Weekend Scholarship Roundup

SCHOLARSHIP ROUNDUP

On Islamic Law:

• In “Navigating Colonial Law in a ‘Sea of Islands’” (Law & Social Inquiry Online (December 3, 2021)), Renisa Mawani (University of British Columbia) reviews Nurfadzilah Yahaya‘s Fluid Jurisdictions: Colonial Laws and Arabs in Southeast Asia (Cornell University Press, 2020).
• In “Rumi without Islam: the cultural appropriation of Rumi” (Bayt Al Fann, n.d.), Omid Safi (Duke University) investigates how “modern consumers of Rumi have taken the Islam out of Rumi in rendering him into a generic (and marketized) spirituality provider.”
• “When is a wedding not a marriage? Exploring non-legally binding ceremonies” (Nuffield Foundation (December 2021)) by Dr. Rajnaara Akthar (De Montfort University) and Sharon Blake (University of Exeter) “investigate[s] why marriage ceremonies occur outside of the legal framework for weddings in England and Wales.”
• In “Sacred Ground: Unearthing Religious Freedom of African American Slaves” (SSRN (September 9, 2021)), Brad Earley (University of Chicago Law School), focusing on burial rituals, argues that “minority groups need not be persecuted or reviled to have their religious freedom removed. Simply failing to understand and accommodate their beliefs ultimately had the same effect.”
• “Law, Religion, and the COVID Crisis” (Journal of Law and Religion, forthcoming) by Mark Movsesian (St. John’s University School of Law) “explores judicial responses to legal restrictions on worship during the COVID pandemic.”
• “The Principle and Politics of Liberty of Conscience” (Harvard Law Review 135 (November 2021)) by Nelson Tebbe (Cornell Law School) “argues for a conception that presumptively protects liberty of conscience while erecting democratic guardrails” that would ensure “political equality that is essential for any democracy.”
• In “Divine Intervention: Invoking God in Peace Agreements” (in The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Religion and Peace, eds. J. Mitchell, S. R. Millar, F. Po and P. Martyn (Hoboken: John Wiley and Sons, forthcoming 2022)), Robert Forster (Chr. Michelsen Institute) and Christine Bell (University of Edinburgh School of Law) “examine[] the use of religious language in peace agreements.”

On Islam and Data Science:

• The project Muslimah – The Power of Modesty offers handcrafted non-fungible tokens (NFTs) depicting Muslim women.
• The Arab Citation Index, “a new database on the Web of Science platform, makes Arabic journals more accessible to researchers worldwide by connecting Arabic scholarly content to the global citation network of high quality, peer-reviewed scholarly literature with more than 1.8 billion cited research references.”
• In “Some Suggestions on Using OpenITI Corpus to Present Enhanced Digital Versions of Large Collections: The Case of al-Dhari‘a Ila Tasanif al-Shi‘a” (Kitab-Project.org (November 22, 2021)), Hamid Reza Hakimi (KITAB Project), using Al-Dhari’a,”the largest bibliographical collection indexing the Shiʿi written tradition in Arabic and Persian,” argues that “annotated texts can be used to present enhanced versions of the texts, especially large biographical/bibliographical collections.”

FIELD GUIDE TO ISLAMIC LAW ONLINE: RECENT SOURCES

This Field Guide to Islamic Law Online is an ever-growing collection of links to hundreds of links to primary sources and archival collections around the world, online. We recently added new resources to this list:

• Qalam Library is a database of online Islamic books in Farsi.
• Ketābchīn is an online store for downloading books in Farsi.

UPCOMING EVENTS & OPPORTUNITIES

PIL & Harvard Calendar:

• Position opening: Librarian for Islamic Art and Architecture, Harvard College Library. Deadline: January 3, 2022.
• Fellowships: Program on Law & Society in the Muslim World, Harvard Law School, 2022-2023. Deadline: January 15, 2022.
• Call for Applications: PIL–LC Research Fellowship Application, 2022-2023. Deadline: January 31, 2022.
• Call for Fellowship Applications: The Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University, 2022-2023. Deadline: January 31, 2022.

Global Calendar:

• Call for Proposals: Unfreedom in the Premodern World: Comparative Perspectives on Slavery, Servitude & Captivity. Deadline: December 17, 2021.
• Position opening: Open Rank Tenure Track Position, Islamic Art History, Pomona College, July 1, 2022. Deadline: January 1, 2022.
• Position opening: Assistant Professor, History of the Islamic World The Department of History at Central Connecticut State University. Deadline: January 1, 2022.
• Short-Term Fellowships: New-York Historical Society, July 1, 2022 – June 30, 2023. Deadline: January 6, 2022.
• Position opening: Lehigh University, History Department Lawrence Henry Gipson Chair in Transnational History. Deadline: January 7, 2022.
• Call for Papers: “The Middle Ages as a Digital Experience,” Department of Medieval Studies, Central European University, April 21-23, 2022. Deadline: January 31, 2022.
• Call for Applications: Research Fellowship, Kamel Center at Yale Law School, 2022-2023. Deadline: January 31, 2022.
• Call for Papers: Theory and Practice of Rebellion, Hamburg, September 22-24, 2022. Deadline: February 1, 2022.
• Persian Language Summer School by Aspirantum, Yerevan (Armenia), July 3, 2022 – August 27, 2022. Deadline: April 21, 2022.
• Position opening: Assistant Professor of Modern Middle Eastern History, University of Tennessee, Fall 2022. Deadline: until an appointment is made.
• Position opening: Columbia University, The Department of Art History and Archaeology Barbara Stoler Miller Assistant Professor, Indian and South Asian Art History. Deadline: until an appointment is made.
• Call for Applications: Interdisciplinary Scholars of Places, Movement and Cultural Practices Professor, New York University Abu Dhabi. Deadline: until the position is filled.
• Research Project: Historian/Researcher – Tudor Period/Elizabethan Era, and the Ottoman Empire during the Suleiman the Magnificent Period. Deadline: until the position is filled.