SCHOLARSHIP ROUNDUP
On Islamic Law
- In “Authoritarian adaptability: the selective enforcement of the unified sermon in Jordanian mosques” (British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies), Astrid Bourlond (Utrecht University) “studies the ‘unified sermon’, the imposition of a single topic for Friday sermons to all preachers at the national level.”
- In “Islam and Freedom of Belief: the Challenge of Female Apostasy” (Hawwa), Mouez Khalfaoui (University of Tübingen) asks, “How has female apostasy been debated by scholars of Islamic law? Why did scholars of the Ḥanafi school, the most geographically widespread school of Islamic law, distinguish between genders with regard to the punishment for apostasy?” [login required]
On Islam and Data Science
- In “Bibliometric Analysis: Trends and Patterns of Islamic Studies Theories and Methods in The Last Five Years” (Jurnal Cendekia), Agus Faisal Asyha (Universitas Islam Negeri Raden Intan Lampung) and others “analyze trends, citation patterns, and collaborations in research related to the theory and methods of Islamic Studies over the past five years.”
- In “Predicting Trends in Islamic Banking & Finance: A Big Data Analysis Using Google Trends and AI” (Journal of Sharia Economics, Banking and Accounting), Asep Koswara (Ikopin University) “employs big data analysis and AI forecasting to predict global public interest trends in Islamic Banking and Finance over the period 2020 to 2025, using Google Trends data and the artificial intelligence (NeuralProphet) model.”
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:
- Sunnah.com is a searchable ḥadīth database that currently contains seventeen collections and “supports full search of both the English text of the hadith as well as the Arabic through a powerful search engine based on Lucene.” Its creators “aim to provide complete collections of hadith, their scholarly translations in as many languages as possible, explanations of hadith, information about hadith collectors and narrators, and resources on the sciences of hadith.”
UPCOMING EVENTS AND OPPORTUNITIES
PIL & Harvard Events:
- Workshop: Middle East Beyond Borders—Omar Abdel Ghaffar (Harvard University), “Canonizing Assent: Legal Canons in Action in late Medieval Jerusalem,” September 22, 2025 @6:15pm
- Talk: “The Taliban Courts in Afghanistan, Waging War by Law,” Adam Baczko, October 9, 2025 @ 4:30pm
- Workshop: Middle East Beyond Borders—Ozkan Karabulut (Harvard University), “Scripturalization of the Alevi Mystical Poetry,” November 3, 2025 @6:15pm
- Workshop: Middle East Beyond Borders—Prof. Houssem Chachia (University of Tunis), “The Conquest of Tunis (1535): Memory, Defeat, and Celebration Across Cultures,” October 20, 2025 @6:15pm
- Workshop: Middle East Beyond Borders—Cem Turkoz (Harvard University), “Ottoman Natural Philosophy in Seventeenth-Century Context: The Evolution of the Canon,” November 17, 2025 @6:15pm
Other Events:
- 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
- Conference: American Society for Premodern Asia Annual Meeting, Los Angeles, CA, April 24–27, 2026
PIL & Harvard Opportunities:
- Call for Submissions: Journal of Islamic Law, October 15, 2025
Other Opportunities:
- Call for Panels: International Medieval Congress, September 30, 2025
- Position Opening: Research Associate (PhD Position) for the history, economy and law of the early Islamic empire, Universität Hamburg, October 3, 2026
- Call for Papers: American Society for Premodern Asia Annual Meeting, October 31, 2025
- 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