King Fahd of Saudi Arabia has given $5-million to the Harvard Law School to help expand its program for the study of Islamic law.
The gift “is part of the King’s effort to serve Islam worldwide, " said Saudi Arabia’s Ambassador to the United States, Prince Bandar bin Sultan.
The gift, which will go toward the creation of an Islamic Legal Studies Center, will endow a chair in Islamic law; strengthen the library’s Islamic-law collection; and support student fellowships and visiting professors.
Islamic law differs from Western law in that it is all-encompassing, governing everything from religion to culture. “Islamic law is central to studying anything Islamic, but for some reason it has been relatively absent in most studies of Islam,” said Frank E. Vogel, an assistant professor of Islamic legal studies at the law school.
The endowed chair will be named “The Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques,” an 800-year-old royal title that King Fahd now holds. The title refers to Islam’s holiest shrines, at Mecca and Medina.
Harvard sought donations for the center from several Muslim countries during the past year, according to Mr. Vogel. The law school will need to raise an additional $5-million for the center, which Mr. Vogel expects will open in January. The law school offers two to three courses a year on Islamic law.
The gift is the second large grant King Fahd has made to an American university in the past three months. In March he established a center for Middle East studies at the University of Arkansas with a $23.5-million donation, one of the largest gifts to an American university from a foreign nation.
