Raashid is a PhD student in the Department of Near Eastern Studies, where he studies early Islamic law and history. His dissertation project aims at reconstructing the earliest phase of legal thought in Islam through the study of the full corpus of primary sources, especially hadith reports, incorporating source-critical and transmission-based methods of analysis. The project seeks to establish the chronology of textual development for a number of discrete topics in Islamic law, illuminating the salient factors impacting the formation of legal doctrine, and the evolving self-conception of the nascent Muslim community.