SCHOLARSHIP ROUNDUP On Islamic Law In Mantle of the Sufi Kings: Political Sufism and the Rise of Early Modern Iran (Cambridge University Press), Hani Khafipour (State University of New York at Buffalo) "explores how loyalty, social cohesion, and…  SCHOLARSHIP ROUNDUP On Islamic Law - In Mantle of the Sufi Kings: Political Sufism and the Rise of Early Modern Iran (Cambridge University Press), Hani Khafipour (State University of New York at Buffalo) "explores how loyalty, social cohesion, and power dynamics found in Sufi thought underpinned the Safavid community's sources of social power and determination. Once in power, the Safavid state's patronage of art, literature, and architecture, turned Iran into a flourishing empire of culture, influencing neighboring empires including the Ottomans and Mughals. Examining the origin and evolution of the Safavid order, Mantle of the Sufi Kings offers fresh insights into how religious and sociopolitical forces merged to create a powerful Shi'i empire, with Iran remaining the only Shi'i nation in the world today."
- In "Islamic Dissent in a Dagestani Kolkhoz: a Research Note" (Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient), Shamil Shikhaliev (Austrian Academy of Sciences) and recent Islamic Law Blog Guest Editor Paolo Sartori (Austrian Academy of Sciences) argue that "the historiography of collectivization in the Muslim-majority regions of the USSR has grown considerably over the last decades and a scholarly consensus has coalesced around the idea that collective farms across the Caucasus and Central Asia served as a flexible infrastructure to preserve the integrity of Islamic institutions such as shrines and mosques, especially when said institutions existed and operated unofficially. With the preponderant weight of scholarly attention focused upon practices of adjustment to social changes, however, manifestations of dissent within the rural environment of kolkhozes have been largely neglected so far, even though in certain regions of the USSR collectivization was met by peasant resistance." They "address this shortcoming by offering a summary and textual edition of an original work of Islamic jurisprudence which disputes Soviet state ownership of the agricultural produce."
- In "The 'Lamp of Hind' in Cairo: How an Indian Jurist Became the Chief Hanafi Judge of the Mamluk Sultanate in the Fourteenth Century" (Al-ʿUṣūr al-Wusṭā), former PIL Research Fellow Sohaib Baig (University of California, Los Angeles) "explores scholarly exchange across the Arabian Sea in the fourteenth century with respect to Islamic law and "connects legal contexts from the Delhi Sultanate to the Cairo Sultanate and shows how the Sunni legal schools (madhhabs) and the recently emergent system of legal pluralism shaped transoceanic exchanges of scholarship. In particular, this article focuses on the career of Sirāj al-Dīn al-Hindī (d. 773/1372), an Indian scholar who traveled from Delhi via Mecca to Cairo, and then built an accomplished career that culminated with him as chief Hanafi judge in Cairo."
On Islam and AI/Data Science - In "HalalLLM vs. KosherLLM: When Abrahamic Scholars Confront Modern Questions through AI" (SSRN), Cantay Caliskan (University of Rochester) and others ask "What if you could ask a 12th-century philosopher about modern society? This study explores that possibility by resurrecting twelve of the most influential scholars in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam through the architecture of large language models (LLMs). We instructed three state-of-the-art models-GPT-4 Turbo, Qwen-Plus, and DeepSeek-R1-to role-play these historical figures, grounding their perspectives in their authentic writings using a retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) pipeline...A repeated-measures ANOVA confirmed that although the models' mean outputs were statistically indistinguishable, their median (F (2, 22) = 13.87, p < .001) and modal (F (2, 22) = 9.71, p < .001) responses were not, confirming that a scholar's ideas are represented differently across models (Hypothesis 4)....Furthermore, our findings indicate that models sometimes project a universalized worldview, with Islamic scholars' profiles aligning closer to the global average (t =-5.77, p < .0001)."
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 Archival Records from the Digitisation of Minangkabau's Manuscript Collections in Suraus contain more than 250 manuscripts from West Sumatra, Indonesia. "These manuscripts contain various texts such as Al-Qur'an, Al-Qur'an Translation (Tafsir), Tasawuf, Fiqh, Agiography (The Stories of the Saints), Arabic Grammar, Minangkabau Laws, Kaba, Hikayat, Nazam, Azimat, Letters and Medicine which hold important information for Minangkabau culture and Islamic history....The manuscripts are mostly written on European papers, some are written on traditional paper (Daluang) in the Arabic, Malay and/or Minangkabau language using Arabic or Perso-Arabic letters. They were written and copied in the 18th and 19th centuries."
UPCOMING EVENTS & OPPORTUNITIES PIL & Harvard Events: - Workshop: Arabic TEI (Textual Encoding Initiative), April 2–3, 2026
Global 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
Opportunities: - 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
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