SCHOLARSHIP ROUNDUP On Islamic Law In an episode of Unlocking Academia, "host Raja Aderdor speaks with Dr. Mutaz Al-Khatib, Associate Professor at the Research Center for Islamic Legislation and Ethics and Director of the Master's program in A…  SCHOLARSHIP ROUNDUP On Islamic Law - In an episode of Unlocking Academia, "host Raja Aderdor speaks with Dr. Mutaz Al-Khatib, Associate Professor at the Research Center for Islamic Legislation and Ethics and Director of the Master's program in Applied Islamic Ethics at Hamad Bin Khalifa University. Together, they explore Key Classical Works on Islamic Ethics (Brill, 2024), a groundbreaking edited volume that brings together foundational texts spanning hadith, fiqh, kalam, Sufism, and Islamic medicine."
- In "Reassessing the Family Waqf: New Insights on the Relation Between Family, Wealth, and Islamic Doctrine," Eirik Hovden (University of Bergen) and Dominik Krell (University of Oxford ) introduce a special issue of the Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient. The issue makes three interventions: "the family waqf is alive," "much of what we believe to know about the family waqf has been shaped by the specific Ottoman experience," and "the family waqf is not necessarily a patriarchal institution."
On Islam and AI/Data Science - In "IslamTrust: A Benchmark for LLMs Alignment with Islamic Values" (Muslims in Machine Learning), Abderraouf Lahmar (Eötvös Loránd University) and others observe that the "alignment of most Large Language Models (LLMs) to broad, often non-Islamic ethical principles creates a significant gap for users from specific cultural and religious backgrounds. LLMs used within Muslim communities for Islamic Q&A should be based on Islamic ethics, derived from scholarly consensus. A standardized benchmark that can evaluate this is currently absent; hence, this work introduces IslamTrust, a novel, multilingual benchmark that is designed to evaluate the alignment of LLMs with consensus-based Islamic ethical principles across Sunni schools of thought."
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: - "M-Classi is a new digital tool in the field of knowledge organization. It is conceived primarily as a means of cataloging and interrogating the classifications of the sciences in Islam and those of the cultures with which the Islamicate world came into contact from antiquity to the pre-modern era. Practically, M-Classi is focused by priority on Arabic, Persian, and Turkish classifications, but for comparative purposes it also integrates taxonomies in languages such as Syriac, Greek, Latin, or Hebrew."
UPCOMING EVENTS & OPPORTUNITIES PIL & Harvard Events: - Workshop: Middle East Beyond Borders—Giovanni DiRusso, "The Textual Tradition of the Arabic Apocalypse of Peter: Variance and Adaptation in a Christian Arabic Apocalypse," February 23, 2026 @ 7:15pm
- Islamic Law Speaker Series: Ihsan Yilmaz (Deakin University), "Sharia as Informal Law: Lived Experiences of Young Muslims in Western Societies," March 10, 2026 @ 12:30pm
- 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
- 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 Applications: Kamel Center Senior Postgraduate Fellowship, Yale Law School, February 20, 2026
- Call for Papers: Comparative Law Work-in-Progress Workshop, Princeton University, February 20, 2026
- Call for Proposals: UCLA Center for Near Eastern Studies Graduate Student Colloquium: The Visual Culture of Algeria Through Exchange, Circulation, and Global Networks, February 27, 2026
- Call for Applications: Orient-Institut Beirut Residential Postdoctoral Fellowship, March 1, 2026
- Call for Papers: Kathryn T. Preyer Scholars Program, American Society for Legal History, April 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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