SCHOLARSHIP ROUNDUP
On Islamic Law
- Jadaliyya interviewed Rosemary Admiral (University of Texas at Dallas) about Living Law: Women and Legality in Marinid Morocco (Syracuse University Press), “a history of how women encountered and navigated Islamic law in premodern Morocco.”
- In “Integrity of Qur’anic Legislations: A Critical Review of the Debate on Abrogation” (Comparative Islamic Studies), Ahmed Ali Salem (Zayed University) observes that “abrogation is claimed to be required to resolve alleged contradictions between legislations in the Qu’ran, the Prophet’s Sunna, or both.” He “critically reviews the debate on the abrogation claim in Arabic literature, both classical and modern—[a] debate that has important theological, legal and practical implications.” [login required]
On Islam and Data Science
- In “A Rule-Based System for Identifying Islamic Citation in LLM Outputs” (IslamicEval 2025), Fatimah Emad Eldin (Cairo University) “presents the Isnad AI system…which focuses on identifying character-level spans of Quranic verses (Ayahs) and Prophetic sayings (Hadiths) within Large Language Model (LLM) outputs….The primary contribution is a novel rule-based data preprocessing and augmentation pipeline, through which a large-scale, high-quality training corpus is systematically generated from raw religious texts. Through comprehensive ablation studies, it is demonstrated that the controlled synthetic data generation approach significantly outperforms traditional database lookup methods and basic fine-tuning approaches.”
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:
- “Farasa is the state-of-the-art full-stack package to deal with Arabic Language Processing. It has been developed by Arabic Language Technologies Group at the Qatar Computing Research Institute (QCRI), and has a RESTful Web API that you can use through your favorite programming language.”
UPCOMING EVENTS AND OPPORTUNITIES
PIL & Harvard Events:
- Workshop: Arabic TEI (Textual Encoding Initiative), April 2–3, 2026
PIL & Harvard Opportunities:
- Call for Applications: 2026–2027 PIL Research Fellowship, February 13, 2026
Global Events:
- Conference: Association of American Law Schools (AALS) Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA, January 6–9, 2026
- Conference: Faith, Values, and the Rule of Law—An Interdisciplinary Conference, Seton Hall University School of Law, February February 4–5, 2026
- Conference: AI Methodologies and Applications in Middle Eastern and Islamic World Studies, Kuwait University, February 4–5, 2026
- Conference: American Society for Premodern Asia Annual Meeting, Los Angeles, CA, April 24–27, 2026
- Conference: Middle East History and Theory Conference (MEHAT), University of Chicago, May 1–2, 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
Global Opportunities:
- Call for Applications: Lilly Scholar in Residence Short-term Fellowship for Technology & African and Middle Eastern Religious Cultures, Library of Congress, January 9, 2026
- Call for Applications: Keyman Modern Turkish Studies Postdoctoral Fellowship, Northwestern University, January 26, 2026
- Call for Submissions: Fusayfsa’, the Smith College student-led Middle East Studies Journal, January 30, 2026
- Call for Papers: Association for the Study of Law, Culture, and the Humanities Annual Conference, Chicago, January 31, 2026
- Call for Papers: 40th Annual Middle East History and Theory Conference (MEHAT), University of Chicago, January 31, 2026
- Call for Papers: Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies (MEIS) Graduate Student Virtual Symposium, University of Alberta, February 2, 2026
- Position Opening: Visiting Assistant Professor of Medieval Middle East, Colby College, July 1, 2026