SCHOLARSHIP ROUNDUP On Islamic Law Erin Braatz (Suffolk University Law School) recently reviewed Rabiat Akande's (University of Toronto) Entangled Domains: Empire, Law and Religion in Northern Nigeria (Cambridge University Press). The book "confr…
SCHOLARSHIP ROUNDUP
On Islamic Law
- Erin Braatz (Suffolk University Law School) recently reviewed Rabiat Akande's (University of Toronto) Entangled Domains: Empire, Law and Religion in Northern Nigeria (Cambridge University Press). The book "confronts a paradox: the state insisted on its separation from religion even as it governed its multireligious population through what remained of the precolonial caliphate. Entangled Domains grapple with this history to offer a provocative account of secularism as a contested yet contingent mode of governing religion and religious difference."
- Mahmut Polat (University of Minnesota) recently reviewed İlkay Yılmaz's (Freie Universität Berlin) Ottoman Passports: Security and Geographic Mobility, 1876-1908 (Syracuse University Press). The book "reconsiders the history of two political issues, the Armenian and Macedonian questions, approaching both through the lens of mobility restrictions during the late Ottoman Empire from 1876 to 1908. Yılmaz investigates how Ottoman security perceptions and travel regulations were directly linked to transnational security regimes battling against anarchism. The Hamidian government targeted “internal threats” to the regime with security policies that created new categories of suspects benefiting from the concepts of vagrant, conspirator, and anarchist. Yılmaz explores how mobility restrictions and the use of passports became critical to targeting groups including Armenians, Bulgarians, seasonal and foreign workers, and revolutionaries."
- In "Iran: It’s the Constitution!" (Small Wars Journal), Thomas J. Ward (HJ International Graduate School) observes that "should military action succeed in significantly degrading Iran’s defenses and a naval blockade further constrain its economic and industrial capacity, Iran – with a talented and highly educated population and an abundance of oil, natural gas, and mineral resources – can be expected to re-emerge as a regional power in the not-so-distant future following the conclusion of any conflict. While the United States and Israel have their thumbs on the scale in the kinetic dimension of the conflict, there is another dimension of this conflict that supersedes psychological profiling the actors seated in the musical chairs of Iranian leadership: the Constitution of the Islamic Republic of Iran."
On Islam and AI/Data Science
- In "Sacred or Synthetic? Evaluating LLM Reliability and Abstention for Religious Questions" (arXiv), Farah Atif (Mohamed Bin Zayed University of AI) and others "introduce a novel benchmark FiqhQA focused on the LLM generated Islamic rulings explicitly categorized by the four major Sunni schools of thought, in both Arabic and English. Unlike prior work, which either overlooks the distinctions between religious school of thought or fails to evaluate abstention behavior, we assess LLMs not only on their accuracy but also on their ability to recognize when not to answer."
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 "LATOC (Latin-transliterated Ottoman Turkish Corpus) includes 143 Ottoman Turkish books, 13,252,350 words, written between the 15th and 20th centuries. The books were transliterated by domain experts and publicly shared on the Internet. The books in the corpus were automatically structured via a rule‑based approach and manually checked."
UPCOMING EVENTS & OPPORTUNITIES
Events:
- 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
- Conference: The Institutional Embedding of Shiʿi Imams: Kinship, Caliphs, Courts and Companions (700-900), University of Leiden, January 13–15, 2027
Opportunities:
- Award: Global Dissertation Prize, American Society for Legal History, June 1, 2026
- Call for Papers: The Institutional Embedding of Shiʿi Imams: Kinship, Caliphs, Courts and Companions (700-900), University of Leiden, June 20, 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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