SCHOLARSHIP ROUNDUP
On Islamic Law
- In Preaching Pious Rulership in Medieval Islam: Ibn al-Jawzi’s Political Thought (Edinburgh University Press), Han Hsien Liew (Arizona State University) “studies the relationship between political thought, preaching and emotions through the writings of Ibn al-Jawzi (d. 1201), a celebrated hortatory preacher in late Abbasid Baghdad. Through an intertextual analysis of Ibn al-Jawzi’s works in various genres, this book details how his ideal form of rulership reflected the emotional norms and pietistic moral virtues promoted in Muslim hortatory sermons. It also examines the emotional strategies deployed in his efforts to reform the rulers of his time. In highlighting the importance of piety in Ibn al-Jawzi’s political discourses, the book points to a new reading of the history of Islamic political thought that, rather than foregrounding order and military prowess, considers competing political languages among medieval Muslim intellectuals. In doing so, it calls for the need to rethink notions of ‘politics’ and the ‘political’ when studying Islam.”
- In “Literal Meaning and Oaths in Medieval Islamic Legal Thought” (MIDÉO), Robert Gleave (University of Exeter) explores the “ways in which notions of literal meaning intersect with Islamic legal literature…by drawing examples from a single work of Muslim jurisprudence (the Kitāb al-ḫilāf of Muḥammad ibn al-Ḥasan al-Ṭūsī, d. 460/1067) and a specific area of Islamic law (from the subsection Kitāb al-aymān—the law regarding oaths and vows). In some ways, any work of classical Muslim jurisprudence and any area of Islamic law could have been selected for these purposes. al-Ṭūsī ’s work, though, is a convenient choice because the author compares the different ways in which language and law interact across the various schools. The legal discussion around oaths, as we shall see, involves a number of linguistic issues in which the role the literal meaning plays can be highlighted.”
On Islam and Data Science
- In “Beyond Keywords: AI-Mediated Access to the Islam West Africa Collection through an MCP Server and Agent Skill” (Eighth Conference on Digital Humanities and Digital History), Frédérick Madore (University of Bayreuth) observes that “over the past two years, AI has transformed the development of the Islam West Africa Collection (IWAC), an open-access database of over 14,500 documents covering Muslim public life in six West African countries. Built and maintained by a single researcher without dedicated staff, IWAC now relies on LLMs for tasks that would otherwise require a full team: from OCR on degraded scans to named entity recognition. This paper turns to the next challenge: using AI not only to help process the collection, but to mediate access to it.”
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 McGill Library’s Islamic Lithographs digital collection started with a selection of sixteen Arabic lithographed books, which were physically displayed in the Islamic Studies Library between February 1st and September 30th 2014. The digitization of Islamic lithographs at McGill is now a work in progress, and this digital collection is therefore a continually updated resource. Visitors can browse the collection by country of publication or language. All books are accessible full text, either in PDF on the McGill website, or using the online reader of the Internet Archive.” As of 2026, the collection includes more than 300 titles.
UPCOMING EVENTS AND OPPORTUNITIES
- 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:
- Position Opening: Assistant or Associate Professor, History, University of California at Berkeley, October 15, 2026
- Position Opening: Assistant Professor in the Pre-Modern History of the Islamicate Middle East or Central Asia, University of Chicago, October 19, 2026
- Position Opening: Department of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, October 21, 2026