By SHARIAsource Lab*
The SHARIAsource Courts & Canons (CnC) Annotation Suite leverages data science tools to explore questions in Islamic law and society historically through mapping the controversies and values reflected in courts (from taʾrīkh, ṭabaqāt) and legal canons (qawāʿid fiqhiyya). We experiment with ways in which the data science tools we are developing at SHARIAsource can aid in that research.
This semester, we continued our efforts to identify and map Islamic legal canons in the SHARIAsource Lab's project on "Courts and Canons (CnC)." Led by Professor Intisar Rabb, the Lab brings together legal scholars, data scientists, and students to build and use tools that facilitate research on our growing collection of data on the practice of courts and the use of legal canons (qawāʿid fiqhiyya) in Islamic law and society, historically. Our close reading helps structure the data and garner insights now, and it will inform the new models to come that enable AI-powered research and text analysis on interpretation in Islamic law.[1] To that end, one of our Lab's key tools is a CnC Annotation Suite—a set of tools that allow researchers to identify, label, and otherwise annotate Islamic legal canons. This year's cohort of Lab members includes 15 students from Harvard and Princeton, who have been diligent at work in digital annotation and further research, and—in the process—learning about the structure of Islamic law, which we share through the following collection of their 2024 Lab Reports.
Figure 1. The Growth of the Courts & Canons Database, 2024
This figure highlights the growth of the canons database over the last year. Each dot represents a single legal canon and each line represents an annotated relationship between them. As lab members annotate each canon with associated data about categories and relationships, the dots get larger. The annotations added by the Fall 2024 Lab members are highlighted in yellow. Annotations of the set of five key canons that we selected and tracked as representative of most canons[2] appear in red. Together, these annotations enable us to map whole networks of legal canons to eventually see how they apply differently in diverse contexts and thus inform research on historical or thematic trends in Islamic law.
To unpack what we are doing: First, what are the legal canons we have been annotating? Islamic legal canons are "principles of interpretation that jurists and judges use in Islamic law in ways that parallel the canons of construction so prominent in American textualism in questions of legislation and statutory interpretation." Although legal canons emerged with the start of Islamic law in the 7th century CE, to build a database of legal canons for the Lab, we extracted the canons from the sizeable corpus of fourteenth- and fifteenth-century "canons collections, Islamic law treatises, and other recent sources."[3] In the Lab, the primary task this semester has been using our canons-tracking search tools with an eye to tracing Islamic legal canons (qawāʿid fiqhiyya) as memes across various works of history and law, exploring new methods for categorizing and understanding legal canons.[4]
Next, how did lab members go about the task of annotating and commenting on these canons? They joined one of two groups. Some lab members were hard at work this term analyzing and annotating thousands of canons using our Canons Tagging tool to tag canons across 5 main categories of legal canons (organized according to function) and some 13 legal fields and 900+ legal subfields (masāʾil, drawn from the chapter headings of an aggregated set of treatises of Islamic law, or fiqh works). Other Lab members deployed our Variants Matching tool to identify and pair (or disambiguate) canons in our database that were drawn from multiple canons collections. This tagging and matching/unmatching work not only informs users about nuances that jurists brought to the interpretation of Islamic legal texts; it also will help engineers train a text analytics tool to speed up such work in the future by automatically recognizing and suggesting variants and categories to increasingly high degree of alignment with researcher's intuitions (to be confirmed by individual researchers).
Over the course of the past year, Lab members have worked to identify and annotate our collection of over 4,500 Islamic legal canons. The results? First, Lab members have been able to meaningfully annotate most of these canons. Second, we have been able to translate or transliterate well over half of the canons in efforts of making them more accessible to comparative law and other non-specialist scholars (as well as to train a model in translation and annotation). Third, and most promising for new research avenues, we have been able to observe from the canons annotations many otherwise hidden facts about the distribution and function of canons in Islamic law over the past millennium. The following graphics show how.
To date, over 94% of the canons in our database have been annotated—beginning with canon categories that speak to the function that the canons perform: Most are substantive canons or textual canons (aka interpretive canons), which match the basic categories of legal canons in American statutory Interpretation. In addition, they fit into categories of procedural canons, governance canons, and structural canons that we have identified for Islamic law.[5] 56% of the canons have been tagged with Islamic legal fields—ranging from ritual law; contracts; and the law of sales to family law; the law of endowments and wills, trusts, and estates; and criminal law. Approximately 29% of the collection has been tagged with more specific legal subfields, such as ṭahāra (ritual purity), ṣalāt (prayer), and zakāt (poll tax). These categories, legal fields, and subfields will allow "us to classify and assess legal canons in ways that better account for their historical significance, broader range, and varied functions—that is, the ways in which canons have been deployed in Islamic law and society over time."[6]
Figure 2: Annotated Legal Canons, SHARIAsource Lab (Dec 2024)
This figure highlights the number and percentage of canons from our that have been completed by our Lab this past year. The first row displays the number of canons that have been tagged in our collection of 4,518 canons. The bright red circle reflects the super-category of total number of canons tagged, followed by three sub-categories displaying how many canons have been tagged with categories, legal fields, and legal subfields, respectively. The second row displays the number of canons that have been translated (in blue), transliterated (in yellow), titled (in green), and that have been matched as being related (in purple).
