Posted on June 23, 2022
A Year in Review As we looked back at the past academic year at the Program in Islamic Law, we reflected on how it was full of rich gatherings, both online and in person. This past year has been in no way an easy one as we navigated our return to campus amid the ongoing pandemic, but we were able to make the most out of these times by expanding our programming to include our scholarly community from all across the globe.We’ve brought it all together with a video montage of the year in pictures, and include here details and links to featured events throughout the year.
CONTENT: Nigeria Special Collection One aim of SHARIAsource is to provide access to primary and secondary sources of Islamic law to support research on salient issues of Islamic law throughout time and space. Our Nigeria Papers: Sharīʿa Implementation in Northern Nigeria Special Collection, edited by Philip Ostien with contributions by Professor Rabiat Akande, makes available a comprehensive collection of documentary material and scholarly analysis on the programs of “sharīʿa implementation” (the application of Islamic law) undertaken by twelve northern Nigerian states beginning in 1999. As part of a larger project to give modern legislative shape to previously uncodified doctrines, those state legislatures enacted legislation or took executive action aimed at making their jurisdictions align more with their conceptions of Islamic law. The material includes, among other sources, the various state statutes establishing Northern Nigeria’s sharīʿa courts; Sharīʿa Commissions and Councils of Ulama, Zakat and Endowment Boards, and hisbah groups; the Sharia Penal and Criminal Procedure Codes; selected high-profile cases, including the infamous zinā cases of Safiyatu Hussaini and Amina Lawal; and a great deal of information about how the new laws are being applied and how the new institutions are functioning. Explore this collection today!
CONTEXT: Fellow Spotlight Our Fellow Spotlight series features interviews with current and previous Program Fellows, highlighting their work with the Program in Islamic Law, their path getting here, and the road going forward. This month we featured one of our previous fellows, Professor Rabiat Akande. Professor Akande is currently an Assistant Professor at Osgoode Hall Law School at York University. Her research interests span the fields of legal history (Islamic legal history, comparative legal history, and British colonial legal history), law and religion, constitutional law, and African law and society. A graduate of Harvard Law School, her dissertation explored the history of the struggles over religion-state relations in Colonial Nigeria, tracing the emergence of secular governmentality as a colonial technique of managing religion and religious difference, and its impacts on Islamic law and institutions. She is currently working on a book project based on her dissertation that will be published by Cambridge University Press. During her time at PIL, she worked on our Sharīʿa Implementation in Northern Nigeria Special Collection, which digitized legislation and judicial decisions on Islamic criminal law in Northern Nigeria. To find out more about her path to becoming a scholar, her work during her time at Harvard, what she is up to now, and what she likes to do for fun, visit our blog!
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