2024

January 2024
January 2024

 

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!

 

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February 2024
February 2024

 

Roundtable on Transformation and Adaptation of Ottoman Land Law in 19th-Century Successor States Throughout the month of February, scholars of Islamic law and history will publish essays on the Islamic Law Blog on the interpretation and adaptation of Ottoman land law in the 19th century sas part of the Roundtable on Transformation and Adaptation of Ottoman Land Law in 19th-Century Successor States. Organized by our Research Fellow Fatma Gül Karagöz, the Roundtable features case studies that focus on Greece after the War of Independence (1821-1830), the situation of Bosnia-Herzegovina, Serbia, and Bulgaria after the Berlin Treaty (1878), and processes of estate and agricultural land-privatization during a period of great transformation. The discussion will tackle questions of continuity and change between Ottoman and successor state legal systems, political and economic reasons behind legal changes, and administrative approaches to nation-building. By focusing on land regimes before and after the promulgation of the Ottoman Land Code in 1858, this Roundtable offers a window onto the transformation of Ottoman land law in the long 19th century.. 

 

 

CONTENT: Constitutional Court of South Africa's Judgement in EB v. ER (2023)  One aim of SHARIAsource is to provide access to recent cases that pertain to Islamic law to support research on salient issues of Islamic law and history. We recently added the  Constitutional Court of South Africa’s (the "Court") judgment in the case EB v. ER (2023), where the Court interpreted section 7(3) of South Africa's Divorce Act. The relevant provision allowed redistribution orders from one spouse to another in marriages that took place "out of the community of property," where marital assets are kept separate between the spouses at all times. Instead, the section introduced an "accrual system" for out-of-community property marriages, allowing spouses, in the event of the marriage's dissolution, to claim from the other spouse some of the assets accruing during the marriage as equitable relief. While the section has been lauded for protecting financially vulnerable spouses, especially those whose domestic and reproductive labor went unnoticed, the Court still invalidated the section to the extent that it excluded two groups from its coverage: (1) spouses who married out of the community of property without accrual after November 1, 1984 (the section's cut-off date) and whose marriage ended through divorce; and (2) spouses who married out of the community of property without accrual before or after November 1, 1984, and whose marriages ended through death. The Court's judgment has been interpreted as extending the accrual system protections to these two groups. Professor Waheeda Amien (University of Cape Town), noted in her contribution to The Conversation that the judgement "will provide much-needed financial relief to spouses whose marriages out of the community of property without accrual end, regardless of when the parties were married or how the marriage ended." Read more about this case today as well as previous South African cases today!

 

 

 

CONTEXT: Legal Recognition and Regulation of Muslim Family Law in South Africa The Constitutional Court of South Africa's judgement in EB v. ER (2023) joins a series of judgements over the past twenty years on the recognition and regulation of Muslim family law in South Africa. Professor Waheeda Amien (University of Cape Town) has written about their recent judgements for the Islamic Law Blog and Journal of Islamic Law. Professor Amien wrote a commentary on the groundbreaking 2018 judgement in the case Women’s Legal Centre Trust v. President of the Republic of South Africa and Others (2013) where a full bench of three High Court judges ordered the government to quickly enact legislations that recognize Muslim marriages. "During the colonial and apartheid periods, only monogamous and heterosexual marriages were considered valid and lawful. This meant that African customary-, Muslim-, Hindu-, and Jewish marriages were excluded from legal recognition due to their potentially polygynous nature, which the colonial and apartheid era courts deemed to be contrary to public policy. The Court found that by failing to recognize Muslim marriages, the South African government had failed in its constitutional obligations set out in section 7(2) of the Constitution, which requires the South African state to 'respect, protect, promote and fulfil the rights in the Bill of Rights.'" Professor Amien expanded on this commentary in the article "Judicial Intervention in Facilitating Legal Recognition (and Regulation) of Muslim Family Law in Muslim-Minority Countries" where she argued that "despite the groundbreaking nature of the judgment, it does not go far enough to ensure sufficient protection for the human rights of Muslim women and that the manner in which the Western Cape High Court’s order is implemented could perpetuate the undermining of Muslim women’s human rights." Read more today! (PC: HorizonZA/CC BY-SA 4.0)

 

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2023

January 2023

January 2023

 

A Year in Review As we begin this new year, we begin this new year, we reflect on the past year at the Program in Islamic Law and the SHARIAsource Lab. We've been up to a lot! Having returned to campus last year after the remote year of the pandemic, we continue to host hybrid and virtual events to continue a broader conversation and increase points of access and exchange with our global network. 

 

 

CONTENT: Legitimizing War within the Ottoman Empire One aim of SHARIAsource is to provide access to primary sources of Islamic law to support research on salient issues of Islamic law and history, to translate key sources into English, and to otherwise make sources accessible and contextual to a broader community of researchers and general readers. This month, we feature an Ottoman formal explanation for the war with Russia in 1768, which Michael Talbot translated into English. This declaration, or beyānnāme, was sent by the Ottoman reʾīsül-kuttāb (chief scribe) to Britain's ambassador to the Ottoman Empire in attempt to justify the Ottoman declaration of war on Russia on claims of Russia's violation of treaty obligations. The document gives insight into how the Ottoman empire legitimized war, how legal plurality functioned within war, and Ottoman ideas of international law and its relationship with Islamic law. For more on Ottoman officials' engagement on the war with Russia in 1768, read Professors Will Smiley and Aimee Genell's essay “Ottoman Empire: War and Peace” in the Roundtable on the History of Islamic International Law.

 

 

CONTEXT: Roundtable on the History of Islamic International Law  Last month, we convened a live Roundtable on the History of Islamic International Law. Organized by Intisar Rabb (Harvard Law School) and Umut Özsu (Carleton University), who are editing a volume on the subject for the Cambridge History on International Law, this Roundtable brought together the contributing authors to that volume – all historians and legal scholars selected for their expertise on the contested status of various visions of international law from the medieval Islamic world to the Ottoman era (622-1923), spanning a variety of regions from across the globe. During the Roundtable webinar, contributing scholars reflected on and deliberated the larger themes, lingering questions, and ongoing debates surrounding the history of what we have become accustomed to calling ‘international law’. The discussion continued on our Islamic Law Blog, where we published essays and summaries that preview the Cambridge volume and that emerge from Roundtable itself.

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February 2023

February 2023

 

Spring Events As the semester is well underway, we look forward to another term of new research and learning. We are particularly pleased to announce our lineup of Spring events, some of which use the data science tools we are developing at SHARIAsource! In short, there is a lot there, more to come, and plenty of ways to get involved or participate online. All of this has been achieved with the continuing support and engagement of both the local and broader global community members, such as yourself. Thank you, our work is made possible by you.

 

 

CONTENT: Islamic Criminal Law Across the World One aim of SHARIAsource is to provide access to primary sources of Islamic law to support research on salient issues of Islamic law and history. The portal features a collection of primary sources from countries that apply varied interpretations of Islamic criminal law today, including: Brunei in a special collection titled “Country Profile: Brunei,” which includes the sultanate's recently adopted an Islamic penal code, the United Arab Emirates in a special collection titled “Country Profile: United Arab Emirates,” as well as primary sources relating to the recent amendments to the country’s criminal code via Federal Decree Law no. 31 of 2021, and Nigeria in the “The Nigeria Papers: Sharīʿa Implementation in Northern Nigeria,” special collection which, among others, brings together sources on Nigerian penal law, including cases on the crime of adultery (zinā). In addition to the above jurisdictions, the portal offers country profiles on many countries that apply a form of Islamic criminal law. Explore the collection today!

 

 

CONTEXT: Islamic Criminal Law Resource Roundup   Discussions of and attention to Islamic criminal law in recent times have revolved almost exclusively around press coverage relating to excessively harsh interpretations of Islamic criminal law or sharīʿa often with little to no religious or historical precedent. To set the record straight: Islamic criminal law refers to and should be understood as an area of law that expresses certain moral norms and values while simultaneously requiring far more procedural protections – through notions of Islamic reasonable doubt – that mitigate application of the harshest punishments on the books. Professor Intisar Rabb recently published a resource roundup on the topic, which features an essay, a list of select resources by lawyers and historians on the history, jurisprudence, and modern operation of Islamic criminal law, primary sources and expert-analysis resources on countries that apply varied interpretations of Islamic criminal law, and news blurbs on the topic that we've gathered over the years and update regularly. Read it today!

