Fellow Spotlight: Dr. Hedayat Heikal This month we launched our Fellow Spotlight series, which features interviews with current and previous PIL Fellows, highlighting their work with the Program, their path getting here, and the road going forward. First in this series is our current fellow, Dr. Hedayat Heikal! 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, as well as a Graduate Program Fellow at Harvard Law School. Her academic work focuses on comparative constitutional law, the rise of the administrative state, and Middle Eastern and Islamic law. Heikal, who holds both a JD and SJD from Harvard Law School, also practiced as a litigation, arbitration, and enforcement attorney, representing clients on a wide array of disputes and regulatory matters. Read more about her transition from private practice into doctoral work, as well as her background, research interests, and what she does for fun in this fellow spotlight! Stay tuned for forthcoming spotlights.

CONTENT: SEARCHstrata App Did you know that SHARIAsource is currently developing a library search and visualization tool called SEARCHstrata? SEARCHstrata will allow researchers to unlock collections for accurate search and virtual browsing for Islamic and other sources. Currently, the tool has indexed all the works available at Harvard Libraries and are now in the midst of importing vast amounts of bibliographical data from the Library of Congress (LOC). Last month, we kicked-off this next stage with a meeting that brought together PIL Faculty Director, Professor Intisar Rabb, PIL Data Science Fellow, Dr. Yusuf Celik, and Associate Director for Collection Development and Digital Initiatives at the Harvard Law School Library, Kevin Garewal, with Law Librarian of Congress, Aslihan Bulut and several LOC librarians advising the project. Moving forward, SEARCHstrata will introduce new features catered to researchers working in Islamic studies. While still a work-in-progress, you can access the beta version today!

 

 

CONTEXT: Islamic Legal Genres As part of our Monthly Lectures on Islamic Legal Genres, Professor Anas Sarmini (29 Mayis University, Istanbul) recently presented “Form, Function, and Historical Development of Ikhtilāf al-fuqahāʾ as a Genre.” During this lecture series, convened by Professors Hakki Arslan, Necmettin Kizilkaya, and Intisar Rabb,  a group of scholars and students have been meeting monthly to explore the form and function of genres popular in Islamic law from the fourteenth to nineteenth centuries. The working group hypothesizes that the development of different genres accompanied different functions and diversity of content to match the evolving needs of Islamic law and society.  The series will culminate in a Roundtable event tomorrow, Wednesday, Dec. 1, which will bring together dozens of scholars from across the fields of Islamic law and history to discuss the development of these genres. Registration is required for this event. You can watch previous lectures here and read their summaries on our blog.  

 

See the full newsletter.