Since 2018 the Society for Arab and Islamic Law (GAIR) e.V. has awarded the GAIR Dissertation Prize for the best dissertation in the field of Islamic law or of the law of the Arab or Islamic states. The prize is endowed with €500.

Current call: 

The dissertation should have been assessed in 2023 or 2024 with at least ‘magna cum laude’. Nominations may be submitted by university teachers (professors, Privatdozentinnen and Privatdozenten, researchers with the right to supervise doctorates, and legal practitioners with relevant expertise). Candidates may not nominate themselves.

The selection is made by GAIR’s Dissertation Prize Committee, which is composed of members of the Committee and the Board of Trustees. Supervisors and examiners of the dissertations under consideration may not be members of the selection committee.

The following documents should be sent as PDF files by email to dissertationspreis@gair.de by 31 October 2025:

  • the dissertation
  • the examiners’ reports
  • a short statement of reasons for the nomination
  • a link to the applicable doctoral regulations
  • a CV of the doctoral candidate

The prize will be awarded at the 2025 GAIR annual conference. Prize winners should attend if possible and present their dissertation to the members of the Society at the conference.

The call for nominations is available as a PDF here.

Previous winners of the GAIR Dissertation Prize:

Dominik Krell (2022) for his dissertation Islamic Law in Saudi Arabia: Concepts, Practices and Developments.

Abdelaali El Maghraoui (2020) for his dissertation Geld im islamischen Recht: Die Grundzüge einer Geldtheorie nach der Rechtslogik ausgewählter klassisch-muslimischer Gelehrter (Money in Islamic Law: Foundations of a Theory of Money according to the Legal Logic of Selected Classical Muslim Scholars).

Serdar Kurnaz (2018) for his dissertation Methoden zur Normderivation im islamischen Recht: Eine Rekonstruktion der Methoden zur Interpretation autoritativer textueller Quellen bei ausgewählten islamischen Rechtsschulen (Methods of Norm Derivation in Islamic Law: A Reconstruction of the Methods for Interpreting Authoritative Textual Sources in Selected Schools of Islamic Law).