Weekend Scholarship Roundup

  • The Zaydi Manuscript Tradition, a collaboration between the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, and the Hill Museum & Manuscript Library at Saint John’s University, is working to digitize a dynamic body of literature, theology, astronomy, legal sources, and other materials spanning a millennium.
  • In “Borrowings, Influences, and Comparability: The Case of Islamic Law,” Islamic StudiesAayesha Rafiq analyzes an orientalist debate on the influence of foreign laws on Islamic law and compares the arguments of proponents and opponents of this proposition.
  • Intisar Rabb and Bilal Orfali published an article on “Islamic Law in Literature” in Tradition and Reception in Arabic Literature Essays dedicated to Andras Hamoriwhich investigates the innovative ways in which poets and writers challenge understandings of the Arabic tradition in the global humanities. Chapters on prose literature analyze the relationship between the Persian and Arabic traditions in the work of Ibn al-Muqaffaʿ, court writer of fiction and political thought, and the role of legal procedure, witnesses, and written evidence in the work of a judge and writer.
  • In “Islamic Law, Colonialism, and Mecca’s Shadow in the Horn of Africa,” Journal of Africana Religions, Mark Fathi Massoud draws on the case of British Somaliland (circa 1884–1960), to argue that Islam—and competing views of Islamic law in politics—occupied a critical role during the region’s colonial period. 
  • Malissa Taylor provides a detailed account of the relations between the ʿaskarī class and peasant communities before the rise of the a’yān, in eighteenth century Damascus, in “Forcing the Wealthy to Pay Their Fair Share? The Politics of Rural Taxes in 17th-Century Ottoman Damascus,” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient. The author outlines the ways in which the ʿaskarī class were obligated to pay village taxes in proportion to the amount of property they owned. 
  • In Muslim Environmentalisms: Religious and Social Foundations, Anna Gade dedicates a chapter of her book to the relationship between Islamic environmental justice, Islamic law, and Islamic ethics, in order to capture how Islamic perspectives can shape understandings of environmentalism and the environmental humanities.

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