Welcome Back Welcome back! We are excited to announce an exciting lineup of events for this spring semester, including our ongoing SHARIAsource Lab. This semester, we will continue to develop the suite of data science and AI tools for research on Islamic law as well a work on a number of forthcoming publications. 

CONTENT: Islamic Criminal Justice  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 and history. We recently added excerpts from primary sources that pertain to the formation of Islamic criminal justice and policing between the eighth and twelfth centuries, including: ʿAlī al- Tanūkhī’s Nishwār al-muḥāḍara, a compilation of anecdotes that offer literary embellished stories; al-Musabbiḥī’s chronicle, Akhbār Miṣr, which contains a new literary genre for Islamic criminal justice: criminal reports; Abd al-Ḥamīd al-Kātib’s rasāʼil, on the testament written for ʿAbdallāh, the son of the last Umayyad caliph, Marwān II, which serves as one of the most pivotal legal-political treatises for early Islamic legal history; Siyāsat al-Mulūk, which offers a detailed administration of Islamic criminal justice in the Abbasid and Buyid periods; an extant investiture letter for a ṣāḥib al-shurṭa compendium of the rasāʼil written by Abū Isḥāq al-Ṣābiʾ, and more. Explore them 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 our current PIL-LC Research Fellow, Dr. Mohammed Allehbi. He specializes in law and governance in the Islamic Near East and the Mediterranean during late antiquity and the Middle Ages. After earning his master’s degree in Middle Eastern studies from the University of Chicago in 2014, he received his doctorate in history from Vanderbilt University in 2021, where he was a senior lecturer in the Department of Classical and Mediterranean Studies. Currently, he is working on his first monograph about the formation of Islamic criminal justice and policing in the Near East and the Mediterranean between the eighth and twelfth centuries. To find out more about his path to becoming a scholar, his work during his time at Harvard, and what he likes to do for fun, visit our blog!