SCHOLARSHIP ROUNDUP On Islamic Law In The Logic of al-Fanari: A Study and Annotated Translation of al-Fanari's Commentary on the Isaghuji (Lockwood Press), former PIL Fellow Aaron Spevack (Brandeis University) "delves into the 15th-century logic…  SCHOLARSHIP ROUNDUP On Islamic Law - In The Logic of al-Fanari: A Study and Annotated Translation of al-Fanari's Commentary on the Isaghuji (Lockwood Press), former PIL Fellow Aaron Spevack (Brandeis University) "delves into the 15th-century logic text by Shams al-Din al-Fanari (d. 1431), a foundational work in the Ottoman seminary tradition. Rather than offering a standard annotated translation alone, Spevack also provides an in-depth analysis of each chapter, enriched with references to multiple super-commentaries and practical examples. Drawing from years of study under scholars trained in the Ottoman tradition along with personal research, he highlights the text's significance in the Islamic logic tradition and its philosophical depth."
- In The Form and Function of Legal Qurʾān Commentaries (Brill), Scott C. Lucas (University of Arizona) offers "the first Western-language study of a legal Qurʾān commentary and the first examination of a Zaydī tafsīr. It proposes an original framework for classifying legal passages of the Qurʾān based on Sayyid Muḥammad b. al-Hādī's (d. 720/1320) Qurʾān commentary, The Garden and the Pool. It shows that the legal Qurʾān commentary format can serve both as a teaching tool and as a platform for a Muslim jurist to demonstrate his legal expertise. This book includes a critical edition of Muḥammad b. al-Hādī's interpretation of the Sūra of Light based on a manuscript written by the author himself."
On Islam and AI/Data Science - In "Linear to Table, Table to Linear" (KITAB Project Blog), Lorenz Nigst (Aga Khan University) uses the KITAB Project's diff viewer to examine text reuse across two manuscripts "containing a short narrative involving Muḥammad Khawārazmshāh...[on] dream interpretation."
- In "Lemmatization as a Classification Task: Results from Arabic across Multiple Genres" (arXiv), Mostafa Saeed (New York University Abu Dhabi) and Nizar Habash (New York University Abu Dhabi) observe that "Lemmatization is crucial for NLP tasks in morphologically rich languages with ambiguous orthography like Arabic, but existing tools face challenges due to inconsistent standards and limited genre coverage." Their paper "introduces two novel approaches that frame lemmatization as classification into a Lemma-POS-Gloss (LPG) tagset, leveraging machine translation and semantic clustering....[R]esults show that classification and clustering yield more robust, interpretable outputs, setting new benchmarks for Arabic lemmatization."
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 KITAB Project's Diff Viewer is "an application that allows you to see the differences between two related pieces of text...[and] can be used with any two (relatively short) pieces of related text." "Contrary to most other diff viewers, it is geared towards comparing texts rather than code, especially texts from the OpenITI corpus and text reuse data created by passim." For more information on how to use the tool, see here.
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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