Weekend Scholarship Roundup

SCHOLARSHIP ROUNDUP

On Islamic Law

• In “A Sense of Justice: Coloniality and the Islamic Legal Tradition,” their introductory essay to a special issue of Die Welt des Islams, Samy Ayoub (University of Texas at Austin) and Ari Schriber (Utrecht University) offer a “critical history of legal modernization and the ‘creative destruction’ of the institutional apparatus of Islamic law.”
• In “Debating Diya: Indirect Rule and the Transformation of Islamic Law in British Colonial Northern Nigeria” (Die Welt des Islams), Rabiat Akande (University of Maryland) “traces the contours of the debate over the fate of diya as a lens through which one may apprehend the impact of colonial indirect rule on Islamic law, particularly criminal law, in Northern Nigeria.” [login required]
• In “The Obscure Appellate: The Egyptian Islamic Supreme Court, 1898–1955” (Die Welt des Islams), Samy Ayoub (University of Texas at Austin) “examines the Egyptian Islamic Supreme Court…and its role in overseeing Islamic judicial practice in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.” [login required]
• In “Islamic Law, Oil Wealth, and the Modern State in the Gulf: The Scope of the Sharia in Twentieth-Century Qatar” (Die Welt des Islams), Alexandre Caeiro (Hamad Bin Khalifa University) asks “How can one write the modern legal history of the Gulf states without projecting onto the past the contemporary hegemony of the modern nation-state?” [login required]
• In “‘Divide According to Sharīʿa’: The Islamic Inheritance System in the Russian Empire” (Die Welt des Islams),  Rozaliya Garipova (Nazarbayev University) examines the ways in which Volga-Ural Muslim communities in the Russian empire utilized the Orenburg Muslim Spiritual Assembly “as an extra-communal venue where Muslims could challenge intra-familial or communal methods of inheritance division.” [login required]
• In “The Transformation of Islamic Property and Evidentiary Law in Colonial-era Morocco: The Case of Shufʿa as Préemption” (Die Welt des Islams), Ari Schriber (Utrecht University) “examines the Islamic property concept of shufʿa (the right of ‘preemption’ or ‘first-refusal’ for co-owned land) as adjudicated in sharīʿa courts and French courts of colonial-era Morocco.” [login required]
• In “The Politics of Religious Non-Interference: Islamic Legal Reform in Colonial India” (Die Welt des Islams), Sohaira Z. Siddiqui (Georgetown University in Qatar) focuses on “Mufti Kifāyatallāh Dihlawī, the President of the Jamʿiyyat-i ʿUlamāʾ-i Hind and a highly influential Deobandi scholar” and his engagement with the 1929 Child Marriage Restraint Act. [login required]

On Islam and Data Science

• In “A Decade of Digital Da’wah: Global Research Trends And Thematic Evolution (2013– 2025)” (El Harakah), Muhammad Choirin (Universitas Muhammadiyah Jakarta) and others employ “ tools such as Biblioshiny and the R programme to generate visual mappings of keyword co-occurrence, citation patterns, and thematic clusters [combined with] frameworks from Islamic communication theory and digital sociology, offering insights into how da’wah adapts to digital contexts.”
• In “Rebuilding ḥabāʾib authority in the digital age in Indonesia: Jamāʿah relations, social action, and transparency” (Cogent Arts & Humanities), Soleh Hasan Wahid (Insitut Agama Islam Negeri Ponorogo) analyzes the “debate over the legitimacy of the ḥabāʾib lineage as a source of religious authority…through critical discourse, sentiment, and content analysis.”

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:

• St. Cyril and Methodius National Library’s digital repository contains Arabic, Turkish and Persian manuscripts, including a “collection of Defters and Sijills.”

UPCOMING EVENTS AND OPPORTUNITIES

PIL & Harvard Events: 

• Talk: “The Taliban Courts in Afghanistan, Waging War by Law,” Adam Baczko, October 9, 2025 @ 4:30pm
• Islamic Law Speaker Series: Rami Koujah (Harvard Law School), The Invention of Islamic Legal Personhood: Artifact to Ontology, October 14, 2025 @12:30pm
• 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—Ozkan Karabulut (Harvard University), “Scripturalization of the Alevi Mystical Poetry,” November 3, 2025 @6:15pm
• Islamic Law Speaker Series: Youssef Belal (United Nations), “Thinking the World with Islamic Knowledges,” November 11, 2025 @12:30pm
• 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: Muslims in AI, Imperial College London, November 16, 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: 

• 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
• Position Opening: Postdoctoral Research Associate, The Sharmin & Bijan Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Iran and Persian Gulf Studies, Princeton University, November 3, 2025
• Call for Papers: Muslims in AI, Imperial College London, November 16, 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
• Position Opening: Visiting Assistant Professor of Medieval Middle East, Colby College, July 1, 2026