SCHOLARSHIP ROUNDUP On Islamic Law In “Can Muslim Women Become Muftis? The Forgotten Legacy of Muslim Women Scholars” (India Tomorrow), Syed Khalique Ahmed (India Tomorrow) considers the questions “Can a Muslim woman become a mufti? Can she…
SCHOLARSHIP ROUNDUP
On Islamic Law
- In “Can Muslim Women Become Muftis? The Forgotten Legacy of Muslim Women Scholars” (India Tomorrow), Syed Khalique Ahmed (India Tomorrow) considers the questions “Can a Muslim woman become a mufti? Can she guide Muslims on matters of Sharia? Can she contribute to the fields of Islamic jurisprudence and law, or conduct educational sessions attended by both men and women?” Ahmed reviews Dr. Muhammad Akram Nadwi’s (University of Oxford) Tazkara-e-Faqeehaat (Hidayat Publishers and Distributors) highlighting the book as “the book a valuable resource for both academic researchers and general readers interested in the intellectual contributions of Muslim women” though it lacked “women scholars who, although they have not received formal education in Islamic seminaries or studied Islamic subjects as part of their academic curriculum, have acquired substantial knowledge through self-study and are making equally valuable, and in some cases even greater, contributions to Islamic scholarship.”
- In “Abdel Karim Zidan: The jurist who codified Islamic law and founded a legal school” (Noonpost) Marwan Aljabouri (Noonpost) details the life of Abdel Karim Zidan Bahij al-Ani, “a legal scholar, academic, and theorist of Islamic governance whose work significantly shaped Islamic jurisprudence and legal thought across the Arab East and the wider Muslim world for decades.”
- In “Taha Jabir Al-Alwani: The Jurist of the “Two Readings” and the Quest for Renewed Knowledge” (Noopost) Marwan Aljabouri (Noonpost) chronicles the life of Dr Taha Jabir Al-Alwani, "a prominent figure who combined methodological authenticity with an aspiration to reform the contemporary Muslim’s cognitive framework, beginning nearly two centuries ago, to raise questions of modernity and the relationship between religion, life, and the world.”
On Islam and AI/Data Science
- In “Introducing Text Evaluation using LabelStudio” (KitLab) Mathew Barber (Aga Khan University's Institute for the Study of Muslim Civilisations) and Peter Verkinderen (Aga Khan University's Institute for the Study of Muslim Civilisations) introduce the KITAB-Transform project focused on “training language models to identify ‘transformative’ text reuse (such as paraphrase and translation) in the OpenITI corpus.” The project utilizes training data to “indicate whether a pair of passages is an example of a specific transformation (“paraphrase”, “translation”), so that the model can learn to distinguish these categories.”
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 KITAB corpus is the Arabic subcorpus of the Open Islamicate Texts Initiative (OpenITI)...a multi-institutional effort to create not only a scientifically curated and open corpus of Islamicate (mainly Arabic and Persian) texts compliant with international data standards, accompanied by scholarly metadata and representative of the diversity of historic traditions but also a full digital text production pipeline. To date, the KITAB corpus comprises more than 10,200 text files plus their corresponding metadata files."
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:
- Position Opening: Department of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, October 21, 2026
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