 

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March 2023

March 2023

 

 
 

 

Welcome Dr. Madlene Hamilton! We are excited to welcome Dr. Madlene Hamilton to our team as the SHARIAsource Lab & Special Projects Manager. Dr. Hamilton holds a B.S in Child and Human Development and a Ph.D. in Educational Leadership and Policy from the University of Texas at Austin and a master’s degree in Educational Leadership – Policy Studies from George Washington University. She is a social scientist, with strong technical and subject-matter expertise in health and education, as well as management experience in the social sector, specializing in strategic policy analysis, mixed-methods research, program evaluation, and data innovation. She has held various positions at several academic institutions including Rice University (Postdoc), Stanford University (Academic Research and Program Officer), and George Washington University (Research) and with the Commonwealth of Massachusetts (Data Specialist). "Joining PIL has really pushed me to think creatively and broadly about the use of data science and AI tools in a way that I would not have thought doable in the past. The project is forward-thinking and groundbreaking in its use of modern technology, specifically with its focus on AI translation and Arabic OCR," says Dr. Hamilton, "The path forward for this work is exciting and PIL is charting the course for some amazing breakthroughs in the field of Islamic law and history, there is a lot that can be learned from this process and used in other disciplines." We look forward to working together to fulfill our Program's mission to promote research and provide resources for the academic study of Islamic law!

 

CONTENT: Kitāb al-Siyar wa-l-maghāzī One aim of SHARIAsource is to provide access to primary sources of Islamic law to support research on salient issues of Islamic law and history. The portal features hundreds of historical primary sources, including a recently added excerpt from Ibn Isḥāq's Kitāb al-maghāzī (Dār al-Fikr, 1978) on the birth of the Prophet Muhammad. This book compiles reports on events that occurred during or prior to the life of the Prophet Muhammad, including his military expeditions. Ibn Isḥāq “arranged [the reports] into what he deemed to be their correct chronological order and to which he added his own comments” adding a chain of narration to most reports. Explore the excerpt today!

 

 

CONTEXT: SHARIAsource #Hackathon   Last month, our SHARIAsource Lab led an Arabic OCR Hackathon. The event brought together a community of people from the Boston area— and virtually around the world— who were interested in developing a dependable program that will allow texts using the Arabic script to be machine readable. Hackathon members brought their efforts together to review and annotate Ibn Isḥāq's Kitāb al-maghāzī, vetting the text efficiently while also getting acquainted with people interested in Islamic law and data science. This effort to make Arabic texts machine readable will allow scholars to access, search, and explore historical and contemporary documents like never before. 

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April 2023

April 2023

 

Welcome Rashid Alvi! We are excited to welcome Rashid Alvi, who returns as the Executive Director of the Program in Islamic Law, where he will be working directly with Faculty Director, Professor Intisar Rabb to make possible an exciting slate of new projects in the Program’s SHARIAsource Lab, where we are building data science tools to use with Islamic law texts. Rashid is no stranger to Harvard: he was the Deputy Director of the Islamic Legal Studies Program—PIL’s predecessor ten years ago—and helped launch the SHARIAsource portal. "I'm delighted to return to Harvard's Program in Islamic Law! I look forward to working with Professor Intisar Rabb and the PIL team to help shepherd PIL and SHARIAsource to even greater heights." says Rashid. "In particular, I'm eager to work on collaborations with other institutions as we create lasting legacies in the use of digital tools, including machine learning and artificial intelligence, for the study of Islamic law and Islamic studies more generally." Rashid holds a JD from Columbia Law School, an MA from the University of Southern California, and a BA from Binghamton University. He has served as a chief strategy officer, manager, and deal advisor with strategic, fiscal, and operations leadership. We look forward to working together to fulfill our Program's mission to promote research and provide resources for the academic study of Islamic law, with the use of digital tools!

 

 

CONTENT: Al-Imāra al-Islāmiyya wa-niẓāmuhā One aim of SHARIAsource is to provide access to primary sources of Islamic law to support research on salient issues of Islamic law and history. We recently added an excerpt from Al-Imāra al-Islāmiyya wa-niẓāmuhā [The Islamic Emirate and Governmental System] (Dār al-ʿUlūm al-Sharʿiyya, 2022) to our portal. This publication is authored by the Chief Justice of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, ʿAbd al-Ḥākim al-Ḥaqqānī, with a foreword by the current Taliban head, Hibatullāh Akhunzāda. The book discusses governance, education, laws of war (jihād), political leadership, education, and the rights and roles of women. It claims to be a manifesto encompassing the political and governance policies of the Taliban, even though it definitely represents the beliefs of al-Ḥaqqānī and his allies, rather than the philosophy of the entire Taliban movement—which has some internal variation.  Explore the excerpt today!

 

 

CONTEXT: Islamic Law, the Taliban, and the Modern State   Last month, Haroun Rahimi (Assistant Professor of Law at the American University of Afghanistan) joined us to present a talk on the "Taliban and Modernity" as part of our Islamic Law Speaker Series. The talk explored the Taliban’s approaches to law, rights, governance, education, and the public and private spheres. He examined what those approaches can tell us about the problems of modernity within Afghan society. He posited that understanding and offering new interpretations of premodern conceptions of separation of powers principles in Islamic tradition could plausibly counter the Taliban’s brand of theocratic authoritarianism. Rahimi also published a related essay on the Islamic Law Blog, titled "Islamic Law, the Taliban, and the Modern State," His essay addresses the question whether the Taliban can be considered modern and why this consideration is significant. Read his essay and watch his talk today! 

 

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May 2023

May 2023

Welcome 2023-2024 Fellows! As this semester comes to an end, we congratulate all students and fellows rounding out the current year, and are pleased to announce an incoming cohort of research fellows for next year! First, in collaboration with the John W. Kluge Center at the The Library of Congress, we are pleased to announce the 2023-2024 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. Currently, he is working on his first monograph about the formation of Islamic criminal justice and policing in the Near East and in the Mediterranean between the eighth and twelfth centuries. After earning his master's degree in Middle Eastern studies from the University of Chicago in 2014, he received a PhD in history from Vanderbilt University in 2021, where he was a senior lecturer in the Department of Classical and Mediterranean Studies. Second, joining him as a PIL Research Fellow is Professor Fatima Karagöz! She is an assistant professor of legal history based at Galatasaray University Faculty of Law. Her overall work focuses mostly on property relations on agricultural land and on landed usufruct in legal theory and practice. Her current research examines applications of property law in the second half of 18th-century Antioch with specific focus on assertions of property rights by women. She received a PhD in Public Law from İstanbul University in 2018, an MA in Ottoman History from İhsan Doğramacı Bilkent University in 2010, and BA in Law from Galatarasay University Faculty of Law in 2005. We look forward to welcoming this new cohort and and look forward to reuniting next year with an exciting lineup of events and opportunities!

 

 
CONTENT: Supreme Court Frieze Depicting the Prophet Muḥammad One aim of SHARIAsource is to provide access to primary sources of Islamic law to support research on salient issues of Islamic law and history. In 1997, commentators protested a Supreme Court frieze installed in 1935 that depicts the Prophet Muḥammad, among other historical figures, social concepts, and major law-givers—including King Louis IX of France, King John of England, Charlemagne,  Justinian, and the ideals of Equity, Liberty, and Peace: At the time, “[a] petition signed by 16 groups across the country asked that the larger-than-life frieze of great lawgivers be altered ‘in the spirit of religious tolerance and pluralism’ because Islamic tradition discourages artistic renderings of people, and showing the face of Muhammad is considered particularly offensive.” The petition was dismissed, many believe correctly, and the frieze depicting the Prophet remains at the Supreme Court in recognition of his role as a major 'lawgiver.' If interested in learning more, you can explore online sites of institutions in the U.S. that feature images or statues depicting important figures from Islamic history.
 

