By SHARIAsource Lab*
The SHARIAsource Courts & Canons (CnC) Annotation Suite leverages data science tools to explore questions in Islamic law and society historically through mapping the controversies and values reflected in courts (from taʾrīkh, ṭabaqāt) and legal canons (qawāʿid fiqhiyya). We experiment with ways in which the data science tools we are developing at SHARIAsource can aid in that research.
In a previous report, we debuted the “SHARIAsource-Analytics” platform in which we at the SHARIAsource Lab are building our Courts and Canons (CnC) Annotation Suite of tools. These tools will aid students and other researchers to identify, tag, and count Islamic legal canons (qawāʿid fiqhiyya)—textualist tools of interpretation that jurists and judges use in Islamic law to interpret texts in ways that parallel the canons of construction so prominent in American textualism in questions of legislation and statutory interpretation.[1] The two main tools are the CnC Variants Matcher and Canons Tagger.
The CnC Variants Matcher parses through our SHARIAsource database of Islamic legal canons, allowing Lab members to identify and pair (or otherwise disambiguate) Islamic legal canons. They do so based on automated predictions of canons clusters or researcher-informed categories. We addressed that in more detail in a previous report.
The CnC Canons Tagger allows researchers to tag the legal canons in our collection with metadata labels that help further parse canons by function, subject matter, and—eventually—labels relevant to the school of law, empire & era, and various issues or fields of Islamic law. The canons we are working with in the Lab come from canons collections that have themselves been culled and extracted from primary sources of Islamic law and historical sources for court cases. The CnC Canons Tagger presents Lab students and researchers with one canon at a time in an interface that allows them to choose the appropriate tags and categories from a rubric for canons that adapts the American law categories of legal canon by function. In parallel to the major categories of textual and substantive canons in American legislation and statutory interpretation contexts, major categories for Islamic legal canons include textual canons and substantive canons in addition to procedural canons, structural canons, and governance canons.
Categorizing canons is not the only output of the CnC Canons Tagger. The tool also allows Lab members and researchers to annotate canons with translations, transliterations, titles, and other researcher-informed notes or metadata. An example follows:
In this example, the tool displays the canon al-ʿIbādāt lā tubṭilu bi-shayʾ min mubṭilātihā ʾidhā wajadat baʿd al-farāgh minhā, translated as “acts of worship are not invalidated by factors that would ordinarily invalidate them when those factors are discovered after the act of worship is complete.” This canon was extracted from a modern canons collection that collects canons from prominent historical canons collections: Muḥammad Ṣidqī Burnū’s Mawsūʿat al-qawāʿid al-fiqhiyya.[2] Given that this canon “elaborate[s] basic substantive principles of law as concise restatements designed to provide guidance in the form of presumptions, tie-breakers, or clear statement rules to aid in interpretation and application of rulings in major areas of Islamic law,” we categorize it as a substantive canon.[3] Because the canon, moreover, applies “to particular subject areas of law with more limited scope,” we can further classify in the category of specific canons (ḍawābiṭ, qawāʿid fiqhiyya juzʾiyya). Finally, because the canon addresses acts of worship, we can also tag it as falling within the field of ritual law (ʿibādāt) and the subfield of prayer (ṣalāt).[4]
The tagging and annotations process allows researchers to both aggregate and assess the number and types of canons in the various canons collections. For the first time, we are able to gain insight into the landscape and therefore functions of specific canons that emerged from the historical legal record.
Notes:
* This essay was prepared by the SHARIAsource Lab, with contributions from Intisar Rabb, Abtsam Saleh and Noah Tashbook.
[1] Intisar Rabb, “Islamic Legal Canons as Memes,” Islamic Law Blog, February 28, 2021, https://islamiclaw.blog/2021/03/03/islamic-legal-canons-as-memes/.
[2] Būrnū, Muḥammad Ṣidqī, Mawsūʿat al-qawāʿid al-fiqhiyya (Beirut, 2015).
[3] Rabb, “Islamic Legal Canons as Memes.”
[4] Ibid.
(Suggested Bluebook citation: SHARIAsource Lab, Experiments in Annotating Islamic Legal Canons, Islamic Law Blog (Dec. 17, 2024), https://islamiclaw.blog/2024/12/17/experiments-in-annotating-islamic-legal-canons/)
(Suggested Chicago citation: SHARIAsource Lab, “Experiments in Annotating Islamic Legal Canons,” Islamic Law Blog, December 17, 2024, https://islamiclaw.blog/2024/12/17/experiments-in-annotating-islamic-legal-canons/)