Weekend Scholarship Roundup

SCHOLARSHIP ROUNDUP

On Islamic Law

• In Muslim Marriage and Non-Marriage: Where Religion and Politics Meet Intimate Life (Leuven University Press), Julie McBrien (University of Amsterdam) and Annelies Moors (University of Amsterdam) bring together a group of authors to explore “unconventional Muslim marriages.” “Building on insights from different disciplines, both from the social sciences (anthropology, political science, gender and sexuality studies) and from the humanities (history, Islamic legal studies, religious studies), the authors address a wide range of controversial Muslim marriages (unregistered, interreligious, transnational, etc.), and include the views of religious scholars, state authorities, and political actors and activists, as well as the couples themselves, their families, and their wider social circle.”
• In “Globalisation and Food Positioning Semiotics: Halaal Food Access and Perceptions among Muslims in Cape Town” (MA thesis), Ammaarah Seboa (University of the Western Cape) “sheds light on how halaal food is branded, positioned and perceived” in Cape Town, South Africa, “and why semiotics, from certificates to logos, are central to Muslim food choices.”
• In History of Waqf in India: Muslim Endowments, Origins and Laws (Global Media Publications), Syed Ubaidur Rahman (Centre for History and Heritage, Delhi) “covers the developments of over fourteen hundred years–from the Islamic theological foundation of awqāf  to the recently enacted Waqf Amendment Act of 2025.”
• Massumeh H. Toosi (Indiana University) discusses “Twelver Shiism—a branch of Islam that serves both as a spiritual and political force in Iran and beyond” in The Conversation.
• Mohd Faizal Musa (Harvard Weatherhead Center for International Affairs) analyzes “Fiqh Sabahi: A Rare Jurisprudential Path Towards an Inclusive Islamic Paradigm in Malaysia” in Fulcrum. For more content and context on Islamic law in Malaysia, consult our Editor-in-Chief Professor Intisar Rabb’s “Legislation and Regulation of Islamic Law in Malaysia” and its appended resource roundup.
• In “Captives and Companions” (Simon & Schuster), Justin Marozzi (Royal Geographical Society) writes the “history of the slave trade in the Islamic world.”

On Islam and Data Science

• In “A Two-Phase LLM Fine-Tuning and Retrieval-Augmented Generation Approach for Islamic Inheritance Reasoning” (QIAS 2025), Mohammad Al-Smadi (Qatar University) presents his “approach and results for SubTask 1: Islamic Inheritance Reasoning at QIAS 2025, a shared task focused on evaluating Large Language Models (LLMs) in understanding and reasoning within Islamic inheritance knowledge.”

FIELD GUIDE TO ISLAMIC LAW ONLINE: RECENT SOURCES

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

• The Living Arabic Project is “an effort to show Arabic as a living language by allowing users to search in both a Classical Arabic dictionary and a dialect dictionary at the same time.” The site features seven dialects, full search functionality, example sentences, flashcard generation, and other features. A companion mobile app is also available.

UPCOMING EVENTS AND OPPORTUNITIES

PIL & Harvard Events:

• Talk: “The Taliban Courts in Afghanistan, Waging War by Law,” Adam Baczko, October 9, 2025 @ 4:30pm

Other Events: 

• Summer School: Digital Humanities and Islamic Studies, University of Bern, September 1–4, 2025
• Conference: Paris Congress at 125—Comparative Law’s Entanglement with Power from Paris to Today, McGill University, Canada, October 16–18, 2025
• Conference: 5th ACM Conference on Equity and Access in Algorithms, Mechanisms, and Optimization, University of Pittsburgh, November 5–7, 2025
• Conference: ASLH 2025 Annual Meeting, Detroit, MI, November 13–15, 2025
• Conference: “Islam and Artificial Intelligence: Challenges and Opportunities,” North American Association of Islamic and Muslim Studies, November 20, 202 
• Conference: International Conference “Poetry and Knowledge,” University of Münster, November 20–22, 2025
• Conference: MESA 2025, Westin Downtown, Washington DC, November 22–25, 2025
• Conference: Faith, Values, and the Rule of Law—An Interdisciplinary Conference, Seton Hall University School of Law, February February 4–5, 2026

PIL & Harvard Opportunities:

• Call for Papers: Middle East Beyond Borders Fall 2025 Workshop, September 12

Other Opportunities: 

• Call for Papers: Faith, Values, and the Rule of Law—An Interdisciplinary Conference, Seton Hall University School of Law, November 1, 2025
• Call for Submissions: Journal of Trends in Intellectual Property Research, Volume 3, Issue 2, December 29, 2025
• Call for Submissions: Journal of Legal Research & Analysis, Volume 3, Issue 2, December 29, 2025