 

CONTEXT: Controversy over Depictions of Prophet Muḥammad Controversy at Hamline University, a private liberal arts university in Minnesota, broke out earlier this year concerning a class that featured depictions of the Prophet Muḥammad. The row for and against it raised questions of free speech and academic freedom, pitted sensibilities around religion and religious expression. To provide context for understanding this current controversy, and past / recurring controversies in this vein, the Islamic Law Blog published a resource roundup on controversies surrounding negative depictions of the Prophet. It also provides references for historical practices among Muslims across the globe, for art historians and matrial cultural scholars, and for varied American institutional actors on depictions of the Prophet. The resource collect sources for images of the depictions, prior court cases on them, and scholarly commentary about them, both negative and positive practices. At base, the controversies are about the ways in which law, history and academic freedom intersect with non-uniform religious and cultural sensibilities. (PC: Lonnie Millsap/The New Yorker)

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June 2023

June 2023

 

 

Year in Pictures It’s time to look back at the past academic year, and reflect on the exciting people and work that have come together at the Program in Islamic Law and the SHARIAsource Lab. 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: Expanded Online Companion to Text and Interpretation  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 expanded the Online Companion to Text and Interpretation: Imam Jaʿfar al-Ṣādiq and His Legacy in Islamic Law, a supplement to the recently published 2022 print volume by Professor Hossein Modarressi (Princeton University), with over a hundred new sources, including excerpts from al-Kulaynī' s Kitāb al-Kāfī and al-Ṭūsī's Tahdhīb al-aḥkām! This companion serves as a resource for readers interested in deeper exploration of the book by including access to some of the chapters as well as a large selection of primary source materials referenced by the individual chapters. Explore the collection today!

 

 

CONTEXT: Maps of The Life and Legacy of Imam Jaʿfar al-Ṣādiq Professor Hossein Modarressi's (Princeton University) Text and Interpretation: Imam Jaʿfar al-Ṣādiq and His Legacy in Islamic Law (Harvard University Press, 2022) examines the main characteristics of the legal thought of Imam Jaʿfar al-Ṣādiq, a preeminent religious scholar jurist of Medina in the mid-eighth century CE. While previous literature has focused on the current status of the school in its developed and expanded form, this book presents an intellectual history of how the school began. As part of the online companion, we've created historical and modern maps on the “The Life and Legacy of Imam Jaʿfar al-Ṣādiq” which relates to places where Jaʿfar al-Ṣādiq lived, visited, or are otherwise associated with him. Start exploring to see what these sites looked like historically! 

 

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September 2023

September 2023

 

 

Welcome back! As the start of the semester is well underway, we welcome you all and look forward to a new academic year full of research and learning! We are also excited to announce a wonderful lineup of events for this fall semester as well as introduce our 2023-2024 team of fellows and editors. Together 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. First up are events! This semester, our faculty director, Professor Intisar Rabb, will be leading a Comparative Law Workshop alongside Professor William Alford and Professor Idriss Fofana, where invited legal scholars will give a series of talks that engage key questions in comparative law in Hauser 102 at Harvard Law School. We kicked off the semester with a talk featuring Justice Mansoor Shah of the Supreme Court of Pakistan, who presented “Cases and Controversies from the Pakistani Supreme Court” on Friday, September 29th. This was followed by a talk on Monday, October 2nd with Professor Rabiat Akande (Osgoode Hall Law School) who presented “Debating Diya: Indirect Rule and the Transformation of Islamic Law in British Colonial Northern Nigeria.” Coming up on Monday, October 16, 2023 from 3:45-5:45 PM US EST, Dr. Hassaan Shahawy (Reginald F. Lewis Fellow at Harvard Law School) will present “Human Authority in a Divine Law: Law-Finding vs. Law-Making in Early Islamic Jurisprudence.” The last workshop of the semester, on Monday, October 23, 2023 from 3:45-5:45 PM US EST, will feature two scholars: Professor Eric Schluessel (George Washington University) will present “Sino-Islamic Legal Encounters in Xinjiang: What We Learn From Vernacular Comparativism” followed by a presentation by Dr. Aaron Glasserman (Academy Scholar at the Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies) titled “The Shari’a-Minded Ethic in Late Qing and Republican China.”

 

 

CONTENT: Expanded Online Companion to Text and Interpretation 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. Accompanying his guest editor posts on the blog, Mohammed Allehbi has recently added excerpts from several primary sources to the portal including: ʿAlī al- Tanūkhī's Nishwār al-muḥāḍara, a compilation of anecdotes that offer literary embellished stories which give insight into the realities of Islamic criminal justice; 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 (letters), on the testament written for the 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, written by an anonymous author, which offers a detailed administration of Islamic criminal justice in the Abbasid and Buyid periods; an investiture letter from Muntajab al-Dīn al-Juwaynī's Kitab ʿAtabat al-Kataba, which provides a clearer understanding of criminal justice in the Near East during the sixth/twelfth century, and more! Explore them today!

 

 

CONTEXT: Legal Genres and Islamic Criminal JusticeThis summer, Mohammed Allehbi, the PIL-LC Research Fellow for the 2023–2024 academic year, joined the Islamic Law Blog as guest editor. He wrote a series of posts on the formation of Islamic criminal justice and policing in the Near East and the Mediterranean between the eighth and twelfth centuries. In his first essay, he argues that literary narrative sources provide insights into how military and administrative elites managed a complex criminal justice system in the Islamic Near East and Mediterranean during this time period, overseeing investigations, arrests, trials, and punishments. His second essay builds on this by examining the genre of political writings known as Mirrors for princes, which instruct rulers and other political authorities on practical matters of governance including the criminal judicial process. Allehbi’s third and fourth essays explore the genres of inshāʾ, or investiture diplomas for officers appointed as the ṣāḥib al-shurṭa and its Saljūq-era equivalent, the shiḥna, and nawāzil, which consisted of records of legal opinions and judgments given by jurists and magistrates, respectively. Learn more about these genres by reading his posts today!

 

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October 2023

October 2023

 

 

The SHARIAsource Lab Our central mission at the Program in Islamic Law is to promote research and provide resources for the academic study of Islamic law while engaging with our global community. In times of crisis, it is imperative that we continue to focus on the work of education and innovation in areas of Islamic law and history. These disciplines serve as invaluable anchors providing historical context and ethical guidance that inform our commitments in the present moment. As part of this commitment, we launched this semester’s SHARIAsource Lab as part of our initiative to build data science tools to aid the study of Islamic law and history. The Lab brings together scholars, practitioners, data scientists, software engineers, and students to develop and experiment with our suite of data science tools, including SHARIAsource-Analytics, SHARIAsource-CorpusBuilder, SHARIAsource-Metadata, and SEARCHstrata, to present research, data preparation, and/or text analysis on materials related to Islamic law. These tools are collaborative efforts that we believe will revolutionize the field by facilitating new research and insights into Islamic law and history. This semester, we are piloting canons-tracking search tools to explore how we can effectively trace Islamic legal canons (qawāʿid fiqhiyya) as memes across works of history, literature, biography, and law, as sources for social and legal history.

 

 

CONTENT: Primary Sources on Islamic Law in PakistanOne aim of SHARIAsource is to provide access to primary sources of Islamic law to support research on salient issues of Islamic law and history. The portal features a Country Profiles special collection that offers succinct overviews and resources for each country’s legal history, institutional structures, and legal status of Islamic law (sharīʿa), including the Islamic Republic of Pakistan. Under Pakistan’s Constitution, Islamic law (sharīʿa or fiqh) is a principal source of legislation. In addition to its Country Profile, our portal also features over 60 primary sources that pertain to Pakistan, including: the Constitution, Muslim Family Laws Ordinance 1961, Supreme Court documents on a recent blasphemy case [Ayub Masih v. State], National Assembly of Pakistan Criminal Laws Act, the Juvenile Justice System Ordinance, and more! Explore them today!

 

 

CONTEXT: Discussion with Justice Shah of the Supreme Court of Pakistan  Last month, Harvard Law School’s Muslim Law Students Association (MLSA), the South Asian Law Students Association (SALSA), and the Program in Islamic Law hosted a discussion and Q&A with Justice Syed Mansoor Ali Shah of the Supreme Court of Pakistan, moderated by PIL Faculty Director, Professor Intisar Rabb. During this discussion, Justice Shah reflected on his journey from law school to the Supreme Court bench, reflecting on his motivations along the way. He also gave an overview of the relationship between the traditional branches of Pakistan’s government as well as the democratic difficulties the country has faces since its founding. Justice Shah also looked forward too, highlighting the anticipated impacts of technological developments such as Artificial Intelligence (AI) on the law. Watch the video today!

