A Year in Pictures It’s time to welcome students to a new academic year, with a look back at the year just past, as we highlight the exciting people and work that have come together at the Program in Islamic Law and the SHARIAsource Lab—which we invite all of YOU to join this year! We’ve brought it all together with a  video montage of the year in pictures, and include here details and links to last year’s featured events as prevents to this year’s activities.

CONTENT: 2023-2024 Primary Sources We have added a number of primary sources over the 2023-2024 academic year. First up are fatwās on e-cigarettes by the National Council for Islamic Religious Affairs (Malaysia) and on cultivated meat by the Islamic Religious Council of Singapore. Our Research Fellow, Fatma Gül Karagöz, added two historical sources including a court certificate (hujja/hüccet)  issued by the qāḍī court of Antakya in 1776 and an Ottoman imperial/sultanic order from 1603. We also added legislative primary sources including a draft report of the Somali Criminal Law Recodification Initiative as well as a discussion paper prepared by the Horizon Institute on Islamic criminal law reform in Somaliland. Lastly, there were the court cases and case briefs including a case on South Africa’s Divorce Act, accompanied by a case brief by Waheeda Amien, a case where a majority of the Supreme Court of Pakistan upheld various provisions of the Supreme Court Act of 2023 as constitutional, Kerala’s High Court decision on khul‘ divorce, a New York intermediate appellate court’s consideration of mahr, or dowry, and a case in which the European Court of Human Rights held that the prohibition of the concealment of one’s face in public spaces does not violate the European Convention of Human Rights. Explore all of these cases, and more, today!

CONTEXT: Best of 2023-2024 in Review  In August, we look back at some of our most read essays and roundtable contributions published in the past year that attracted a lot of interest.  Each week, we focus on essays and posts that touch on a similar topic relating to Islamic law. First we look at we take a look at Ovamir Anjum’s essays, which focus on the past, present, and future of Islamic law, and critically engage with what he calls “the sharīʿa’s fatigue.” Then we take a look at Sohaib Baig‘s popular essay, “Islamic Law Collections across 14 North American Libraries,” which arises from a simple yet profound question: how many books are there on Islamic law? Next up is an essay by Ahmed El Shamsy and participants in his seminar, which explores a particular recension of one of the canonical texts of Islamic legal history— ʿAbd Allāh al-Qaʿnabī’s (d. 221/833) recension of Mālik’s Muwaṭṭaʾ.  More specifically, the authors compare the language used in this particular recension of the Muwaṭṭaʾ with other recensions. Engaging in an in-depth textual analysis across four recensions of this canonical text, the authors arrive at a number of important findings, including for example that “the differences in legal terminology among the four recensions studied here portray Mālik’s Muwaṭṭaʾ as a book that was well established across the Islamicate world already within its author’s lifetime.” Check out the series today!