SCHOLARSHIP ROUNDUP
On Islamic Law
- “John Tolan’s Islam: A New History from Muhammad to the Present (Princeton University Press) offers a sweeping account of Islam’s evolution, highlighting influential figures, sectarian divisions, and global expansion. Though it lacks in-depth exploration of some claims and underplays Sufi contributions to the religion’s development, Haider Ali [Jamia Millia Islamia] finds it an engaging and rich study.”
- In “Cancellation of Marriage due to Fraud Related to Deviant Sexual Orientation As Referred to in the Compilation of Islamic Law and Marriage Law” (Nomoi Law Review), Putri Giofani Br Lubis (Universitas Sumatera Utara) and others argue that “many marriages have been annulled due to deception by one of the partners regarding their sexual orientation. In principle, Indonesian positive law has regulated the annulment of marriage in Article 27 of the Marriage Law and Article 72 of the Compilation of Islamic Law. An annulment request can be submitted if one of the parties feels confused or has experienced an error regarding the identity of the partner….In the Islamic perspective, an annulment of marriage caused by the inequalities of the partners in fulfilling the requirements and pillars of marriage will be considered invalid; however, a marriage annulled due to deviation remains valid under positive law.”
On Islam and AI/Data Science
- In “Islamiclegalbench: Evaluating LLMs Knowledge and Reasoning of Islamic Law Across 1,200 Years of Islamic Pluralist Legal Traditions” (arXiv), Ezieddin Elmahjub (Qatar University) and others observe, “As millions of Muslims worldwide turn to LLMs like GPT, Claude, and DeepSeek for religious guidance, a critical question emerges: Can these AI systems reliably reason about Islamic law? This paper introduces IslamicLegalBench, the first multi-school benchmark for evaluating LLM performance across a broad range of Islamic jurisprudence (fiqh). Drawing from 38 foundational legal texts spanning 1,200 years and seven schools of jurisprudence, we create 718 evaluation instances across 13 tasks, manually collected and organized by complexity, from basic recall to sophisticated reasoning including legal rationale identification (‘illah), analogical application (qiyās), and cross-school synthesis.”
- In “QV finder: an accurate Quran verse finder system” (Indonesian Journal of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science), Bashar Al-Rfooh (University of Jordan) and others “present QV finder, an artificial intelligence (AI)-powered system that utilizes a fine- tuned whisper-based automatic speech recognition (ASR) model specifically trained on diverse Quranic recitations for the whole Quran. In this paper, we present a robust pipeline for Quranic verse retrieval that bridges the gap between ASR technology and domain-specific linguistic complexity. The model supports both professional and normal reciters, even under noisy conditions.”
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:
- “Whisper-Small-Quran is a fine-tuned version of OpenAI’s Whisper-Small model specialized for Quranic recitations in Arabic. It’s part of the QV Finder project — a research system for AI-powered Quran verse transcription and retrieval. Unlike general ASR systems, this model captures Tajweed-influenced pronunciations, regional recitation styles, and noisy real-world recordings, achieving high accuracy across both professional and normal reciters.”
UPCOMING EVENTS & 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
- Roundtable: Knowledge in the Islamic Court, Program in Islamic Law, Harvard Law School, April 16, 2026
- 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:
- 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 Papers: Kathryn T. Preyer Scholars Program, American Society for Legal History, April 1, 2026
- Fellowship: 2026 ARIT Fellowships for Research in Turkey, American Research Institute in Turkey, 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