Oct272025
Justice Without Pain: The Abolition of Torture in Modern Egyptian Penal Law
Join us for a lunch talk with Professor Khaled Fahmy to discuss the abolition of torture in modern Egypt from a historical perspective.
Event Overview
Join us for a lecture and discussion with Professor Khaled Fahmy, renowned Egyptian historian and Edward Keller Professor of North Africa and the Middle East at Tufts University. Professor Fahmy will discuss the abolition of torture in modern Egyptian penal law, drawing on his recent book In Quest of Justice: Islamic Law and Forensic Medicine in Modern Egypt. The discussion will be moderated by Salma Waheedi, Executive Director of the Program on Law and Society in the Muslim World at Harvard Law School.
Lunch will be provided.
This event is sponsored by the Program on Law and Society in the Muslim World at Harvard Law School and Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Islamic Studies Program at Harvard University.
About the Speaker:
Khaled Fahmy is Professor of History and Edward Keller Professor of North Africa and the Middle East at Tufts University. Having been educated at the American University in Cairo and the University of Oxford, and having earlier taught at Princeton, NYU, Columbia, Harvard and Cambridge Universities, he is an historian of the modern Middle East with special emphasis on nineteenth century Egypt. His books and articles deal with the history of the Egyptian army in the first half of the nineteenth century, and the history of medicine, law and urban planning in 19th- and 20th-century Egypt. Through working on such topics as conscription, vaccination, quarantines, forensic medicine and legal torture, he charts the specific ways in which a modern state was established in Egypt and the manner in which Egyptians accommodated, subverted or resisted the institutions of this modern state.