Iza Hussin is an academic at theUniversity of Cambridge, who writes onIslamic law in colonial andpost-colonial states. Hussin is an Associate Professor in Asian Politics at theDepartment of Politics and International Studies (POLIS) and Mohamed Noah Fellow atPembroke College, Cambridge. She is a series editor for the Cambridge University Press Series Asian Connections, and on the editorial boards of the Social Science Research Council’s The Immanent Frame, and Indonesia and the Malay World.

Hussin gained an AM and AB fromHarvard University before studying for her MA atGeorgetown University and gaining a PhD at theUniversity of Washington. She was a member of the political science faculty at theUniversity of Chicago before moving to Cambridge.^[1]

For Hussin, Islamic law has been continuously re-invented as a 'problem-space' for the modern state.^[2] Her 2016 bookThe Politics of Islamic Law examinined the way in which the colonial encounter inBritish Malaya,India andEgypt simultaneously marginalized and centralized Islamic law. The final two chapters used two Malayapostasy cases – that ofLina Joy andNyonya Tahir – to pursue changing relations between sharia, society and the post-colonial nation-state.^[3] One reviewer praised it as "a work of unique critical sensibilities, setting the scene for future interdisciplinary research of colonial and postcolonial Islamic law".^[4]

In 2015, she spoke at theCambridge Union on colonialism and fundamentalism.^[5]

Hussin has participated in campaigns defendingacademic freedom. In 2018 she was one of 300 academics who signed an open letter to Singapore'sSelect Committee on Deliberate Online Falsehoods, objecting to the committee's efforts to discredit historianP J Thum.^[6] In 2019 she defended the poetAlfian Sa’at after he was attacked by Singapore's Education MinisterOng Ye Kung.^[7] In 2021 she signed a joint letter in solidarity with students atBoğaziçi University protesting against the Turkish government.^[8] In August 2020 she joined theCambridge University Libraries Decolonisation Working Group (DWG).^[9]

• The Politics of Islamic Law: Local Elites, Colonial Authority and the Making of the Muslim State. University of Chicago Press, 2016.

• Living people
• Fellows of Pembroke College, Cambridge
• Legal scholars of the University of Cambridge
• University of Chicago faculty
• Georgetown University alumni
• Harvard College alumni
• University of Washington alumni

• Year of birth missing (living people)