SCHOLARSHIP ROUNDUP On Islamic Law In "Women, Violence, and Law: A Critical Analysis of Women's Rights in Afghanistan," (Mapping Futures for Afghanistan, ed. Arif Saba et al, Routledge), Nazifa Haqpal (School of Oriental and African Studies) "cri…
SCHOLARSHIP ROUNDUP
On Islamic Law
- In "Women, Violence, and Law: A Critical Analysis of Women's Rights in Afghanistan," (Mapping Futures for Afghanistan, ed. Arif Saba et al, Routledge), Nazifa Haqpal (School of Oriental and African Studies) "critically analyzes the complex interplay of law, socio-cultural norms, and gender power relations in Afghanistan, focusing on the persistent issue of violence against women post-2001. [The chapter] argues that while legal enactments are essential, they are insufficient without addressing deeply entrenched socio-cultural barriers and external political dynamics. The chapter highlights the historical context of women’s rights, highlighting recurring cycles of progressive legal reforms followed by regression, often influenced by external interventions and internal power struggles. It explores the debate between universal human rights and cultural relativism within Islamic law, emphasizing the misuse of religion by oppressive regimes like the Taliban 2.0 to justify gender-based violence." [login required]
- In The Premodern Origins of Jihadi-Salafism (Edinburgh University Press), Jaan Islam (Boğaziçi University) asks "what is Jihadi-Salafism and how does it relate to classical Islam? Scholars of Terrorism Studies argue that ‘Jihadism’ and Salafism are derivatives of Wahhābism and lie on the ideological margins of the Islamic tradition. This book challenges this narrative, demonstrating that concepts associated with the terms – including ‘divine sovereignty’, ‘jihad’ and ‘the caliphate’ – are utilised by Salafi Ulama in connection with the following disparate classical Islamic traditions: Shāfiʿite legal theory during the Mongol invasions; Ottoman and Indian anti-colonial Ḥanafite thought; Mālikite and Shāfiʿite ‘political jurisprudence’; and the literalism of the Yemeni luminary Muḥammad al-Shawkānī (d. 1834)."
On Islam and AI/Data Science
- In "Technical vs Cultural: Evaluating LLMs in Arabic" (Open Review), Ahmad A. Rushdi (Stanford University) "pilot evaluation framework for language models in Arabic, revealing nuanced performance patterns across technical and cultural dimensions. We evaluate five prominent models—Arabic-specialized systems (Fanar, Falcon 3) and frontier models (Claude Opus, GPT-5, Llama)—across a small set of 45 prompts spanning general knowledge, trust and safety, and mathematical reasoning. Using four-dimensional scoring, we find varied performance patterns. While Claude (and frontier models in general) excel in technical accuracy, Arabic-specialized models demonstrate competitive cultural context and language quality, with Fanar showing strong linguistic competency. Mathematical reasoning emerges as the primary technical differentiator, while cultural competency shows less variation between specialized and frontier models than initially hypothesized."
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:
- IslamicBank-HCDi-RoBERTa is a "RoBERTa-based NLP transformer model fine-tuned to classify dimensions of human capital disclosure in Islamic banking. The model identifies whether a text segment is substantively related to human capital and assigns it to one of six human capital disclosure dimensions or to a separate Not related class. The model is based on FacebookAI/roberta-base and was fine-tuned using a supervised seven-class text classification design. It is intended for research on human capital disclosure, Islamic banking, sustainability reporting, corporate disclosure, workforce disclosure and computational text analysis."
UPCOMING EVENTS & OPPORTUNITIES
Events:
- 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
- Conference: Rupture or Continuity in Sharīʿa: (De)Colonizing Sharīʿa? International Conference, Centre for Islamic Studies (ISAM), Istanbul, Turkey, June 9–11, 2027
Opportunities:
- Award: Student Travel Award, Association for Gulf and Arabian Peninsula Studies, September 1, 2026
- Call for Papers: Legal Research & Analysis, September 29, 2026
- Call for Papers: Trends in Intellectual Property Research, September 30, 2026
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