Joseph Schacht

| birth_place = Ratibor, Province of Silesia, German Empire | nationality = British-German | death_date = | death_place = Englewood, New Jersey, United States | occupation = Historian, academic }} Joseph Franz Schacht (, 15 March 1902 – 1 August 1969) was a British-German professor of Arabic and Islam at Columbia University in New York. He was the leading Western scholar in the areas of Islamic law and hadith studies, whose ''Origins of Muhammadan Jurisprudence'' (1950) is still considered a centrally important work on the subject. The author of many articles in the first and second editions of the ''Encyclopaedia of Islam'', Schacht also co-edited the second edition of ''The Legacy of Islam'' and authored a textbook titled ''An Introduction to Islamic Law'' (1964). Provided by Wikipedia