SCHOLARSHIP ROUNDUP
On Islamic Law
- In Litigating Subjects: Algerian Women, Local Courts, and the Making of Colonial Law (Stanford University Press), Sarah Ghabrial (Concordia University) “examines the activities of Algeria’s Muslim courts to reveal how Algerian subjects both incorporated and subverted colonial legal authorities and thereby exploited the tensions of the colonial state.”
- In “Harmonizing Criminal Law with Islamic Ethics, Economic Justice, and Legal Education: A Comparative Analysis of Selected OIC Countries” (Natural Resources for Human Health), Mohammad Nasr Khater (Applied Science Private University) and others develop “an Integrated Criminal Law Harmonization Framework, consisting of four interconnected pillars: Islamic Ethical Governance, Economic Justice Policies, Modern Criminal Law Reform, and Transformative Legal Education. The proposed framework provides a comprehensive model for reducing crime, strengthening the rule of law, improving judicial legitimacy, protecting human rights, and promoting sustainable development while accommodating the constitutional and legal diversity of OIC member states.”
On Islam and Data Science
- In “Digital Eschatology in Islamicate Traditions: a Comparative Study of Inter-Religious Prophecies” (Journal of Digital Islamicate Research), Mohammed Qasim Khan (University of Malaya) suggests that “AI-produced religious texts tend to support conventional theological doctrines and, at the same time, allow the emergence of novel links between Islamic, Christian and Jewish apocalypticism.” [login required]
- In “Artificial Intelligence in Islamic Guidance: Assessing Chatbot Performance and Jurisprudential Adherence” (Journal of Digital Islamicate Research), Soleh Hasan Wahid (Institut Agama Islam Negeri Ponorogo) “recommends collaboration between Islamic scholars and AI developers to create epistemologically grounded systems.”
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:
- Call for Papers: Legal Research & Analysis, September 29, 2026
- Call for Papers: Trends in Intellectual Property Research, September 30, 2026