 

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November 2023

November 2023

 

The SHARIAsource LabThis semester, we made strides in the SHARIAsource Lab in parsing legal canons works in ways accessible to researchers interested in new ways to access these older texts. Scholars, data scientists, and students have collaborated in the Lab on various aspects of our core suite of applications and tools:  SHARIAsource-Analytics,  SHARIAsource-Metadata, and SEARCHstrata. The primary task this semester has been on piloting canons-tracking search tools with an eye to tracing Islamic legal canons (qawāʿid fiqhiyya) as memes across various works of history and law. For example, one text-analytics tool I a ’variants matcher,’ which facilitates the identification and pairing (or disambiguating) of Islamic legal canons from one canons collection with those from another collection. Through this matching and unmatching process, we will be able to train a text analytics tool to automatically recognize variants to increasingly high degree of alignment with researcher’s intuitions. Additionally, we are enriching the metadata of our corpus of primary sources by adding biographical, geographical, contextual, and citational information to each source. Stay tuned for more and, in the meantime, check out some publications that summarize our previous lab work!

 

 

CONTENT: Expanded Online Companion to Text and Interpretation  We take the opportunity at the end of the semester to highlight our recent publications and interactive tools. 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 expanded the Online Companion to Text and Interpretation: Imam Jaʿfar al-Ṣādiq and His Legacy in Islamic Law, a supplement to the 2022 print book by Professor Hossein Modarressi (Princeton University), with nearly a hundred sources, including excerpts from al-Jawharī's Musnad al-Muwaṭṭaʾ, Ibn Bābawayh's Khiṣāl, al-Kashshī's RijālThis companion serves as a resource for readers interested in deeper exploration of the book by including access to some of the chapters as well as a large selection of primary source materials referenced throughout the book. Explore the collection today!

 

 

CONTEXT: Maps of The Life and Legacy of Imam Jaʿfar al-Ṣādiq Professor Hossein Modarressi's  print  edition of Text and Interpretation: Imam Jaʿfar al-Ṣādiq and His Legacy in Islamic Law (Harvard University Press, 2022) examines the main characteristics of the legal thought of Imam Jaʿfar al-Ṣādiq, the Sixth Imām of the mainstream Shīʿī community and a preeminent religious scholar-jurist living and teaching in Medina in the mid-eighth century CE. While previous literature has focused on the current status of the school in its developed and expanded form, this book presents an intellectual history of how the school began. As part of the online companion, we've created historical and modern maps on the “The Life and Legacy of Imam Jaʿfar al-Ṣādiq” which relates to places where Jaʿfar al-Ṣādiq lived, visited, or that are otherwise associated with him. Start exploring to see what these sites looked like historically! 

 

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December 2023

December 2023

 

A Year in Review As we usher in the new year, we reflect on the past year at the Program in Islamic Law and the SHARIAsource Lab. We’ve been up to a lot! 

In short, there is a lot there, more to come, and plenty of ways to get involved or participate online. All of this has been achieved with the continuing support and engagement of both the local and broader global community members, such as yourself. Thank you— our work is made possible by you.

 

 

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2022

January 2022
January 2022

PIL: Fellow Spotlight: Dr. Yusuf Celik We recently 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. This month we featured our current Data Science Fellow, Dr. Yusuf Celik!  Dr. Celik is the lead data scientist for the SHARIAsource Courts and Canons Project. His research is on philosophical hermeneutics in Islamic studies, drawing on continental philosophy; and he has also been active for years in the field of software engineering. At Harvard, he is currently exploring ways to synthesize insights from philosophical hermeneutics with new technologies in data science such as deep learning. This year, he is working with Professor Intisar Rabb to build a research platform called Courts & Canons :: Qayyim (CnC-Qayyim), which will enable scholars to ask and answer questions about Islamic law and history, with a focus on legal canons and other genres using advanced search tools, data visualization, and other tools that will enable new insights to both existing and new questions in the field. For more on Dr. Celik's research, visit his page.

You can join our team by applying to our 2022-2023 PIL–LC Research Fellowship, offered in collaboration with the John W. Kluge Center at the The Library of Congress. This new fellowship is designed to provide an intellectual home to promising young scholars in Islamic legal studies, to advance their research, and to contribute to the intellectual life of the Program, the greater Harvard community, and the Library of Congress community. Applications will be accepted until January 31st. Apply today!

 

 

CONTENT: Muwaṭṭaʾ Online Companion One aim of SHARIAsource is to provide access to primary and secondary sources of Islamic law to support research on Islamic law and history. We recently added the consolidated full text of the Original Arabic Royal Moroccan Edition to our Online Companion to the book,Al-Muwaṭṭaʾ, the Royal Moroccan Edition: The Recension of Yaḥyā Ibn Yaḥyā al-Laythī by Mālik b. Anas, edited by Professor Mohammad Fadel and Dr. Connell Monette. This special collection  serves as a resource for introducing interested readers to the translation of this core work of Islamic law's founding period by including an online introduction to the print translation of the Royal Moroccan Edition of the Muwaṭṭaʾ, excerpts of the the English translation itself, and supplemental materials that will provide further biographical and historical background to the people, events, and ideas that inform the legal texts, including maps and timelines, biographies of major figures, and a history of the text. For context on text, check out our Roundtable on the blog. 
 
 
CONTEXT: Top Five Blog Posts of 2021 As we say goodbye to 2021, we reflect back on the Islamic Law Blog's most popular posts! All of last year’s top posts were part of our Roundtable on Islamic Legal History & Historiography, which kicked-off with an introduction on "Methods and Meaning in Islamic Law" by PIL Faculty Director, Professor Intisar Rabb. The most visited post of the year is an interview with Professor Wael Hallaq “Scholarship as Resistance,” conducted by PhD student, Omar Abdel-Ghaffar. Next up is Professor Sohaira Siddiqui’s “Rethinking Dichotomies: Beyond Continuity and Rupture in Islamic Law in the Colonial Period,” followed by Professor Ahmed El Shamsy's, “How not to reform the study of Islamic law: A response to Ayesha Chaudhry.” Then we have Professor Marina Rustow's "Islamic law and the documentary record before 1500: Unsolved problems and untried solutions." Last, but certainly not least, is an interview with Professor Michael Cook "Simplicity, Creativity, Lucidity as 'Method' in the Study of Islamic History," conducted by Professor Intisar Rabb, who also concluded the Roundtable with "Islamic Legal Canons as Memes." We look forward to the many exciting posts and guest editors lined up for 2022!
 

 

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February 2022
February 2022

Faith in the Law For its Winter 2022 issue, Harvard Law Today published an article on “Faith in the Law” to explore the main programs at Harvard Law School that pursue research at the intersection of religion and law. The article outlines how these HLS programs fuel innovation with through programming that ranges “from using the latest tech tools to mine sources from hundreds of years ago, to bringing people together in unexpected combinations to dream up new ideas” and that “the programs provide participants with opportunities to think big about what is possible.” Spotlighting the Program in Islamic Law, the bulletin features an interview with PIL Faculty Director, Professor Intisar Rabb who states that “The study of Islamic law is something of increasing consequence and importance for the study and understanding of law generally. For Harvard, which has a global footprint, these programs are an essential part of the school.” Pointing to SHARIAsource as PIL's "flagship project," PIL is notable for using artificial intelligence and data science to aid in the historical research of Islamic law and society. Of course, Professor Rabb notes, “AI and data science tools will never replace a researcher or a lawyer. But tools like the ones we are developing at the SHARIAsource Lab can help [each] navigate a vast and exciting array of history and texts as data. This can inform the research and conclusions that we’re able to make about the making and interpretation of law, about values behind law, and about social history surrounding existing law and new legal developments.” Read the full article today and explore our many resources. 

 

 

CONTENT: SHARIAsource Data Science Tools At SHARIASource we are developing various machine learning algorithms that will assist researches in semantically relating Islamic legal canons to one another. Extracting specific data from general texts is challenging in any project, especially one dealing with Arabic and other RTL texts. Even when we manage to extract the data, we still must resolve follow-on questions, such as: what patterns or thematic relationships connect the extracted data? In answering, we can examine thousands of “hits” from a general search to manually group them. Or, we can leverage advances in Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning to cluster and group bits of texts as data in advance according to the semantic similarity. The illustration above shows our initial forays into the second approach. It shows three legal canons our ML model has clustered with a proposed shared theme of “time.” Explore our other data science tools today!
 
 
CONTEXT: Monthly Islamic Legal Genres
As part of our Monthly Lectures on Islamic Legal Genres, convened by Professors Hakki ArslanNecmettin Kizilkaya, and Intisar Rabb, Professor Marion Katz of New York University presented “Form, Function and Historical Development of the ṭabaqāt al-fuqahāʾ literature.” Her talk comprised three parts: a scholarship review on biographical dictionaries for legal actors (ṭabaqāt)exploration of the aims of this literature, and consideration of whether this category of historical-legal literature constitutes a single coherent genre in Islamic law. For Professor Katz, appraising the multiple aims of ṭabaqāt throughout history leads her to the conclusion that the ṭabaqāt did not form a uniform genre in and of themselves. To find out why, and for more on genres, binge watch the full series of ten lectures or read summaries of each lecture on the Islamic Law Blog.
 
