia. His fieldwork has been funded by the John L. Loeb, Jr. Religious Freedom Initative at Harvard University (2019), the American Institute for Maghrib Studies (2018), Harvard Law School (2016), and the Fulbright Institute of International Education (2013). 

Recent publications

• “The Transformation of Islamic Property and Evidentiary Law in Colonial-Era Morocco: The Case of Shuf'a as Préemption,” Die Welt des Islams, special issue on Islamic law and coloniality (July 2024), https://doi.org/10.1163/15700607-20240017 
• “A Sense of Justice: Coloniality and the Islamic Legal Tradition” (with Samy Ayoub), introduction to special issue on Islamic law and coloniality, Die Welt des Islams (July 2024), https://doi.org/10.1163/15700607-20240019 
• "Judicial Practice as Islamic Law: The 'Amal of Fez in Post-Classical Maliki Legal Tradition," Asiatische Studien - Études Asiatiques 78, No. 1 (2024), https://doi.org/10.1515/asia-2024-0012  
• “Allal al-Fassi: Visions of Shari'a in Post-Colonial Moroccan State Law,” in Contemporary Moroccan Thought, ed. Mohammed Hashas (Brill: 2025), 351-76, https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004519534_013
• “Judgment of the Moroccan Supreme Council of Shari'a Appeals in 1943 on Inheritance, Slavery, and Paternity Claim,” in Islamic Law in Context: A Primary Source Reader, ed. Robert Gleave and Omar Anchassi (Cambridge University Press: 2024), 296-310, https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009031783.033