Weekend Scholarship Roundup

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SCHOLARSHIP ROUNDUP

On Islamic Law

  • In “What Do Sources Say about Agricultural Slavery (and Why Don’t They Say More)? A Study on Legal Sources for Early Islamic Ifrīqiya” (Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient), Antonia Bosanquet (Utrecht University) “examines the evidence for agricultural slavery in early Islamic Ifrīqiya and relates it to the existing historiography on the topic. [She] argues that legal texts, which are used more than other sources to understand slavery and slave labor, are of limited value for understanding agricultural slavery and that references in other text genres should be given more weight.”
  • In “Enforcement Matters: How Nigeria’s Sharia Reform Created Winners and Losers” (World Bank Blogs), Hardi Ahmed (University of Alicante) observes that “child nutrition improved across West Africa from 1990 to 2018. Ghana, Senegal, and Côte d’Ivoire reduced stunting to about 17 to 21 percent. Southern Nigeria followed the same path. Northern Nigeria did not.” He argues that “the answer to this peculiar health crisis lies in an institutional reform that transformed criminal justice across 12 northern states. In January 2000, Zamfara State adopted Sharia Penal Codes (SPC), transferring criminal jurisdiction from secular to Islamic courts. Within months, 11 other states followed.”
  • In “Shari’ah Appraisal of Juvenile Justice System Act 2018” (LLM thesis), Mujeeb ur Rahman (International Islamic University) “examines the juvenile justice framework in Pakistan with specific focus on the Juvenile Justice System Act (JJSA) 2018 in light of Islamic Sharīʿah principles. [He] evaluates whether the Act, which aims to protect and rehabilitate children in conflict with the law, aligns with Islamic teachings and Pakistan’s constitutional requirement to enforce laws consistent with Sharīʿah. The study addresses core issues such as the definition of a juvenile, the age of criminal responsibility, rehabilitation, and diversionary practices.”

On Islam and Data Science

  • In “Context-Aware Extraction of Quranic References: A Hybrid Language Model- and Rule-Based Approach” (Muslims in Machine Learning Workshop), Alireza Sahebi (Sharif University of Technology) and others observe that “large language models (LLMs) often generate hallucinated or inaccurate Quranic content, highlighting the importance of tools capable of verifying and correcting such outputs.” They present “a multi-layered tool for extracting Quranic expressions from arbitrary input text. A central challenge in this task lies in distinguishing between intentional references and incidental lexical overlap with Quranic text. The proposed tool combines an Arabic language model with rule-based techniques to achieve high precision and contextual understanding. The language model identifies expressions likely intended as Quranic references, effectively filtering out irrelevant matches.”

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:

  • The Haji Nurdin Ismail digitized manuscript collection contains nine eighteenth–twentieth century manuscripts in Arabic and Malay, including works of fiqh and tafsīr, currently housed in Sumatra, Indonesia.

UPCOMING EVENTS AND OPPORTUNITIES

PIL & Harvard Events: 

  • Workshop: Arabic TEI (Textual Encoding Initiative), April 2–3, 2026

PIL & Harvard Opportunities: 

Global Events: 

  • Book Talk: How Commerce Became Legal: Merchants and Market Governance in Nineteenth-Century Egypt by Omar Youssef Cheta (Syracuse University), January 21, 2026 @ 7:00pm
  • 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: Annual Meeting of the Medieval Academy of America, Amherst, MA, March 19–21, 2026
  • Conference: Humanities of AI—Intelligence and Imitation: Mind, Mechanism, Mimesis, Johns Hopkins University, April 24-26, 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
  • Conference: Middle East Studies Association Annual Meeting, Boston, MA, November 21–24, 2026

Global Opportunities: 

  • Call for Proposals: 2026 Sponsored Event Program, American Society of Comparative Law, January 20, 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: Humanities of AI Workshop—Intelligence and Imitation: Mind, Mechanism, Mimesis, Johns Hopkins University, January 31, 2026
  • Call for Papers: Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies (MEIS) Graduate Student Virtual Symposium, University of Alberta, February 2, 2026
  • Call for Panels: Middle East Medievalists at MESA 2026, February 12, 2026
  • Call for Papers: Middle East Studies Association Annual Meeting, Boston, MA, February 17, 2026
  • Call for Applications: Kamel Center Senior Postgraduate Fellowship, Yale Law School, February 20, 2026
  • Call for Papers: Comparative Law Work-in-Progress Workshop, Princeton University, February 20, 2026
  • Position Opening: Visiting Assistant Professor of Medieval Middle East, Colby College, July 1, 2026 

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