 

 

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March 2022
March 2022

Experiments in Tracking Canons across the Mecelle [Ottoman Code of 1869]  Last term, we convened CnC Research Working Group to bring together a global group of scholars interested in interpretation in Islamic law to share works in progress, read texts, and discuss new ideas on research questions relevant to the history of interpretation, courts, and canons. One aim was to better understand legal canons as tools for interpretation in historical context. A second aim was to see whether and how data science tools can augment that process. To those ends, we meet to workshop works-in-progress deliberately designed to be ‘half-baked ideas’ at the preliminary stages of research. We experiment with ways in which data science tools of the type we are developing at SHARIAsource (CnC Qayyim) can aid in that research. Case in point: our most recent workshop on the Ottoman Code of 1869, better known as the Mecelle. Professor Intisar Rabb and PIL Data Science Fellow, Dr. Yusuf Celik, explored debates over how and why the Mecelle Drafting Committee borrowed 99 legal canons to reform Ottoman law. They and the Research Group raised several questions: By looking at patterns of canons clusters that the CnC tools helped produce, what conclusions can we form about why the Mecelle scholars made certain choices over others for which canons to include in their short list of 99 legal canons? If tracking canons across texts, how extensive would a corpus need to be to definitively answer the questions posed? What types of sources would add greater insight into applications of those canons in late-Ottoman law and society? Together, we worked through the clustering of canons in the ‘Mecelle Flow,’ highlighted in the image above. The authors will go back to the digital drawing board to further develop the tools and prepare a paper to publish the results. Read more here, and stay tuned for findings and a dedicated site of the digital tools for you to compare canons and explore the Mecelle flow for yourself! 

 

CONTENT: Family Law in Pakistan 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. Professor Zubair Abbasi's recently added the two new amendments in sections 4 and 7 of the Muslim Family Laws Ordinance 196 introduced by the National Assembly in Pakistan late last year. Both of these amendments relate to Shīʿī law (Fiqh-e-Jafaria). The first amendment provides that a childless widow of a Shīʿī husband has inheritance rights in immovable property. The second amendment clarifies the Shīʿī law on ṭalāq (divorce), requiring that the husband pronounce an Arabic formula for it in the presence of two witnesses to make divorce effective. This amendment further provides that a ṭalāq pronouncement shall not be effective if uttered “jokingly or under anger, intoxication, insanity, duress or coercion of any kind”. Both amendments provide that in cases of dispute, the parties may have recourse to “a court of competent jurisdiction or by approaching the Mujtahid-e-Alam from the panel maintained by the Council of Islamic Ideology.” Explore this updated legislation directly on the SHARIAsource Portal and, for more context on Islamic family laws in Pakistan, check out Professor Abbasi's posts on the Islamic Law Blog.
 
 
CONTEXT: Fellow Spotlight As our Fellow Spotlight series features interviews with current and previous PIL Fellows, highlighting their work with the Program, their path getting here, and the road going forward. This month we featured last year’s PIL Research Fellow, Dr. Sohaib Baig. Dr. Baig is currently the Librarian for Middle Eastern, North African, South Asian, and Islamic Studies at UCLA.His research examines how the Sunni madhhab system made it possible for  Indian Ḥanafī scholars to travel and engage in a wide array of transactions across such a politically vast and heterogenous space, with inter- and intra-madhhab exchanges. He is also interested in the history of Qur’ānic scholarship in South Asia, and its role in constructing Islamic law in in the region. At Harvard, he worked on his book project on Islamic legal and ḥadīth scholarship in South Asia and the Hijaz from the 16th century to the early 20th century. During his time at PIL, he also was involved in our SEARCHstrata project, which is an advanced library search tool in collaboration with the Harvard Law School Library and the Library of Congress. To find out more about his path to becoming a Research Fellow at the Program in Islamic Law, his work during his time at Harvard, what he is up to now, and what he likes to do for fun on our blog!
 
 

 

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April 2022
April 2022

Welcome to our 2022-2023 PIL-LC Fellow In collaboration with the John W. Kluge Center at the The Library of Congress, we are pleased to announce the inaugural PIL-LC Research Fellow for the 2022-2023 academic yearDr. Dilyara Agisheva. Agisheva received an undergraduate degree in Middle Eastern Studies and Political Science from UCLA and an MA in Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies from Columbia University. As a PhD student at Georgetown University, she specialized in Islamic legal studies and Ottoman history. In August 2021, she defended her doctoral thesis entitled “Entangled Legal Formations: Crimea Under Russian Rule in the Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries.” This new joint fellowship is designed to provide an intellectual home to promising young scholars in Islamic legal studies, to advance their research, and to contribute to the intellectual life of the Program and greater Harvard community, the Library of Congress community, and the broader scholarly community. As a fellow, Agisheva’s research objective is to prepare a book for publication and to implement OCR software to digitize Islamic court records utilized in her monograph. The book project builds on her dissertation thesis, which explores the transformation of Islamic Crimean legal structures after the Russian Empire annexed the Crimean Peninsula in 1783. The fellowship will allow Agisheva to incorporate additional sources held at the Library of Congress and Harvard Libraries and to benefit from mentorship and collaboration with scholars at the Program in Islamic Law at the Harvard Law School.  

 

CONTENT: Islamic Law in U.S. Prisons 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. We recently added several documents from the Smith v. Crockett et al case. In this case, petitioner Ray Anthony Smith, a Muslim inmate housed in a Colorado state prison, alleged a violation of his federal constitutional right to the free exercise of religion and his federal statutory right to a diet that complies with his faith. Specifically, he alleged that prison officials revoked his right to a halal diet upon observing him ordering non-halal food. Smith initiated this federal lawsuit in 2020 alleging violations of free exercise of religion under the First Amendment of the U.S. constitution and the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act (“RLUIPA”). Upon reviewing the record, U.S. Magistrate Judge Nina Y. Wang determined that the petitioner alleged actions that sufficed to make out a basic claim and recommended that government officials should not receive immunity, but denying the remainder of the petitioners requests. U.S. District Judge William J. Martinez adopted the recommendation, ordering its implementation. Explore these documents today!
 
 
CONTEXT: Islamic Law Speaker Series As part of our Islamic Law Speaker Series, Professor Issam Eido (Vanderbilt University) presented “Pre-Canonical Islamic Legal Canons: An Analysis of Early Hanafi Literature.” He traced the legal canons that were used in early Hanafi sources, beginning with Muḥammad ibn al-Ḥasan al-Shaybānī’s (d. 189/805) works and ending with Abū Zayd al-Dabūsī’s (d. 430/1038) works. These canons, he argues, were evolving and underwent changes that adjusted, polished, or even created a new canon over time. His presentation followed Dr. Hedayat Heikals talk titled “Inheritance versus Personal Status: Shifting National Strategies in Syria, Egypt, and Tunisia.” Heikal argued that demands for equality among similarly situated male and female heirs in inheritance cases (among others matters) have taken a confessionalist turn in the Middle East. Whether by legislation in Syria or through court battles in Egypt, non-Muslim citizens of both countries have begun to achieve inheritance equality by yanking inheritance away from the jurisdiction of Islamic default rules and defining it as a matter of personal status. She contrasted Egyptian approaches to inheritance to recent developments in Tunisia. Watch these talks here
 
 

 

