Dominik Krell is a Fellow of the Kolleg from April 2026 to March 2027.
Vita
Dominik Krell is trained in law and holds, in addition, a BA in History and Culture of the Middle East from Freie Universität Berlin, an MSc in Social Anthropology from the University of Oxford, and a PhD in Law from the Max Planck Institute for Comparative and International Private Law/University of Hamburg.
Until May 2025, he was a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the Centre for Socio Legal Studies, University of Oxford, and a Junior Research Fellow at Wolfson College. Prior to that, he was a Senior Research Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Comparative and International Private Law. He has also been a visiting fellow at the King Faisal Center for Research and Islamic Studies in Riyadh, a visiting researcher at the University of Colombo, and a guest researcher at the University of Bergen.
His first book, Islamic Law in Saudi Arabia (Brill, 2025), employs a multi-disciplinary approach to examine the prevailing understanding of Islamic law in the Saudi judiciary. Based on interviews with senior Islamic scholars, recently published court decisions, and seldom seen legal literature, it shows that Saudi jurists have fundamentally reinterpreted key aspects of Islamic jurisprudence and thereby paved the way for recent legal reforms in the kingdom.
His work has received several awards, including the Otto Hahn Medal of the Max Planck Society, the German Middle East Studies Association (DAVO) Dissertation Award, the Association for Arabic and Islamic Law (GAIR) Dissertation Award, and an honourable mention for the 2023 BRAIS Prize in the Study of Islam and the Muslim World.
Research Project
Decentring Western Law: How the Gulf Is Shaping the Global Landscape of Islamic Law
In the global Islamic legal landscape, important shifts have occurred in the twentieth and twenty first centuries. While there have always been major centres of learning in the Muslim world, such as al Azhar in Cairo, more regional centres, such as Timbuktu in Mali, have also played a significant role. In recent decades, countries in the Gulf, most prominently Saudi Arabia, have sought to establish themselves as new centres of knowledge in the Muslim world and offer generous scholarships to students from poorer regions to study Islamic law. At the same time, the importance of more traditional institutions of learning has declined.
Drawing on two contrasting case studies, Sri Lanka and the Gambia, my research explores how this shift in centres of knowledge, and the increasing globalisation of Islamic law, affect adjudication at local Muslim courts. What does influence from the Gulf mean for local Islamic adjudication? What are the political implications of the increasing globalisation of Islamic law? How does it change people’s perception of the Gulf countries? By answering these questions, I hope to offer a new perspective on the globalisation of law, and on the various ways in which law is used as a political tool in non-Western contexts.
Selected Publications
Krell, Dominik. Islamic Law in Saudi Arabia. Leiden: Brill, 2025
Krell, Dominik. “Inheritance as a God-Given Right: The Debate on the Family Waqf in 20th and 21st Century Saudi Arabia.” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 68, nos. 5–6 (2025): 761–782.
Engelcke, Dörthe, Dominik Krell, and Nadjma Yassari. “Underage Marriage: Legal and Social Practice in Muslim Jurisdictions.” Arab Law Quarterly (2025): 1–49.
Krell, Dominik. “Ibn Khunayn (b. 1376/1956) on Adjudication and Judicial Organisation, from al-Kāshif fī Sharḥ Niẓām al-Murāfaʿāt al-Sharʿiyya al-Saʿūdī.” In Islamic Law in Context: A Primary Source Reader, edited by Omar Anchassi and Robert Gleave, 367–374. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2024.
Krell, Dominik. “Die Reform der Loskaufscheidung (ḫulʿ): Lehren aus Saudi-Arabien.” Die Welt des Islams 60, no. 4 (2020): 408–432.
Krell, Dominik. “Saudi Arabia.” In Filiation and the Protection of Parentless Children: Towards a Social Definition of the Family in Muslim Jurisdictions, edited by Nadjma Yassari, Lena-Maria Möller, and Marie-Claude Najm, 299–323. The Hague: T.M.C. Asser Press, 2019.