SCHOLARSHIP ROUNDUP On Islamic Law Arabica 74, no. 4–5 is a special issue coordinated by recent Islamic Law Blog guest editors Eirik Hovden (University of Bergen) and Mahmood Kooria (University of Edinburgh) on "The Muḫtaṣar and Its Role i…  SCHOLARSHIP ROUNDUP On Islamic Law - Arabica 74, no. 4–5 is a special issue coordinated by recent Islamic Law Blog guest editors Eirik Hovden (University of Bergen) and Mahmood Kooria (University of Edinburgh) on "The Muḫtaṣar and Its Role in the Islamic Legal Schools." The issue includes the below articles.
- In "Al-Muḥaqqiq al-Ḥillī (d. 676/1277) and His al-Muḫtaṣar al-Nāfīʿ" (Arabica), Robert Gleave (University of Exeter) examines "first the muḫtaṣar in the Twelver Šīʿī legal tradition, then al-Muḫtaṣar al-Nāfiʿ and its contents, and finally...give[s] an assessment of its impact and reception history."
- In "A Ḥanafī muḫtaṣar in Context: Abū l-Barakāt al-Nasafī's (d. 710/1310) Kanz al-daqāʾiq" (Arabica), Katharina Ivanyi (University of Vienna) "examines Abū l-Barakāt al-Nasafī's (d. 710/1310) Kanz al-daqāʾiq, one of the most important epitomes of Ḥanafī fiqh. Widely commented upon, from the immediate post-Mongol period, into the early modern and modern eras, al-Nasafī's muḫtaṣar represents one of the fundamental teaching texts of the Ḥanafī maḏhab to this day. The article will situate Nasafī's muḫtaṣar in the particular context of its composition, as well as within the wider historical framework of the development of Ḥanafī doctrine in the so-called 'post-classical' era."
- In "An Unexpected Member of the Mālikī muḫtaṣars list: Tuḥfat al-ḥukkām by Abū Bakr Muḥammad Ibn ʿĀṣim (Granada 760/1359-829/1426)" (Arabica), Delfina Serrano Ruano (Institute for Languages and Cultures of the Mediterranean and the Near East) "addresses a work titled Tuḥfat al-ḥukkām fī nukat al-ʿuqūd wa-l-aḥkām ("A gift for judges", book on delicate details of legal documents and judgments). Also known as al-ʿĀṣimiyya, this is a compilation of Mālikī legal maxims condensed in 1698 verses in raǧaz metre by the Andalusi scholar Abū Bakr Muḥammad b. Muḥammad b. Muḥammad Ibn ʿĀṣim (Granada 760/1359-829/1426). Apart from arguing why [she] think the Tuḥfa can be treated as a muḫtaṣar[, her] aim is to expand our present understanding of the historical and intellectual context of its emergence in Nasrid Granada and its reproduction in the form of commentaries and super-commentaries elsewhere in the Islamic realm. . . .In the Appendix[, she] provides the English translation of a section of the Tuḥfa dealing with the crime of rape. This is followed by examples of how this text relates to some earlier Mālikī treatments of rape, on the one hand, and of how some later commentators of the Tuḥfa addressed the import of this section."
- In "The Conservative Legacy of Ibn al-Murtaḍā (d. 840/1436-37) in the Zaydī Legal Maḏhab: a Study of His Codification Project in Kitāb al-Azhār" (Arabica), Ebrahim Mansoor (University of Bergen) argues that "Kitāb al-Azhār emerged following an expansion of Zaydī legal literature, characterized by extensive plurality. In Kitāb al-Azhār, the author sought to codify Zaydī law by reducing plurality to a single legal ruling for every case. He then presented the selected rulings in a systematic, concise, and coherent sequence, separated only by the conjunctive wa ("and"). In doing so, he followed a conservative approach, adhering to a particular selection of legal rulings drawn from traditional Zaydī sources. The article explores Kitāb al-Azhār's background, authorship, and reception in an effort to shed light on the process of codification in the Zaydī maḏhab (school of law)."
On Islam and AI/Data Science - In "Can LLMs Write Faithfully? An Agent-Based Evaluation of LLM-generated Islamic Content" (Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems), Abdullah Mushtaq (Information Technology University) and others—including former PIL Fellow Ezieddin Elmahjub (Qatar University)—observe that "large language models are increasingly used for Islamic guidance, but risk misquoting texts, misapplying jurisprudence, or producing culturally inconsistent responses." They "pilot an evaluation of GPT-4o, Ansari AI, and Fanar on prompts from authentic Islamic blogs. [Their] dual-agent framework uses a quantitative agent for citation verification and six-dimensional scoring (e.g., Structure, Islamic Consistency, Citations) and a qualitative agent for five-dimensional side-by-side comparison (e.g., Tone, Depth, Originality).
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: - Al-Azhar University provides free access to issues of Majallat al-Azhar as downloadable PDFs. The collection currently spans issues published between 1349 and 1435 AH (1931 and 2013 CE).
UPCOMING EVENTS & OPPORTUNITIES PIL & Harvard Events: - Workshop: Arabic TEI (Textual Encoding Initiative), April 2–3, 2026
PIL & Harvard Opportunities: Other Events: - Conference: Faith, Values, and the Rule of Law—An Interdisciplinary Conference, Seton Hall University School of Law, February February 4–5, 2026
- Conference: American Society for Premodern Asia Annual Meeting, Los Angeles, CA, April 24–27, 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
Other Opportunities: - Call for Applications: The Abdallah S. Kamel Center at the Yale Law School for the Study of Islamic Law and Civilization 2026-2027 Research Fellowship, November 30, 2025
- Position Opening: 4-year postdoc, Centre for Near and Middle Eastern Studies, University of Marburg, November 30, 2025
- Call for Papers: The Law and Humanities Workshop for Junior Scholars, University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School, December 1, 2025
- Position Opening: Tenure-track/tenured open-rank faculty appointments in Legal Studies, NYU Abu Dhabi, December 1, 2025 @11:59pm
- Call for Submissions: Journal of Trends in Intellectual Property Research, Volume 3, Issue 2, December 29, 2025
- Call for Submissions: Journal of Legal Research & Analysis, Volume 3, Issue 2, December 29, 2025
- Call for Submissions: Fusayfsa', the Smith College student-led Middle East Studies Journal, January 30th, 2026
- Call for Papers: Association for the Study of Law, Culture, and the Humanities Annual Conference, Chicago, January 31, 2026
- Call for Papers: Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies (MEIS) Graduate Student Virtual Symposium, University of Alberta, February 2, 2026
- Position Opening: Visiting Assistant Professor of Medieval Middle East, Colby College, July 1, 2026
| | | |
No comments:
Post a Comment