Weekend Scholarship Roundup

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SCHOLARSHIP ROUNDUP

On Islamic Law

  • In “Penchants of the polymaths” (Aeon), Mariam Sabri (Aga Khan University) argues for “the recovery of the penchants of polymathy that once thrived in the Muslim world.” Sabri makes this argument using the examples of four polymaths, concluding that “If al-Biruni, Alhazen, Avicenna and al-Khwarizmi could turn scarcity, captivity, patronage and instability into new ways of knowing, then breadth is the necessary preparation for the tremendous work ahead.”
  • Naureen Shariff (Blackfords LLP) offers a review of Hadi Enayat (London School of Economics and Political Science) and Mohamed M Keshavjee’s (Independent Scholar) Contemporary Trends in Sharia: Critical Debates in Historical Contexts (Bloomsbury) in in The Law Society Gazette. Shariff observes that “this study is a timely and valuable intervention in debates that are too often marked by anxiety, simplification and political heat rather than legal understanding.” Shariff concludes that the book “does not seek to romanticise sharia, nor does it offer easy recommendations…. For lawyers working in increasingly plural legal environments—whether in family law, mediation, public law or international practice—this is an intelligent and useful guide to a complex legal and ethical concept.”
  • In “The Islamic Ethics of Tax Evasion” (Interdisciplinary Journal for Religion and Transformation in Contemporary Society), Idris Nassery (University of Paderborn) “explores the ethical dimensions of taxation within Islamic thought, focusing on the interplay between divine command, legal reasoning, and political legitimacy.” Nassery “argues that Islamic fiscal ethics, far from being doctrinally rigid, offer a rich grammar for evaluating contemporary fiscal regimes, particularly in contexts marked by corruption, inequality, or institutional decay.”

On Islam and Data Science

  • In “YallaMorph: A Benchmark for Evaluating Arabic Morphological Generation in Large Language Models” (ArXiv), Mahmoud Reda (New York University Abu Dhabi) and others debut “YallaMorph, a large-scale benchmark for Arabic morphological generation covering verbs, nouns, adjectives, their cliticized forms, and invalid configurations.… [The] results show that Arabic morphological generation remains difficult, especially for cliticized, unseen, and morphologically rare forms.”

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:

  • “YallaMorph is a large-scale benchmark for evaluating the ability of Large Language Models (LLMs) to perform controlled Arabic morphological generation. Given an Arabic lemma, part-of-speech (POS), gloss, and a set of target morphosyntactic features, the task is to generate the corresponding fully diacritized Arabic surface form or forms. The benchmark also includes morphologically invalid feature configurations for which no valid form exists….The benchmark contains 663,804 evaluation instances across 4,795 sampled lemmas.”

UPCOMING EVENTS AND OPPORTUNITIES

  • Workshop: Archival Abundances and Silences in Islamic Studies, Princeton University, October 2–3, 2026
  • Conference: Middle East Studies Association Annual Meeting, Boston, MA, November 21–24, 2026
  • Conference: The Institutional Embedding of Shiʿi Imams: Kinship, Caliphs, Courts and Companions (700-900), University of Leiden, January 13–15, 2027
  • Conference: Rupture or Continuity in Sharīʿa: (De)Colonizing Sharīʿa? International Conference, Centre for Islamic Studies (ISAM), Istanbul, Turkey, June 9–11, 2027

Opportunities: 

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