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May 2022
May 2022

Congratulations to 2022 Graduates! ICongratulations to the Class of 2022, as well as the returning Classes of 2020 and 2021! We at the Program in Islamic Law at Harvard Law School extend a warm congratulations on your extraordinary accomplishments during your time at Harvard. These past few years have been in no way easy ones– from going remote in 2020, to completing an entire year of online learning, to navigating our return to campus amid the ongoing pandemic. But you were able to make the most out of these times through your efforts of collective care and engagement. We commend you to reflect on these experiences alongside the knowledge and skills you’ve gained at Harvard to continue your efforts of collective care as you commence on a new path, with the hopes of making a just, positive difference in the world. We also would like to congratulate the winners of the paper and doctoral dissertation prizes in Islamic studies. Congratulations to Shayan Karbassi (JD ‘22), the recipient of the Program in Islamic Law Writing Prize for his paper "Pursuit of Supranational Authority: Constitutionalism and the Islamic Republic of Iran,” written under the supervision of Professor Vicki C. Jackson. We award this prize annually to the Harvard Law School student who has written the best paper in the field of Islamic legal studies or at the intersection of Islamic law and related fields during that current academic year. We also extend our congratulations to the winner and honorable mention of the Alwaleed Bin Talal Doctoral Dissertation Prize in Islamic Studies, Dr. Janan Delgado (Religion) and Dr. Ari Schriber (NELC), respectively. Dr. Delgado received the prize for her dissertation, “The Ties That Bind: Child Custody in Andalusian Malikism, 3rd/9th - 6th/12th c.” in which she conducts a longitudinal study of the evolution of child custody rules in the Maliki school of law and offers insights into the social history of parent-child relations, especially mother-child relations, and networks of children's custodians in pre-modern Islamic societies, a topic that has been the subject of minimal scholarly attention. Dr. Schriber received an honorable mention for his dissertation, “The End of Shari'a? The Structural and Epistemological Evolution of the Shari'a Judge in Colonial-Era Morocco,” which addresses the long-standing question of the place of Islamic law in the 20th century nation state, specifically the process of producing sharia-based court rulings in colonial-era Morocco (1912-1956). Congratulations to you all for producing exceptional work on Islamic law during these pandemic-laden times..  

 

CONTENT: Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization Amicus Brief 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. We recently added an amicus brief filed before the Supreme Court concerning the case of Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization, submitted by Muslim Advocates, a Muslim American organization, among others. The brief argues that  "many schools of Islamic thought permit abortion, under certain circumstances, at any point up to 120 days from conception, or approximately 19-20 weeks gestation." Citing various scholars of Islamic law, the brief states further that, among Muslims, "there is no universally agreed-upon moment when a fetus becomes a person."  "However," the brief continued, "the predominant view is that a fetus acquires personhood 120 days from conception (approximately 19-20 weeks gestation)." Explore this document today!
 
 
CONTEXT: Abortion and Islamic Law Roundup As the right to abortion made headlines in the United States due of a leaked draft opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization, discussions on Islamic legal perspectives on abortion rose to the surface.  The tenor of the debates has meant that arguments from Islamic law occasionally appear in difficult conversations about abortion and when life begins as a matter of American constitutional law, and in related discussions internal to the Islamic tradition, about the range of opinions on abortion and life in Islamic law. Our Islamic Law Blog has curated a Resource Roundup: Abortion and Islamic Law, which is a collection of resources, meant not to resolve the debates, but to shed light on arguments in Islamic law and for consideration or comparison to religious law aspects of the debate on the controversy over abortion and the start of life among Muslims. These resources help inform the understanding of Islamic law on its own, and may be relevant to American law at the intersection of religious liberty and free exercise in the current constitutional row.
 
 

 

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June 2022
June 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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July 2022
July 2022

Hot Off The (Digital) Press: JIL Volume Three is Out! We are pleased to announce the publication of the third volume of the open-access, peer-reviewed Journal of Islamic Law, a special issue on racial justice and equality. We invite you to digitally explore the third issue which started with one question: how do Islamic legal traditions, whether in theory or in practice, inform contemporary debates on racial justice and equality, particularly with the notable rise of mass incarceration? Exploring this question appeared to us critical in several respects. First, race continues to be a major fault line in today’s world—W. E. B. Dubois’s color line persists. Race also continues to affect the way Black people and other people of color—including many Muslims—are treated on a day-to-day basis. Second, the Black Lives Matter moment brought realist approaches to law out of law reviews and into the mainstream conversation through its focus on structural inequalities, mass incarceration, and the policing of communities of color and immigrants in the United States. No matter what law said it did, one had to look at what it actually did to affect (different segments of) society. Third, Muslims, be it in the United States or in the Global South, were not simply subjects or victims of the law or of its systems. We recognized that they are actors shaping the course of the developments in law and society that touch on racial equality, criminal justice, and equality; and they sometimes draw on Islamic traditions in doing so. We sought to examine how. 

 

CONTENT: Ḥajj 1443H/2022AD As part of its growing archive of contemporary fatwās and related materials SHARIAsource, features the documents giving voice to the recent decision in Saudi Arabia to assume full control over Ḥajj, the annual Islamic pilgrimage in commemoration of the rites of Abraham, his wife Hagar, and the would-be sacrifice of their son Ishmael. The Kingdom's Ministry of Hajj and Umrah issued the decision on 6 June 2022, only weeks before hajj season, to require hajj pilgrims from Europe, America, and Australia for this year’s hajj (1443H/2022AD) to petition individually rather than in groups via a new lottery system and to use their portal exclusively, rather than arrange their trips through the local groups that ordinarily lead, educate, and organize tours for Muslims in the West. The Saudi portal is meant to enable visa processing and monitor COVID-19 protocols. We've recently added the decision to our portal, and rounded up news about the difficulties that pilgrims faced this year as a result (see our blog's weekly roundup). Explore them today!
 
CONTEXT: Abortion and Islamic Law  As the recent Supreme Court decision made headlines in the United States for removing a constitutional right to abortion, discussions on Islamic legal perspectives on abortion rose to the surface around the world. The tenor of the debates has meant that arguments from Islamic law occasionally appear in difficult conversations about abortion and when life begins as a matter of American constitutional law, and in related discussions internal to the Islamic tradition; there is range of opinions on abortion and life in Islamic law. The Islamic Law Blog has curated a Resource Roundup: Abortion and Islamic Law, a collection of resources meant to shed light on the diversity of arguments in Islamic law and for consideration or comparison to religious law aspects of the debate on the controversy over abortion and the start of life among Muslims. These resources help inform the understanding of Islamic law on its own, and may be relevant to American law at the intersection of religious liberty and free exercise in the current constitutional row.
 
 

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August 2022
August 2022

New Book! We are excited to announce the publication of the latest book in our Harvard Series in Islamic Law, Hossein Modarressi's Text and Interpretation: Imam Jaʿfar al-Ṣādiq and His Legacy in Islamic Law! This book examines the main characteristics of the legal thought of Imam Jaʿfar al-Ṣādiq, a preeminent religious scholar jurist of Medina in the first half of the second century of the Muslim calendar (mid-eighth century CE). Numerous works in different languages have appeared over the past half century to introduce this school of Islamic law and its history, legal theory, and substance in contexts of Shīʿī law.

While previous literature has focused on the current status of the school in its developed and expanded form, this book presents an intellectual history of how the school began. The Jaʿfarī school emerged within the general legal discourse of the late Umayyad and early Abbasid periods, but was known to differ in certain approaches from the other main legal schools of this time. Namely, the Jaʿfarī school expanded the tools for legal interpretation generally and contracts specifically, to a degree unmatched by any of its counterparts in the Muslim legal tradition. In addition to sketching the origins of the school, the book examines Jaʿfar al-Ṣādiq’s interpretive approach through detailing his position on a number of specific questions, as well as the legal canons, presumptions, and other interpretive tools he adopted.Alongside its release, we're also publishing a series of blog posts over the next month on our Islamic Law Blog that take a deep dive into the book, which will be followed by the release of an Online Companion to the book on our SHARIAsource portal. Get your hands on a copy today and stay tuned for all that's to come!

 

 

CONTENT: Muslim Marriage in South Africa As part of its growing archive of contemporary primary sources to support research on salient issues of Islamic law, SHARIAsource features the South African Constitutional Court's confirmation of the Supreme Court of Appeal's order to amend existing legislation or enact new legislation to recognize and regulate the consequences of Muslim marriages. The order declared certain provisions of the Marriage Act and the Divorce Act unconstitutional due to the persistent non-recognition of Muslim marriages, or marriages solemnized in accordance with the tenets of sharīʿa, that have resulted in the infringement of fundamental rights of parties to Muslim marriages, and Muslim women and children in particular. The Constitutional Court confirmed this order stating that “the common law definition of marriage is declared to be inconsistent with the Constitution and invalid to the extent that it excludes Muslim marriages.” Explore the document today!
 