In addition to the results above, Lab members used the CnC Variants Matcher to identify and pair (or otherwise disambiguate) 40% of the canons as variants of one another. They were able to navigate through the varied "canons clusters," which refers to canons that our tool tentatively groups according to the way they appear in the canons collections. These clusters provide starting points for identifying each canon variant—defined as a "form or version of a canon that differs in wording but not meaning from another canon."[7]
To visualize the work, consider the work of a single researcher navigating canons over this last year. The below image highlights varied canon categories by the function they play in legal interpretation and constructing institutions, bottom up. And it offers a sense of how many canons relate to other canons and remain within or cut across different canon categories.
Figure 3: Canon Categories by Function, SHARIAsource Lab (Dec 2024)
Specifically, this image highlights relationships between canon categories, where each canon is represented as a point around a circle, grouped by their primary category (for canons with multiple categories, we determined a primary category). Each line represents a labelled relationship between two canons. What might appear as a short line is actually a relationship between two canons within the same category. As expected, most variant-type relationships are intra-categorical. However, cross-categorical links appear as well. These inter-categorical relationships between canons may point to shifts in how judges and jurists applied certain canons over others, or how they interpreted particular substantive canons in contexts of procedure as opposed to case resolutions.
Figure 4: Canons Clusters by Variant, SHARIAsource Lab (Dec 2024)
In the figure below representing clusters of canons, each bar represents a single Islamic legal canon in our collection and all of its known variants. The red bars denote a set of five canons that we tracked as representative of most canons in the full collection. The bars get longer as researchers identify additional variants. Notably, these canons clusters are only a small subset of the canons in our database (namely, canons with five or more identified variants). Understanding the variations in formulas that each legal canon adopts and adapts over time can help researchers determine whether and how judges and jurists use a particular canon in practice, whether and how its usage changed over time, and whether and how judges and jurists differed in their references to the canons when applying them in contexts of theory or practice.
One notable outcome of the Lab work this term has been that researchers identified several common patterns and themes within Islamic legal canons. For example, many legal canons do not fit neatly into a single category, reflecting their multifaceted nature. Some canons take on have multiple meanings or apply to several legal fields, requiring researchers to make difficult decisions about how to classify each canon. Furthermore, student researchers have been able to identify instances when the same or similar legal canons appear in different works, revealing how these principles were expressed, applied, or interpreted across various contexts. This task involves not only finding identical or near-identical wording of canons but also tracing broader connections between related canons.
In sum, the SHARIAsource Lab work with the CnC Annotation suite of tools this year have facilitated discovery of both clear and subtle differences in legal canons, allowing for a deeper understanding of how Islamic legal canons evolve across texts. We are simultaneously enriching the metadata of our corpus of primary sources by adding biographical, geographical, contextual, and citational information to each source. Our goal is to complete working through this list of canons while ingesting more canons from other available sources toward building a comprehensive and structured database of canons. In the end, the work in the Lab will bring new insights on the frontiers of digital Islamic legal studies and comparative statutory interpretation.
In the coming weeks, the Islamic Law Blog will publish Lab Reports from its student members this term, to highlight their work in more detail. Stay tuned for the series.
Notes:
* This essay was prepared by the SHARIAsource Lab, with contributions from Intisar Rabb, Abtsam Saleh and Noah Tashbook.
[1] These tools, in development, include web applications that we refer to as SHARIAsource-Analytics, SHARIAsource-Metadata, and SEARCHstrata–all of which feed into our annotation tools for Islamic legal canons: the CnC Annotation Suite.
[2] These canons are (1) the universal certainty canon: al-yaqīn lā yazūlu biʾl-shakk: certainty is not superseded by doubt; (2) the evidence canon: al-bayyina ʿalā al-muddaʿī waʾl-yamīn ʿalā man ankar (or: ʿalā muddaʿā ʿalayh): evidence is the burden of proof for the petitioner, and an oath of denial for the respondent; (3) the judicial knowledge canon: istiʿmāl ʿilm al-qāḍī jā'iz (or: wājib): it is legal (or obligatory) to rely on judicial knowledge as evidence; (4) the property possession canon: qāʿidat al-yad [al-milk li-man yaqbuḍ fī yadih]: the property possession canon: ownership goes to the one who has property in his possession; (5) the doubt canon: idraʾū al-ḥudūd biʾl-shubahāt: avoid criminal punishments in cases of doubt. See Intisar Rabb, "Islamic Legal Canons as Memes," Islamic Law Blog, February 28, 2021, https://islamiclaw.blog/2021/03/03/islamic-legal-canons-as-memes/.
[3] Ibid.
[4] Ibid.
[5] Ibid.
[6] Ibid.
[7] Intisar Rabb, "Canon Variant Types," Program in Islamic Law, January 24, 2024 (updated January 25, 2024) (internal working document).
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