SCHOLARSHIP ROUNDUP On Islamic Law In a recent podcast, Amanie Antar (University of Toronto) interviews Gijs Kruijtzer (independent scholar): "How do people justify what others see as transgression? Taking that question to the Persian-Muslim and …
SCHOLARSHIP ROUNDUP
On Islamic Law
- In a recent podcast, Amanie Antar (University of Toronto) interviews Gijs Kruijtzer (independent scholar): "How do people justify what others see as transgression? Taking that question to the Persian-Muslim and Latin-Christian worlds over the period 1200 to 1700, Justifying Transgression: Muslims, Christians, and the Law (de Gruyter, 2023) shows that people in both these worlds invested considerable energy in worrying, debating, and writing about proscribed practices. It compares how people in the two worlds came to terms with the proscriptions of sodomy, idolatry, and usury."
- In "Archival Practices and the Codex: A Mamlūk Protocol on Regulating Markets in Damascus and Its Ottoman Afterlife" (Der Islam), Konrad Hirschler (University of Hamburg) and others explore the "intersection of archival practices, material philology, and administrative documentation in late Mamlūk and early Ottoman Damascus through an in-depth analysis of the codex as a site for document preservation. Challenging earlier assumptions about the absence of archival institutions and documentation in pre-Ottoman West Asia and North Africa, the authors propose a tripartite framework – transmediation, translocation, and book-born documents – to conceptualize the integration of documentary texts and artefacts into codices as a strategy of preservation. Using the case of a 15th-century shurūṭ formulary housed in the Süleymaniye Library (Istanbul), the study focuses on transmediated text added as paracontent by the Damascene judge ʿAbd al-Qādir ibn Mufliḥ al-Ḥanbalī." [login required]
On Islam and AI/Data Science
- In "The Affective Algorithm: Mapping the Emotional Architecture of Fatimid Geniza Petitions (Part 1)" (Digital Orientalist), Abdulqadir Haidermota (Aljamea-tus-Saifiyah) observes that, "for the historian of the Mediterranean, Geniza documents are rightly celebrated for their detailed preservation of the material world—offering up the price of flax, the lineage of a merchant, or the date of a decree." His study asks "what happens when we treat these formulaic expressions not as background noise, but as structured data points—patterns that might reveal an emotional logic beneath the surface, allowing for the visualisation of a constitutive underlying architecture that isolated close reading often misses."
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:
- "Ptolemaeus Arabus et Latinus (PAL) is dedicated to the edition and study of the Arabic and Latin versions of Ptolemyʼs astronomical and astrological texts, and related material. These include works by Ptolemy or attributed to him, commentaries thereupon, and other works that are of immediate relevance to understanding Ptolemy’s reception and legacy in the Middle Ages and the early modern period up to 1700 AD." PAL currently contains over 400 Arabic manuscripts.
UPCOMING EVENTS & OPPORTUNITIES
PIL & Harvard Opportunities:
- Award: Alwaleed Bin Talal Doctoral Dissertation Prize, May 15, 2026
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:
- Call for Participation: Digital Medieval Studies Institute, International Congress on Medieval Studies, Western Michigan University, May 13, 2026
- 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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