- The Carnegie Corporation of New York recognizes scholar of Islamic law Abdullahi Ahmed An-Na’im, the Charles Howard Candler Professor of Law at Emory University, in their annual list of Great Immigrants.
- In “On Violence, Revolution and the Self” (Postcolonial Studies 24, no.1, published ahead of print (2020)), Ratna Kapur examines the relationship between epistemic violence and power, specifically at the level of the conception of the individual subject in law. The article engages with alternatives to pre-existing notions of the liberal subject proposed by two critical postcolonial intellectuals, Frantz Fanon and his contemporary, Ali Shari’ati.
- Lev Weitz’ article “Islamic Law on the Provincial Margins: Christian Patrons and Muslim Notaries in Upper Egypt, 2nd-5th/8th-11th Centuries” (Islamic Law and Society 27, no.1 (2020)) examines the interaction of Coptic Christians with Islamic legal institutions in provincial Egypt on the basis of a corpus of 193 Arabic legal documents, as well as relevant Coptic ones, dating to the 2nd-5th/8th-11th centuries. He argues that around the 3rd/9th century Islamic Egypt’s Christian subjects began to make routine use of Islamic legal institutions to organize their economic affairs, including especially inheritance and related matters internal to Christian families.
- Mohammad Abdullah’s article “Reflection of Maqāṣid al- Sharī‘ah in the Classical Fiqh al-Awqāf” (Islamic Economic Studies 27, no.2 (2020)) examines the jurisprudential framework of waqf (Islamic endowments) from a maqāṣid (the higher objectives of Islamic law) perspective and contextualizes the scope of dynamism and innovation in the modern waqf structure. Abdullah analyzes the classical waqf books and treatises from the four Sunni schools of jurisprudence by employing a textual analysis method and finds that the key constituents of maqāṣid are interwoven in the classical discourse of waqf rulings.