SCHOLARSHIP ROUNDUP
On Islamic Law
- In “Women’s Gifting of Their Inheritance Share to Male Kin Is Void: A Study of Late Ottoman Fatwas on Social Coercion” (British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies), Muhammad al-Marakeby (Indonesian International Islamic University) “explores the juristic discussions about women’s access to their financial rights” by “taking fatwa collections as a source of social history.” [login required]
- In “Islamic International Humanitarian Law and the War Against ISIS in Iraq: Competing Interpretations and Legal Applications” (Manchester Journal of Transnational Islamic Law & Practice), Mohamad Janaby (Aberdeen University Law School) “examines the practical applicability of Islamic legal and ethical principles to the armed conflict with the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) by offering a comparative analysis of their interpretation and deployment by opposing Islamic actors.”
- In “Safeguarding Life as a Higher Objective (Maqṣad) in Islamic Law: The Prophetic Perspective on Paternal Retribution in Filicide and Its Application in the Jordanian Penal Code” (Manchester Journal of Transnational Islamic Law & Practice), Tamam Al-Assaf (University of Jordan) and others explore “the legal and societal complexities of parental filicide under Islamic law and the Jordanian Penal Code, framed within the higher objectives of Shari’ah, namely, the objective of the preservation of the soul (maqṣad ḥifẓ al-nafs).” [login required]
On Islam and AI/Data Science
- In “Understanding the Integration of Deep Learning and Artificial Intelligence in Quranic Education and Research through Bibliometric Analysis” (Educational Process), Andri Nirwana An (Universitas Muhammadiyah Surakarta) and others present “methodological insights for researchers interested in integrating AI and DL in religious research.”
- In “Modernising the Arbitration Industry: The Potential of an AI-Arbitration Legal Framework in Malaysia” (Manchester Journal of Transnational Islamic Law & Practice), Mohamad Fateh Labanieh (Universiti of Utara Malaysia) and others employ a “doctrinal legal research methodology to explore the feasibility of establishing a legal framework for AI-assisted arbitration.” [login required]
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 a new resource to this list:
The Islam West Africa Collection (IWAC), directed and developed by Frédérick Madore, is a collaborative, open-access digital database supported by the Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient (ZMO) and funded by the Berlin Senate Department for Science, Health and Care. Building on the success of the award-winning Islam Burkina Faso Collection launched in 2021, this repository features over 14,000 archival documents, newspaper articles (both scanned and online versions archived via the Wayback Machine), diverse Islamic publications, audio and video recordings, and photographs relating to Islam and Muslims in Burkina Faso, Benin, Niger, Nigeria, Togo, and Côte d’Ivoire.
Although the majority of the materials are in French, the Collection also includes items in Hausa, Arabic, Dendi, and English. It indexes more than 850 references—books, articles, chapters, theses, reports and blog posts—and applies optical character recognition (OCR) to each document. This approach, combined with detailed metadata tagging, enables efficient keyword searches and advanced multi-criteria queries. The IWAC also offers a comprehensive index of over 4,000 events, languages, locations, organisations, people, and topics.
UPCOMING EVENTS & OPPORTUNITIES
PIL & Harvard Events:
- 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
- Workshop: The Law and Humanities Workshop for Junior Scholars, University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School, June 8–9, 2026
PIL & Harvard Opportunities:
- Call for Submissions: Journal of Islamic Law, October 15, 2025
Other Opportunities:
- 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 Papers: The Law and Humanities Workshop for Junior Scholars, University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School, December 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
- Position Opening: Visiting Assistant Professor of Medieval Middle East, Colby College, July 1, 2026