Weekend Scholarship Roundup

SCHOLARSHIP ROUNDUP On Islamic Law In "De-Europeanisation as Counter-conduct: The Case of Non-Muslim Religious Minorities in Turkey" (Romanian Journal of International Affairs 22, no. 2 (2022)), Serap Gunes (Masaryk University) "analyse[s] the dynamics through which the Turkish government seeks to uproot and reverse the Europeanisation in minority rights, and how this counter-conduct works in the … Continue reading Weekend Scholarship Roundup

An Experiment in Natural Language Processing, Machine Learning, and Islamic Law :: Part 2 ::

By Mairaj Syed Results I initially decided that I would divide up the Testimony chapter into 7-gram word fragments, because the original evidence canon consisted of seven Arabic words. This created a list of 38,683 7-gram fragments. Being ambitious and hoping to be lucky, I decided to send the google service 1000 texts at a … Continue reading An Experiment in Natural Language Processing, Machine Learning, and Islamic Law :: Part 2 ::

An Experiment in Natural Language Processing, Machine Learning, and Islamic Law :: Part 1 ::

  By Mairaj Syed Project Description and Goals As I briefly indicated in my previous blog post, a fundamental desideratum for the field of Islamic law and ethics is a corpus of texts whose argumentation has been fully mined: conclusions would be distinguished from premises, and the premises categorized according to type of argument. The … Continue reading An Experiment in Natural Language Processing, Machine Learning, and Islamic Law :: Part 1 ::

Canons (Qawāʿid) and Reasoning in Islamic Law and Ethics

By Mairaj Syed Although ethical thought is found in virtually every literary genre of Islamic civilization, it finds the most explicit articulation in works of adab (belles-lettres), akhlāq (virtue ethics), and fiqh (positive law).[1] There are a number of distinguishing features that make fiqh an rich repository of moral thought, especially useful for the types … Continue reading Canons (Qawāʿid) and Reasoning in Islamic Law and Ethics

A New Framework for the Analysis of Islamic Tradition-Bound Rationality

By Mairaj Syed My book Coercion and Responsibility in Islam seeks to organize the insights of the four conceptual approaches in the previous blog post into a coherent structure. It proposes an analytical framework that identifies and tracks the interactions of the key features that explain the content and historical development of concepts within technical … Continue reading A New Framework for the Analysis of Islamic Tradition-Bound Rationality

Four Conceptual Frameworks on Tradition-Bound Rationality

By Mairaj Syed Intellectual production in the premodern period was largely structured by belonging to a given, usually explicit and named, school. This was especially the case for theology and law. The school identities comprising these two disciplines of thought lasted many centuries, and at a minimum required a school-bound scholar to affirm a basic … Continue reading Four Conceptual Frameworks on Tradition-Bound Rationality

Al-Qarāfī’s collection of legal distinctions

By Mariam Sheibani Source: Al-Qarāfī, Shihāb al-Dīn. Kitāb al-furūq aw Anwār al-burūq fī anwāʿ al-furūq. 3rd ed. Edited by Muḥammad Sarrāj and ʿAlī Jumuʿa. 2 vols. Cairo: Dār al-Salām, 2010. General Description: This excerpt comprises the seventy eighth ‘legal distinction’ in Qarāfī’s collection of legal distinctions (furūq). Legal distinctions are a subset of legal maxims, … Continue reading Al-Qarāfī’s collection of legal distinctions

Scholarship in “Plain English”: Najm al-Din Yousefi on Ibn Al-Muqaffaʿ

By Sheza Alqera Atiq Citation: Yousefi, Najm al-Din. 2017. "Islam without Fuqahāʾ: Ibn Al-Muqaffaʿ and His Perso-Islamic Solution to the Caliphate's Crisis of Legitimacy (70–142 AH/690–760 CE)." Iranian Studies 50 (1): 9-44. doi:10.1080/00210862.2015.1073912. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00210862.2015.1073912. Summary:                                       Major … Continue reading Scholarship in “Plain English”: Najm al-Din Yousefi on Ibn Al-Muqaffaʿ