 
CONTEXT: Mariam Sheibani 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 Mariam Sheibani! Professor Sheibani is currently Associate Academic Director at Cambridge Muslim College and will be an Assistant Professor at Brandeis University starting in September 2023. Her research explores the ways in which Islamic thought has evolved to reflect changing socio-cultural realities in late antique and medieval Muslim societies. During her time at PIL, she worked on the Islamic Law Blog as Lead Blog Editor, overseeing a monthly blogger series and a bi-annual roundtable. To learn 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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September 2022
September 2022

Fall Events Line-Up As we begin our return to campus this semester, we look forward to a new year of new research and learning. We are particularly pleased to announce our lineup of Fall events, many of which use the data science tools we are developing at SHARIAsource! We hope that you are able to join us at our forthcoming events and we wish you the best of luck with the semester ahead!

 

 

 

 

CONTENT: NEW! Online Companion 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. Our latest feature on the SHARIAsource portal is the new Online Companion to Text and Interpretation: Imam Jaʿfar al-Ṣādiq and His Legacy in Islamic Law (Harvard University Press, 2022) by Professor Hossein Modarressi (Princeton University), providing online access to the recently published 2022 print volume. This companion serves as a resource for readers interested in deeper exploration of the book by including access to each of its chapters as well as a large selection of primary source materials referenced by the individual chapters. Explore the collection today!
 
 
 
 
CONTEXT: Issam Eido 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 Issam Eido! Professor Eido is currently Assistant Professor of the Practice of Religious Studies at Vanderbilt University. His research focuses on the Qur’ān in late antiquity and the semantic development of Qur’ānic concepts, and the relationship between legal canons and interpreting ḥadīth. During his time at PIL, he presented his research at our Islamic Law Speaker Series and our Islamic Legal Genres monthly series. To learn more about his current research and what he likes to do for fun, visit our blog!
 
 

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October 2022
October 2022

SHARIAsource Workshops Last month, we began the semester with an exciting slate of events in the SHARIAsource Lab! We started with a Lab Workshop on Ibn ʿAsākir and His History of Damascus: Named Entity Recognition and Text Reuse led by Sarah Bowen Savant (Aga Khan University) on Tuesday, September 27th. The workshop explored an ongoing project that examines the question: prior to the arrival of the printing press or electricity, how were authors working in Arabic so prolific? Savant focused on the many earlier sources that Ibn ʿAsākir (d. 571/1176 ) cited in his The History of Damascus (Taʾrīkh Madīnat Dimashq). At the end of September, we co-convened an OpenITI-SHARIAsource Experts Workshop for building Arabic corpora with machine-readable texts and the future of the Open Islamicate Texts Initiative (OpenITI), co-organized by its principal investigators Matthew Thomas Miller (University of Maryland, College Park), Intisar Rabb (Harvard Law School), Maxim Romanov (University of Vienna), and Sarah Bowen Savant (Aga Khan University). Held on September 29 and 30, the workshop, called ‘Into the Digital Islamic Future,’ was held in-person on the University of Maryland, College Park’s campus. We invited some 30 researchers from around the world to share results from, discuss, and test the results of the first phase of the OpenITI Arabic OCR Catalyst Project (OpenITI AOCP).

 

 

CONTENT: Raziya bt. Abdallah v. Hafiza bt. RecebThe SHARIAsource Portal provides access to primary and secondary sources of Islamic law and history, which scholars often compile and wish to share, to support teaching and collaborative research on salient issues in the field. Professor Zoe Griffith (Baruch College) recently contributed a court record, from the Islamic court of Tripoli (Lebanon) in April 1679. The case addresses the fate of an enslaved woman in the household of a recently deceased provincial Janissary. In summary, the enslaved woman, Raziya bt. Abdallah, argued and successfully won her manumission through the legal norm of umm walad, in which an enslaved woman who bears her master’s child should be manumitted after his death. As Radiya explains, she miscarried after a four-month pregnancy. Based on a fatwa and some rather extraordinary witness testimony, the judge agreed that Radiya held the status of umm walad, even though she was never visibly pregnant and did not give birth to a baby. Explore the source today.
 
 
CONTEXT: A Former Concubine Wins her Manumission in CourtThe Islamic Law Blog offers space for scholars to comment on sources of Islamic law and history, including those that they might feature on the SHARIAsource Portal. Last month, Professor Zoe Griffith (Baruch College) published a commentary on the case of Raziya bt. Abdallah v. Hafiza bt. Receb, in which a former concubine, Raziya, went to court and won manumission through a claim to umm walad status following a miscarriage rather than a birth, as was the typical Islamic legal norm. In her analysis of the case, Griffith reflects on the court’s close attention to the timing and description of Raziya’s pregnancy, and argues that the case presents a twist on a well-known point of Islamic law surrounding questions of enslavement and manumission. Cases like that of Raziya, Prof. Griffith says, and the court’s novel approach to an old legal norm, raise a number of questions about how enslaved people and households "made use of Islamic law in … highly sensitive matters." 
 
 

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November 2022
November 2022

Roundtable on the History of Islamic International Law This month, we convened a live Roundtable webinar on the History of Islamic International Law, which accompanies an online Roundtable on the Islamic Law Blog that will feature essays on the theme each week throughout November and December. Organized by Intisar Rabb (Harvard Law School) and Umut Özsu (Carleton University), who are editing a volume on the theme in the Cambridge History of International Law, this Roundtable brings together the contributing authors to that volume – all historians and legal scholars selected for their expertise on the contested status of various visions of international law from the medieval Islamic world to the Ottoman era (622-1923), spanning a variety of regions from across the globe. 
Contributing scholars include Cemil Aydin (University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill), Fahad Bishara (University of Virginia), Malika Dekkiche (University of Antwerp)Mohammad Fadel (University of Toronto)Aimee Genell (University of West Georgia)Will Hanley (Florida State University)Suleiman Mourad (Smith College)Will Smiley (University of New Hampshire)Mathieu Tillier (University of Sorbonne)Joshua White (University of Virginia), and Adnan Zulfiqar (Rutgers Law School). During the live Roundtable, these scholars deliberated on and debated the larger themes, lingering questions, and ongoing debates surrounding the history of what we have become accustomed to calling “international law.” The online Roundtable opened with an introduction to the subject from the editors, Intisar Rabb (Harvard Law School) and Umut Özsu (Carleton University), and it will feature contributions on Islamic international law and relations across a vast region of the Islamic world in the medieval period, that is, spanning the beginning of Islam to the mid-15th century, mirroring the first part of the volume. It will also feature contributors to the second part of the volume focusing on the Ottoman era, from the mid-15th century to the early 20th century, with particular emphasis on Ottoman-European relations and questions of private and public international law. The live Roundtable has been posted, and essays for the online Roundtable will continue to feature on the Islamic Law Blog through December. Read them today!

 

CONTENT: Islamic Legal Canons Collections: al-Ashbāh waʾl-naẓāʼir Alongside developing data science tools to aid scholarly research, one aim of SHARIAsource is to expand access to primary sources of Islamic law. We recently added to the Portal several collections of Islamic legal canons (qawāʿid fiqhiyya), which are succinct principles of interpretation or substantive law that guide jurists and judges in deciding novel cases. Newly added sources include al-Majmūʿ al-Mudhhab fī Qawāʿid al-Madhhab  by Ṣalāḥ al-Dīn al-ʿAlāʾī (d. 761/1359), which is the third-oldest known Shāfiʿī canons collection from the Mamlūk era (following those of al-ʿIzz b. ʿAbd al-Salam (d. 660/1262) and Ibn Wakīl (d. 716/1317)). We have also added a second Mamlūk Shāfiʿī  canons collection called al-Ashbāh wa’ l-Naẓāʾir by Suyūtī (d. 911/1505), and an early Ottoman Ḥanafī canons collection with the same title by Ibn Nujaym (d. 969/1563). Professor Mairaj Syed (UC Davis) examined these collection as part of our Courts and Canons (CnC) Workshop last month. Check them out today!
 
 
CONTEXT: Workshop on Islamic Legal ‘Courts and Canons’ at Harvard  Last month, Professor Mairaj Syed (UC Davis) presented “Experiments in Searching for Islam’s Universal Canons on the CnC-Qayyim Platform” as part of our Courts and Canons (CnC) Workshop. To explore the literature on legal canons (qawāʿid fiqhiyya), Syed posed the research question: How extensively were universal legal canons cited in premodern canons collections? Searching for the universal legal canon al-yaqīn lā yazūlu bi’l-shakk (certainty is not superseded by doubt), Syed was able to use the SHARIAsource platform for searching canons, CnC-Qayyim, to identify all uses of that canon in his select corpus. He was also able to retrieve a list of results that indicated the amount of time the canon had been cited, the authors who have cited it, and the inter-legal school (madhhab) use—or lack thereof—of certain legal canons over others. Read about his work on the Islamic Law Blog or watch the video today! 
 
