SCHOLARSHIP ROUNDUP
On Islamic Law
- In Slavery and the Shaping of the Muslim Family (De Gruyter), Cristina de la Puente (Instituto de Lenguas y Culturas del Mediterráneo), Karen Moukheiber (University of Balamond) and Serena Tolino (University of Bern) delve “into the wide-ranging and complex subject of slavery within the familial sphere of Islamic societies. For too long, secondary literature has treated the family and slavery as separate domains, overlooking the ways in which enslaved individuals were deeply embedded in domestic life. Contemporary research increasingly recognises that the presence and participation of slaves within households were crucial to the formation of both family structures and broader social frameworks in the Islamic world. Bringing together the work of distinguished historian-philologists specialising in diverse regions of the Islamic world, the book examines this theme through a variety of genres – including Islamic jurisprudence, literature, and mysticism.”
- In “Systematic Analysis of Inheritance Rights of Khuntha (Simple Hermaphrodite) and Khuntha Mushkil (Problematic Hermaphrodite) under Islamic Law and Pakistani Legal System” (Manchester Journal of Transnational Islamic Law & Practice), Haseeb Fatima Saikhu and Rasham Armab Saikhu (independent scholars) “analyse the inheritance rights of khuntha and khuntha mushkil under Islamic law and the Pakistani legal system” including via an examination of “the relevant provisions of the Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Act, 2018 (Pakistan), as well as judicial decisions.”
- In “The Taliban Legal System and the 2026 Criminal Procedural Regulations” (Princeton School of Public and International Affairs Blog), Hanifa Girowal (Princeton University Afghanistan Policy Lab) examines the recently enacted “Criminal Procedural Regulations for Courts, which sets out the framework of their criminal justice system” and argues that “more than four years after returning to power, the Taliban have failed to establish a coherent legal system grounded either in Islamic principles of justice or in modern legal norms centered on human dignity.”
On Islam and Data Science
- In “Is Lying Only Sinful in Islam? Exploring Religious Bias in Multilingual Large Language Models Across Major Religions” (arXiv), Kazi Abrab Hossain (BRAC University) and others “introduce BRAND: Bilingual Religious Accountable Norm Dataset, which focuses on the four main religions of South Asia: Buddhism, Christianity, Hinduism, and Islam, containing over 2,400 entries, and we used three different types of prompts in both English and Bengali. Our results indicate that models perform better in English than in Bengali and consistently display bias toward Islam, even when answering religion-neutral questions. These findings highlight persistent bias in multilingual models when similar questions are asked in different languages.”
- A podcast on “Artificial Intelligence (AI) in African and Islamic Studies” explores “how artificial intelligence is transforming research practices: How can AI support historical and anthropological research—and where are its limits? And how might AI change the future of the humanities—opening up new possibilities while also raising pressing questions about language equity, digitisation gaps, and academic responsibility?” The episode features a conversation with Frédérick Madore (ZMO Berlin), who “is developing the Islam West Africa Collection—an open-access digital archive of more than 14,500 documents on Islamic print culture and Muslim life in West Africa.”
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 Saiful Bahri Collection contains “digital images of 23 manuscripts owned by Saiful Bahri of Lambunot, Besar Regency. The manuscripts contain texts on a range of topics, including Islamic law, Sufism, theology, history and fiction, in prose and poetic form; the manuscripts date from the 17th to the 20th century” in Achinese, Arabic, and Malay.
UPCOMING EVENTS AND OPPORTUNITIES
PIL & Harvard Events:
- Islamic Law Speaker Series: Ihsan Yilmaz (Deakin University), “Sharia as Informal Law: Lived Experiences of Young Muslims in Western Societies,” March 10, 2026 @ 12:30pm
- Workshop: Middle East Beyond Borders—Cem Turkoz, “An Edifice of Super-Glosses: The Making of an Ottoman Tradition of Natural Philosophy, 1650–1800,” March 23, 2026 @ 6:15pm
- Islamic Law Speaker Series: Sherman Jackson (University of Southern California), “The Islamic Secular,” April 7, 2026 @ 12:30pm
- Workshop: Arabic TEI (Textual Encoding Initiative), April 2–3, 2026
- Workshop: Middle East Beyond Borders—Amadu Kunateh, “Footnote to Ghazali: Philosophy Without Falsafa in West African Intellectual Archive,” April 6, 2026 @ 6:15pm
- Workshop: Middle East Beyond Borders—Djelemory Diabate, “Closing the Sufi Age: Authority, Finality, and Political Theology in Umar al-Futi Tal’s Kitab Rimah,” April 20, 2026 @ 6:15pm
Global Events:
- Presentation: Lutforahman Saeed—God’s Law, Man’s Rule: Debating Women’s Right to Health from Sacred Texts to the Taliban, March 2, 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: UCLA Center for Near Eastern Studies Graduate Student Colloquium: The Visual Culture of Algeria Through Exchange, Circulation, and Global Networks, February 27, 2026
- Call for Nominations: American Society of Comparative Law Book Prize, March 1, 2026
- Call for Applications: Orient-Institut Beirut Residential Postdoctoral Fellowship, March 1, 2026
- Call for Contributions: Middle East Medievalists Newsletter, March 1, 2026
- Call for Papers: Kathryn T. Preyer Scholars Program, American Society for Legal History, April 1, 2026
- Language School: Persian Language Summer School, Armenian School of Languages and Cultures, Yerevan, Armenia, May 1, 2026
- Call for Participation: Digital Medieval Studies Institute, International Congress on Medieval Studies, Western Michigan University, May 13, 2026
- Position Opening: Visiting Assistant Professor of Medieval Middle East, Colby College, July 1, 2026
- Call for Participation: Digital Medieval Studies Institute, International Medieval Congress, Leeds, UK, July 10, 2026