SCHOLARSHIP ROUNDUP
On Islamic Law
- In “Spaces for Women in Mosques: Past, Present and Future” (Journal of Islamic Art and Architecture), Bernard O’Kane (American University in Cairo) “explores first the historical debates around the presence of women in mosques, and the extent, if any, to which these have been reflected in mosque design, past and present” and asks “What were the societal impulses that led to gender separation? What forms did these separated areas take? What are the architectural consequences of this separation?” [login required]
- In Corruption in the Ottoman Polity: Empirical Insights, Conceptual Reflections (Edinburgh University Press), editors Boğaç A. Ergene (University of Vermont) and Cengiz Kırlı (Boğaziçi University) bring together “essays that explore corruption and its manifestations in the Ottoman Empire through social, political, economic, legal and discursive approaches. . . . Combining theoretical analysis with detailed case studies, the volume also examines various corruption-related crimes and how they were regulated in the Ottoman polity across the early modern and modern periods.”
On Islam and Data Science
- In “Assessing Copilot’s Semantic Depth in Classical Arabic: A Mixed-Methods Evaluation Using Alfiyah ibn Malik and Nadham Al-Imrithy” (Lisania: Journal of Arabic Education and Literature), Nely Rahmawati Zaimah (Sekolah Tinggi Agama Islam Al-Anwar Rembang) and others “evaluated how accurately [Microsoft] Copilot interpreted and understood the advanced Arabic prose from the intricate works of Alfiyah ibn Malik and Nadham Al-Imrithy . . . using a mixed-method approach under the Collect-Measure-Repeat (CMR) framework of Responsible AI.”
- In “Determining the meter of classical Arabic poetry using deep learning: a performance analysis” (Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence), A. M. Mutawa ( Kuwait University) and Ayshah Alrumaih (University of Hamburg) utilized “a deep learning-based approach . . . to accurately determine the meter of Arabic poetry using TensorFlow and a large dataset” using “multiple deep learning architectures, including long short-term memory (LSTM), gated recurrent units (GRU), and bidirectional long short-term memory (Bi-LSTM).”
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:
- Dīwān, an association for French doctoral students working on the medieval and modern Islamic world, hosts a list of digitized manuscript catalogues. The collection currently includes libraries in the Czech Republic, England, Germany, the Netherlands, Serbia, and Spain.
UPCOMING EVENTS AND OPPORTUNITIES
PIL & Harvard Events:
- 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
PIL & Harvard Opportunities:
- Call for Applications: Berkman Klein Center Fellowship 2026 and 2026–2027, December 5, 2025 @11:59 pm
Other Events:
- 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
- Conference: Association for the Study of Law, Culture, and the Humanities Annual Conference, Chicago, June 17–18, 2026
Other Opportunities:
- Call for Papers: Muslims in AI, Imperial College London, November 16, 2025
- Call for Applications: The Abdallah S. Kamel Center at the Yale Law School for the Study of Islamic Law and Civilization 2026-2027 Research Fellowship, November 30, 2025
- Call for Papers: The Law and Humanities Workshop for Junior Scholars, University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School, December 1, 2025
- Position Opening: Tenure-track/tenured open-rank faculty appointments in Legal Studies, NYU Abu Dhabi, December 1, 2025 @11:59pm
- 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
- Call for Submissions: Fusayfsa’, the Smith College student-led Middle East Studies Journal, January 30th, 2026
- Call for Papers: Association for the Study of Law, Culture, and the Humanities Annual Conference, Chicago, January 31, 2026
- Position Opening: Visiting Assistant Professor of Medieval Middle East, Colby College, July 1, 2026