Dr. Ray Jureidini is Professor of Migration, Human Rights, and Ethics at the Research Center for Islamic Legislation and Ethics (CILE) and the first-of-its-kind Master of Arts program in Applied Islamic Ethics at CIS. He grew up in Australia, completing his studies in Industrial and Economic Sociology at Flinders University in South Australia. He completed his BA (1977), majoring in Sociology and Psychology; First Class Honors in Sociology with a thesis on producer cooperatives (1979); and a PhD thesis on Moral Values in Economic Life: a Case Study of Life Insurance and Superannuation (1986).
In the 1990s, he was Co-founder and Vice-chairman of the Australian Arabic Council, established to counter anti-Arab racism in Australia, as well as Founder and Editor of the Journal of Arabic, Islamic and Middle East Studies (JAIMES). After teaching sociology at five universities in Australia, from 1999, he spent six years at the American University of Beirut, where he began researching and publishing on human rights abuses of migrant domestic workers in Lebanon. From 2005, at the American University in Cairo, he became Director of the Center for Migration and Refugee Studies and conducted a number of research projects on migrant and refugee issues. In 2011, he returned to Lebanon at the Institute for Migration Studies at the Lebanese American University. Between 2012-13, he served as a consultant to the Migrant Worker Welfare Initiative at the Qatar Foundation.
Prof. Jureidini was one of the authors of the Qatar Foundation’s 2013 Mandatory Standards for Migrant Worker Welfareand the author of a 2014 report, Migrant Labour Recruitment to Qatar for the Qatar Foundation. In 2016, he authored the International Labour Organization (ILO) White Paper, Ways Forward in Fair Recruitment of Low-skilled Migrant Workers in the Asia-Arab States Corridor; in 2017 the Wage Protection Systems and Programmes in the GCC, by the European University Institute; also in 2017 the Transnational Culture of Corruption in Migrant Labour Recruitmentpublished by the International Organization for Migration.
In 2019, Dr Jureidini was the lead author of an ILO report, Assessment of the Wage Protection System in Qatar; and in 2020 co-edited a book with Said Hassan Migration and Islamic Ethics (Brill Publishers) with a chapter on kafala. The book is currently one of the top 5 books of the entire Brill catalogue. He is currently engaged in a funded research project looking at food security and migrant workers in Qatar.
