SCHOLARSHIP ROUNDUP On Islamic Law In "Beyond the Secular Binary: Bargaining with God in Modern Constitutions" (International Society of Public Law Blog), Ali Shirvani (Northwestern University) observes that "few questions have haunted modern con…  SCHOLARSHIP ROUNDUP On Islamic Law - In "Beyond the Secular Binary: Bargaining with God in Modern Constitutions" (International Society of Public Law Blog), Ali Shirvani (Northwestern University) observes that "few questions have haunted modern constitutional theory as persistently as the relationship between divine authority and popular sovereignty. While this tension is a global phenomenon present in various religious traditions, it has acquired a particular urgency in the context of the Muslim world, where the role of the sacred in public life remains a central site of political contestation....To understand the future of governance in the Muslim world, we must move beyond asking whether Islam is compatible with democracy and instead examine how societies constitutionally negotiate faith, power, and modern statehood."
- In "God's Law, Man's Rule: Debating Women's Right to Health from Sacred Texts to the Taliban" (Video—Middle East Studies Association Global Academy), Lutforahman Saeed (Birgham Young University Law School) "discussed women's right to healthcare in Islamic law, outlining its foundations in the Qur'an, the Prophet's Sunnah, and the core objectives of Sharia, and examining how these principles compare with the Taliban's restrictive policies on women's access to medical education and healthcare services."
On Islam and AI/Data Science - In "BALSAM: A Platform for Benchmarking Arabic Large Language Models" (ACL Anthology), Rawan Al-Matham (King Salman Global Academy For Arabic Language) and others "introduce BALSAM, a comprehensive, community-driven benchmark aimed at advancing Arabic LLM development and evaluation. It includes 78 NLP tasks from 14 broad categories, with 52K examples divided into 37K test and 15K development, and a centralized, transparent platform for blind evaluation. [They} envision BALSAM as a unifying platform that sets standards and promotes collaborative research to advance Arabic LLM capabilities."
- In "Evaluating Arabic Large Language Models: A Survey of Benchmarks, Methods, and Gaps" (arXiv), Ahmed Alzubaidi (Technology Innovation Institute, Abu Dhabi) and others "the first systematic review of Arabic LLM benchmarks, analyzing 40+ evaluation benchmarks across NLP tasks, knowledge domains, cultural understanding, and specialized capabilities. We propose a taxonomy organizing benchmarks....[Their] analysis reveals significant progress in benchmark diversity while identifying critical gaps: limited temporal evaluation, insufficient multi-turn dialogue assessment, and cultural misalignment in translated datasets. We examine three primary approaches: native collection, translation, and synthetic generation discussing their trade-offs regarding authenticity, scale, and cost."
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: - "Arabic LLM Benchmarks" is a comprehensive GitHub repository "of Arabic LLMs benchmarks and evaluation benchmarks, curated from systematic research on evaluating Arabic Large Language Models" and organized into four categories:
- Knowledge includes benchmarks evaluating acquired knowledge and reasoning capabilities, along with domain-specific benchmarks in fields such as law and medicine.
- Natural Language Processing (NLP) encompasses early task-specific benchmarks and comprehensive multi-task benchmarks, reflecting the evolution from narrow task evaluation to unified assessment across diverse dialects and domains.
- Culture and Dialects groups benchmarks assessing cultural knowledge and dialect understanding, addressing the essential property of cultural awareness in Arabic LLMs.
- Target-Specific covers benchmarks designed to assess particular LLM properties such as safety, hallucination detection, instruction-following, and vision capabilities.
UPCOMING EVENTS & OPPORTUNITIES PIL & Harvard Events: - Workshop: Middle East Beyond Borders—Cem Turkoz, "An Edifice of Super-Glosses: The Making of an Ottoman Tradition of Natural Philosophy, 1650–1800," March 23, 2026 @ 6:15pm
- Islamic Law Speaker Series: Sherman Jackson (University of Southern California), "The Islamic Secular," April 7, 2026 @ 12:30pm
- Workshop: Arabic TEI (Textual Encoding Initiative), April 2–3, 2026
- Workshop: Middle East Beyond Borders—Amadu Kunateh, "Footnote to Ghazali: Philosophy Without Falsafa in West African Intellectual Archive," April 6, 2026 @ 6:15pm
- Roundtable: Knowledge in the Islamic Court, Program in Islamic Law, Harvard Law School, April 16, 2026
- Workshop: Middle East Beyond Borders—Djelemory Diabate, "Closing the Sufi Age: Authority, Finality, and Political Theology in Umar al-Futi Tal's Kitab Rimah," April 20, 2026 @ 6:15pm
Global Events: - Conference: Annual Meeting of the Medieval Academy of America, Amherst, MA, March 19–21, 2026
- Conference: Humanities of AI—Intelligence and Imitation: Mind, Mechanism, Mimesis, Johns Hopkins University, April 24–26, 2026
- Conference: American Society for Premodern Asia Annual Meeting, Los Angeles, CA, April 24–27, 2026
- Conference: Middle East History and Theory Conference (MEHAT), University of Chicago, May 1–2, 2026
- 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
- Conference: Middle East Studies Association Annual Meeting, Boston, MA, November 21–24, 2026
Global Opportunities: - Call for Papers: Kathryn T. Preyer Scholars Program, American Society for Legal History, April 1, 2026
- Fellowship: 2026 ARIT Fellowships for Research in Turkey, American Research Institute in Turkey, April 1, 2026
- Language School: Persian Language Summer School, Armenian School of Languages and Cultures, Yerevan, Armenia, May 1, 2026
- Call for Participation: Digital Medieval Studies Institute, International Congress on Medieval Studies, Western Michigan University, May 13, 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
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