Welcome! 2021-2022 Program in Islamic Law Fellows: As we approach the return to campus, we look forward to a new year of new research and learning. We are particularly pleased to welcome our 2021-2022 Program in Islamic Law Fellows, Hedayat Heikal and Yusuf Celik! We also welcome back Issam Eido as a Global Academy Scholar at PIL, in partnership with the Middle East Studies Association.
Hedayat Heikal is a Research Fellow at the Program in Islamic Law and a Climenko Fellow and Lecturer on Law at Harvard Law School. She served as a Research Scholar in Law and the inaugural Islamic Law and Civilization Research Fellow at Yale Law School, a Distinguished Visiting Professor at the American University in Cairo.Her academic work focuses on comparative constitutional law, the rise of the administrative state, and Middle Eastern and Islamic law. Hedayat holds an S.J.D. and J.D. from Harvard Law School.
Yusuf Celik is a Data Science Fellow at the Program in Islamic Law. He is currently an adjunct lecturer and researcher at the University of Utrecht. His research is on Philosophical Hermeneutics in the Islamic tradition and Continental philosophy. Yusuf Celik has also been active for years in the field of software engineering. He is currently exploring ways to synthesize insights from Philosophical Hermeneutics with new technologies such as Deep Learning. Celik received his PhD from the University of Edinburgh in 2020.
We look forward to an in-person Fall semester for students and fellows on campus alongside continuing our PIL events online with our wider community.
CONTENT: Call for Memes! Our SHARIAsourceportal for Islamic law and data science tools is now on Instagram! Our portal’s growing set of digitized texts and digital tools enable researchers to better explore an access a growing set of sources in this area. These tools will open possibilities for answering new questions about both Islamic legal history and contemporary law, and related fields in Islamic studies, as they change over time and place. Courts & Canons (CnC) is one of our emerging tools that will allow us to trace legal canons as memes across works of history, literature, biography and more, in addition to law. We invite you to join the fun side this project by sending us all of your Islam or Islamic studies-related memes. Tag our @SHARIAsource Instagram account or email us at [email protected]. We look forward to hearing from you!
CONTEXT: Monthly Lectures on Islamic Legal GenresThrough Monthly Lectures on Islamic Legal Genres, convened by Professors Hakki Arslan, Necmettin Kizilkaya, and Intisar Rabb, a group of scholars and students of Islamic law and history have been meeting monthly to explore the form and function of genres popular in Islamic law. The working group hypothesizes that the development of different genres accompanied diverse functions and content to match the evolving needs of Islamic law and society. Christian Müller (CNRS- Paris) recently presented “Siǧillāt and the transformations of the qadis’ documents in Islamic law (10th-16th centuries).” His presentation followed Maribel Fierro (CSIC-Madrid) on “Fatawa Compilations: Exploring a Legal Genre in the Islamic West.” You can watch previous lectures here and read their summaries on our blog.
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