SHARIAsource events

Speaker: Mariam Sheibani, PhD Candidate, University of Chicago Mariam Sheibani surveys the terminological and conceptual evolution of maxims in Shāfiʿī legal literature from the founding of the school in the ninth century to the emergence of maxim treatises in the fourteenth century. Examining this evolution not only provides a history of maxims without gaps, but it … Continue reading ILSP Lunch Talk :: A History Without Gaps: Legal Maxims and the Evolution of Islamic Law

Sharon Tai, SHARIAsource Deputy Editor and Ali Hashmi, former MIT Media Lab Fellow, use natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning techniques to build a taxonomy of entities for SHARIAsource’s collection of cases of Islamic law in U.S. Courts, including cases of family law and religious accommodation. From there, comparison of state courts with overall … Continue reading ILSP Lunch Talk :: Research Methods: Studying Court Narratives through Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing

Ahmed El Shamsy, Visiting Fellow, ILSP: SHARIAsource, Harvard Law School will delve into the seemingly frivolous issue of male grooming practices to shed light on how the early Muslim community positioned itself and its law vis-a-vis the Jews and Jewish law. Ahmed El Shamsy (PhD Harvard, 2009) is an associate professor of Islamic thought at the … Continue reading ILSP: SHARIAsource Lunch Talk :: Hair and Identity in Islamic and Jewish Law: Uncovering an Unlikely Link

The universality and coherence of modern international is increasingly challenged by technical fragmentation and identity-driven claims to particularity. This talk critically examines both the historical contribution of Islamic law to the regulation of international relations and whether relations with and between Islamic nations are in fact different. How to meet the justified demand for greater … Continue reading ILSP: SHARIAsource Lunch Talk :: Islamic Challenges to the Universality of International Law

Ebrahim Afsah, Visiting Fellow, ILSP: SHARIAsource, Harvard Law School, will discuss his current research on a structured comparison between waqf and the Western institution of landed trust and the implications for Islamic administrative and public law. Mediterranean lunch will be served.

Early Islamic political theory as it enjoyed currency among the scholarly classes alternated between two possibilities: legal functionalism and political anthropology.  Critical to our understanding of these intellectual trends and their conceptual contours is an understanding of a "theoretical turn" in early Islamic thought which created the preconditions for a theory of power, and the … Continue reading ILSP: SHARIAsource Lunch Talk :: Early Islamic Political Theory Between Legal Discourse and Political Anthropology

Amir Toft's talk profiles the education and career of a judge who served for one year around 1580 as judge in the court of Üsküdar, one of the districts of Istanbul. His name and titles—Mevlana Ibrahim Çelebi Efendi el-Galatavi—are known to us only through their appearance in the court register for that year. Apart from … Continue reading ILSP Lunch Talk :: A Gentleman and a Scholar: Profile of an Ottoman Judge in the Late Sixteenth Century