SCHOLARSHIP ROUNDUP On Islamic Law In "Integrating Energy Justice and Maqasid al-Shariah to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in Malaysia" (International Review of Law), former PIL Senior Research Fellow Wan Mohd Zulhafiz bin Wan Z…
SCHOLARSHIP ROUNDUP
On Islamic Law
- In "Integrating Energy Justice and Maqasid al-Shariah to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in Malaysia" (International Review of Law), former PIL Senior Research Fellow Wan Mohd Zulhafiz bin Wan Zahari (International Islamic University) and others explore "how the integration of energy justice and Maqasid al-Shariah can enhance Malaysia’s ability to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) by 2030. While energy justice emphasizes procedural, distributive, and recognition justice in energy policy, Maqasid al-Shariah provides a holistic Islamic legal framework that promotes the protection of faith, life, intellect, progeny, and property. By aligning these two frameworks, the study identifies gaps in Malaysia’s energy policies and SDG implementation, particularly in rural electrification, environmental protection, and social inequality. Through doctrinal legal analysis, the study finds that incorporating energy justice principles and Maqasid al-Shariah can significantly improve the fairness, equity, and sustainability of energy-related policies."
- In a recent podcast, Ahmed Almaazmi (Emirates University) interviews David S. Powers (Cornell University) and Eric Tagliacozzo (Cornell University): "The essays in Islamic Ecumene: Comparing Muslim Societies (Cornell UP, 2023) address the ways in which Muslims from Morocco to Indonesia and from sub-Saharan Africa to the steppes of Uzbekistan are members of a broad cultural unit....[The book] showcases ethics, education, architecture, the arts, modernization, political resistance, marriage, divorce, and death rituals. Using the insights and methods of historians, anthropologists, literary critics, art historians, political scientists, and sociologists, Islamic Ecumene seeks to understand Islamic identity as a dynamic phenomenon that is reflected in the multivalent practices of the more than one billion people across the planet who identify as Muslims."
On Islam and AI/Data Science
- In "HATFormer: Historic Handwritten Arabic Text Recognition with Transformers" (arXiv), Adrian Chan (independent scholar) and others "propose HATFormer, a transformer-based encoder-decoder architecture that builds on a state-of-the-art English HTR model. By leveraging the transformer's attention mechanism, HATFormer captures spatial contextual information to address the intrinsic challenges of Arabic script through differentiating cursive characters, decomposing visual representations, and identifying diacritics. Our customization to historical handwritten Arabic includes an image processor for effective ViT information preprocessing, a text tokenizer for compact Arabic text representation, and a training pipeline that accounts for a limited amount of historic Arabic handwriting data."
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 a new resource to this list:
- "Al-Muwatta AI is an Islamic knowledge platform specialized in Maliki jurisprudence, combining retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) with multiple LLM providers. Named after Imam Malik's foundational hadith compilation, the platform provides authenticated responses from classical Maliki texts."
UPCOMING EVENTS & OPPORTUNITIES
Global Events:
- Workshop: The Law and Humanities Workshop for Junior Scholars, University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School, June 8–9, 2026
- Conference: Association for the Study of Law, Culture, and the Humanities Annual Conference, Chicago, June 17–18, 2026
- Workshop: Association for Gulf and Arabian Peninsula Studies Graduate Student Workshop, July 25–26, 2026
- 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
Global Opportunities:
- Award: Global Dissertation Prize, American Society for Legal History, June 1, 2026
- Position Opening: Visiting Assistant Professor of Medieval Middle East, Colby College, July 1, 2026
- Call for Participation: Digital Medieval Studies Institute, International Medieval Congress, Leeds, UK, July 10, 2026
- Award: Gwenn Okruhlik Dissertation Award, Association for Gulf and Arabian Peninsula Studies, July 15, 2026
- Award: Graduate Paper Prize, Association for Gulf and Arabian Peninsula Studies, July 15, 2026
- Award: Student Travel Award, Association for Gulf and Arabian Peninsula Studies, September 1, 2026
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