SCHOLARSHIP ROUNDUP On Islamic Law In "Religious Elites and the Management of Islamic Affairs in Sarawak: A Mixed Scorecard" (Fulcrum), Mohd Faizal Musa (ISEAS–Yusof Ishak Institute) argues that "political rather than religious authority still …  SCHOLARSHIP ROUNDUP On Islamic Law - In "Religious Elites and the Management of Islamic Affairs in Sarawak: A Mixed Scorecard" (Fulcrum), Mohd Faizal Musa (ISEAS–Yusof Ishak Institute) argues that "political rather than religious authority still calls the shots in multi-religious Sarawak."
- In "Ahmad al-Sharaa Is Building the State Abu Mohammed al-Golani Promised" (Lawfare), Sara Harmouch (H9 Defense) argues that the "new Syrian government is consolidating power in the hands of the president while privileging Sunni religious institutions and marginalizing competing centers of authority."
- In "Iran's ruling structure explained" (The Conversation), Eric Lob (Florida International University) Although the supreme leader possesses disproportionate power, he is not the single authority. Instead, he is one of several positions and institutions through which the Islamic Republic's 47-year-old regime organizes its ruling structure....[His article includes] a rundown of how each of these entities functions and interacts with one another."
On Islam and AI/Data Science - In "Syllable Structures Across Arabic Varieties" (ACL Anthology), Abdelrahim Qaddoumi (NYU Abu Dhabi) and others investigate "the syllable structures of nine Arabic varieties from Wiktionary, using a computational syllabifier....A cross-variety analysis using Jensen-Shannon divergence reveals three principal groupings: Egyptian, Hejazi, and Modern Standard Arabic are closely related; Levantine and Gulf varieties constitute a second cluster; and Juba Arabic, Maltese, and Moroccan emerge as outliers. A cleaned dataset encompassing all nine varieties is also provided."
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: - Bahadin H. Kerborani's (University of Chicago) "Short Introduction to Kurdish Online Resources" compiles a list of "online primary and secondary Kurdish resources and collections that might make knowledge and sources more accessible" to researchers.
UPCOMING EVENTS & OPPORTUNITIES PIL & Harvard Events: - Islamic Law Speaker Series: Sherman Jackson (University of Southern California), "The Islamic Secular," April 7, 2026
- Workshop: Manuscripts to Megabytes: Evolving Editorial Practices and Challenges in Arabic Manuscripts from the Premodern to the Digital Age with Sabine Schmidtke, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, April 2, 2026
- Workshop: Arabic TEI (Textual Encoding Initiative), April 2–3, 2026
- Workshop: The BADR Project (7th-21st c.): A TEI-XML Analysis of Premodern Islamic Texts and Beyond with Adrien de Jarmy, April 3, 2026
- Workshop: Middle East Beyond Borders—Amadu Kunateh, "Footnote to Ghazali: Philosophy Without Falsafa in West African Intellectual Archive," April 6, 2026
- 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
Global Events: - 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
- Fellowship: MESA 2026–2027 Global Academy, April 16, 2026
- Language School: Persian Language Summer School, Armenian School of Languages and Cultures, Yerevan, Armenia, May 1, 2026
- Summer School: Philology and Manuscripts from the Muslim World, Leiden University, May 4, 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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