SCHOLARSHIP ROUNDUP On Islamic Law In "Intellectual Practice and Manuscript Culture in Early Islamic North Africa" (Al-ʿUṣūr al-Wusṭā), Clément Salah (University of Oxford ) "examines the figure of Abū al-ʿArab al-Qayrawānī (d. 333/94…
SCHOLARSHIP ROUNDUP
On Islamic Law
- In "Intellectual Practice and Manuscript Culture in Early Islamic North Africa" (Al-ʿUṣūr al-Wusṭā), Clément Salah (University of Oxford ) "examines the figure of Abū al-ʿArab al-Qayrawānī (d. 333/945) as a scribe-scholar in early Islamic North Africa, situating his manuscripts within the broader history of intellectual and material practices in Ifrīqiya." The article argues that "the material labor of copying was central to the formation and transmission of scholarly authority in Kairouan. More broadly, it demonstrates how the study of manuscript culture reshapes our understanding of scholarly practice and authority in the Islamic West."
- In "The Spirit of God’s Laws: The Diffusion of Distilled Liquors in the East Mediterranean Through Hanafi Normative Texts" (Der Islam), Marwan El-Asmar (independent scholar) suggests that the spreads of distilled liquors in Western Europe and East Asia were two independent phenomena since any transfer between the two regions should have been visible in the East Mediterranean before the 16th century" and "shows that several geographies located between Western Europe and East Asia, including the East Mediterranean, may have experienced a diffusion of distilled liquors originating from East Asia." [login required]
On Islam and AI/Data Science
- In "Implementation of a transformer-based question answering model in KutubBot for the Kutubut Tis’ah Hadith Corpus" (EPJ Web of Conferences), Ana Tsalitsatun Ni’mah (Universitas Trunodjoyo Madura) and others "develop an artificial intelligence-based chatbot, called kutubBot, to answer questions related to Kutubut Tis'ah. This system employs a Transformer-based Question Answering approach to comprehend user questions and provide relevant answers based on the hadith corpus. The research stages included data collection from nine hadith books, text preprocessing, model training, and performance evaluation using accuracy, precision, recall, and F1-score metrics."
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 Manuscripts of Arabic Handwriting (Muharaf) dataset is a "machine learning dataset consisting of more than 1,600 historic handwritten page images transcribed by experts in archival Arabic. Each document image is accompanied by spatial polygonal coordinates of its text lines as well as basic page elements. This dataset was compiled to advance the state of the art in handwritten text recognition (HTR), not only for Arabic manuscripts but also for cursive text in general. The Muharaf dataset includes diverse handwriting styles and a wide range of document types, including personal letters, diaries, notes, poems, church records, and legal correspondences. In this paper, we describe the data acquisition pipeline, notable dataset features, and statistics."
UPCOMING EVENTS & OPPORTUNITIES
PIL & Harvard Opportunities:
- Award: Alwaleed Bin Talal Doctoral Dissertation Prize, May 15, 2026
Global Events:
- 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
- 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:
- 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
- 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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