SCHOLARSHIP ROUNDUP
On Islamic Law
- Mohammad Fadel (University of Toronto) offers a critical review of Sherman A. Jackson's The Islamic Secular in a recent issue of the Turkish Journal of Islamic Studies. Fadel characterizes Jackson's central concept as a modality of secularity internal to the Islamic tradition that, unlike its Western counterpart, does not devalue religion but instead sustains Islamically-inflected worldly flourishing. Summarizing the book's two parts—an intellectual history of the secular and the ḥukm concept in Islamic jurisprudence, followed by Jackson's critique of Wael Hallaq, Abdullahi An-Na'im, and Andrew March—Fadel appreciates the work's conceptual richness while raising several objections: the unclear capacity of the Islamic secular to mediate pluralism under modern state conditions; Jackson's underappreciation of fiqh's own disciplinary function toward religion (e.g., its aversion to bid'a); the difficulty of adapting a Western-derived category of "the secular" to Islamic thought; Jackson's failure to draw on the ʿibādāt/muʿāmalāt distinction, which could have bolstered his thesis; an oscillation in Jackson's treatment of siyāsa's relationship to sharīʿa; the historically contingent, rather than essential, nature of empire-state legal pluralism; and the possibility that modern legal monism is a functional requirement for collective action and equality of citizenship. Fadel closes by engaging Jackson's critique of Andrew March and his skepticism toward Rawlsian public reason, suggesting that Jackson's own position may be more Rawlsian than he acknowledges.
- Sherman A. Jackson's (University of Southern California) replies to Mohammad Fadel's critical review of his book The Islamic Secular here (Turkish Journal of Islamic Studies). Jackson argues that Fadel's review is shaped by a prior set of ideological commitments—centered on the normative status of the modern secular democratic state and legal monism, mediated through Rawlsian political liberalism—which causes the book's actual thesis to be displaced by Fadel's preferred narrative. Proceeding page by page, Jackson reaffirms that the "Islamic Secular" rests on the shar'ī/non-shar'ī distinction, a mode of differentiation rooted in classical and post-formative Islamic juristic tradition rather than an import from Western secularism, and that it does not seek to curtail religion's scope but simply demarcates non-shar'ī domains as equally Islamic. The article addresses, in turn, Fadel's objections concerning the relationship between siyāsa and sharī'ah, the historical viability of empire-state legal pluralism, the distinction between "formal equality" and "equality of respect," the jurispathic tendencies of the modern state, and Jackson's critique of Andrew March's treatment of liberal democracy, contending that Fadel's readings consistently import Rawlsian presuppositions that obscure rather than clarify the book's central argument.
On Islam and AI/Data Science
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:
- "The Special Collections Division of The University of Manchester Library holds a collection of nearly 15,000 fragments from the Genizah of the Ben Ezra Synagogue in Old Cairo. They were purchased from the estate of Dr Moses Gaster in 1954. They are mostly written in Hebrew, Judeo-Arabic, and Arabic but there are also a few Judeo-Spanish, French, and Coptic items and a Yiddish (B 6619) and an Ottoman Turkish piece (Ar. 400). About 90% of the items are on paper, the remainder on parchment. Most of them are manuscripts but there are printed texts too....The fragments cover a wide range of topics including religious and literary texts, documentary sources, letters, and material relating to grammar, philosophy, medicine, astrology, and astronomy. The Gaster Genizah Collection is divided into more than a dozen series, that have been digitised or catalogued to various degrees."
UPCOMING EVENTS & OPPORTUNITIES
Events:
- 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
- Conference: The Institutional Embedding of Shiʿi Imams: Kinship, Caliphs, Courts and Companions (700-900), University of Leiden, January 13–15, 2027
- Conference: Rupture or Continuity in Sharīʿa: (De)Colonizing Sharīʿa? International Conference, Centre for Islamic Studies (ISAM), Istanbul, Turkey, June 9–11, 2027
Opportunities:
- Award: Student Travel Award, Association for Gulf and Arabian Peninsula Studies, September 1, 2026
- Call for Papers: Legal Research & Analysis, September 29, 2026
- Call for Papers: Trends in Intellectual Property Research, September 30, 2026
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