 

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December 2022
December 2022

2023-2024 Data Science Fellowship With the semester over, we're already planning for what's to come next year, including announcing our Data Science Fellowship for the 2023-2024 academic year! We are looking for a 2023-2024 Data Science Fellow who will work on various apps in the SHARIAsource Lab, a Harvard initiative designed to deploy data science tools on historical Islamic sources. The Fellow will be based at Harvard Law School, with opportunities to collaborate with various departments and partners—including the Harvard Libraries and the Library of Congress, SEAS and the Institute for Quantitative Social Science, and the Department of History and a community of scholars and students working on similar problems in DH. Successful forays into this data science-driven approach to the study of legal history will require building a corpus of texts from open-source online repositories; creating tools to extract, code, and map data and metadata with GIS and other means; and building algorithms that help relate key people, places, and books to one another through researcher-created data sets and linked open data. The Fellow will work on multiple components of this project. The ideal candidate will have completed a program in computer science or a related field (with a BA, MA, or PhD), have at least 3 years of experience in DH or development, have a background in RTL languages, and/or interest in Islamic studies, and would benefit from spending time working in a university setting on problems at the intersection of technology and academic research. The Fellow will work closely with the PI, Professor Intisar Rabb (Professor of Law & History; Director of the Program in Islamic Law and SHARIAsource Lab at Harvard). We look forward to ushering in the new year and all that is to come!

CONTENT: Abū Bakr Ahmad b. ʿAlī al-Jaṣṣāṣ' Kitāb Aḥkām al-Qurʾān Alongside developing data science tools to aid scholarly research, one aim of SHARIAsource is to expand access to primary sources of Islamic law. We recently added to the Portal several collections of Islamic legal canons (qawāʿid fiqhiyya), which are succinct principles of interpretation or substantive law that guide jurists and judges in deciding novel cases. Newly added sources include al-Majmūʿ al-Mudhhab fī Qawāʿid al-Madhhab  by Ṣalāḥ al-Dīn al-ʿAlāʾī (d. 761/1359), which is the third-oldest known Shāfiʿī canons collection from the Mamlūk era (following those of al-ʿIzz b. ʿAbd al-Salam (d. 660/1262) and Ibn Wakīl (d. 716/1317)). We have also added a second Mamlūk Shāfiʿī  canons collection called al-Ashbāh wa’ l-Naẓāʾir by Suyūtī (d. 911/1505), and an early Ottoman Ḥanafī canons collection with the same title by Ibn Nujaym (d. 969/1563). Professor Mairaj Syed (UC Davis) examined these collection as part of our Courts and Canons (CnC) Workshop last month. Check them out today!
 
 

CONTEXT: Roundtable on the History of Islamic International Law  Last month, we convened a live Roundtable on the History of Islamic International Law. Organized by Intisar Rabb (Harvard Law School) and Umut Özsu (Carleton University), who are editing a volume on the subject for the Cambridge History on International Law, this Roundtable brought together the contributing authors to that volume – all historians and legal scholars selected for their expertise on the contested status of various visions of international law from the medieval Islamic world to the Ottoman era (622-1923), spanning a variety of regions from across the globe. During the Roundtable webinar, contributing scholars reflected on and deliberated the larger themes, lingering questions, and ongoing debates surrounding the history of what we have become accustomed to calling ‘international law’. The discussion continued on our Islamic Law Blog, where we published  essays and summaries that preview the Handbook and emerge from Roundtable. 

 
 

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2021

January 2021

January 2021

Islamic Legal History & Historiography Roundtable: Methods and Meaning in Islamic Law Entering this new year, we continue the Roundtable on Islamic Legal History and Historiography featured on the Islamic Law Blog. This exciting new roundtable questions meaning and method in Islamic law through intersecting conversations with legal, social, and intellectual historians on their approaches. What is Islamic law and history about? How do we know? And to what end? How has it evolved and where may it lead? 

Kicked off with a letter from its editors Intisar Rabb (Editor-in-Chief) and Mariam Sheibani (Lead Blog Editor), scholars contributing include: Rula Abisaab (McGill University), Ahmed El Shamsy (University of Chicago), Maribel Fierro (Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas-Madrid), Ersilia Francesca (University of Naples), Robert Gleave (University of Exeter), Najam Haider (Barnard College), Joseph Lowry (University of Pennsylvania), and Elizabeth Urban (West Chester University), alongside an interview with Yossef Rapoport (Queen Mary University).

In particular consideration are some of the following questions: What have been the most significant methodological and historical developments in the field of Islamic law over the past two decades? How have mainstream and critical approaches from fields in the humanities and social sciences informed the study of Islamic law? How has data science - the use of quantitative methods and digital technologies - impacted the field or promised to shape the future of the field?

Visit the Islamic Law Blog for new posts throughout January and to participate in the February live Zoom virtual event. All publications and events are public and of open digital access. 

 

CONTENT:  Islamic Law Blog Top Five ʾAs we say goodbye to 2020, we reflect back on the Islamic Law Blog's most popular posts! Professor Ahmed El Shamsy leads us with his post, “How not to reform the study of Islamic law: A response to Ayesha Chaudhry,“ also featured in our current roundtable series on Islamic legal history and historiography. Akhila Kolisetty follows with her 2017 post, “Commentary: The Danial Latifi Case and the Indian Supreme Court’s Balancing Act,“ one of our most popular posts for a few years running. PIL Faculty Director, Intisar Rabb's introduction to the current roundtable series, “Methods and Meaning in Islamic Law: Introduction,” continues to gain traction with the roundtable currently underway. The 2016 post by Esther Agbaje, “Debt and Bankruptcy in Classical Islamic Law," also continues to garner popular attention. Last, but certainly not least, is “Against 'flattening the [curve of] diversity of approaches' to Muslim understandings of contagion in a time of pandemic,” by Justin Stearns. We look forward to the many exciting posts and guest editors lined up for 2021! 
 

 

CONTEXT:  PIL Book Talk Webinar  In our Islamic Law Speaker Series, Nathan Spannaus of University of Jyväskylä discussed  his new book, Preserving Islamic Tradition: Abu Nasr Qursawi and the Beginnings of Modern Reformism (Oxford University Press, 2019), which analyzes Abu Nasr Qursawi's reformism within the Russian empire, referencing its antecedents and sources in light of many historical shifts. He argues that Qursawi’s reformism was grounded within the existing scholarly tradition and its content was not subject to European influence. However, his reformism is perceived as a response to the incorporation of Islamic institutions into the bureaucracy of the Russian imperial state in the late 18th century, remaking the exercise of Islamic law and religious authority in the empire. Through this analysis, Spannaus ultimately argues that although Qursawi's reformism is grounded in the postclassical tradition, it is also an early example of Islamic modernism. Moderated by Program in Islamic Law Research Fellow Sohaib Baig, view the full webinar with English subtitles on the PIL website and Vimeo channel.

 

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February 2021

February 2021

Roundtable on Method and Meaning in Islamic Law and History: Online Dec 2020-Feb 2021; Live in March 2021  Last December we launched our Roundtable on Islamic Legal History and Historiography featured on the Islamic Law Blog. This Roundtable brought together leading and emerging scholars of Islamic law and history to weigh in on diverse approaches to questions of history and historiography, method and meaning in Islamic legal history. Professor Intisar Rabb wrote the Roundtable’s introduction to set the stage; in it, she succinctly introduces the themes and purpose of the roundtable, highlighting the most significant developments in the field from the mid-19th century to the present. Throughout the month of January, we’ve published eight new essays in the Roundtable. New contributing scholars include: Sohaira Siddiqui (Georgetown University in Qatar), Metin M. Coşgel (University of Connecticut), Boğaç A. Ergene (University of Vermont), Hiroyuki Yanagihashi (University of Tokyo), Marion Katz (New York University), Carl F. Petry (Northwestern University), and an interview with Wael Hallaq (Columbia University). Check out the two most recent contributions: an interview with Michael Cook (Princeton University) titled "Simplicity, Creativity, Lucidity as “Method” in the Study of Islamic History: An Interview with Michael Cook,” and a post by Marina Rustow (Princeton University) titled "Islamic law and the documentary record before 1500: Unsolved problems and untried solutions." Visit the Islamic Law Blog for new posts throughout February and register to participate in the March live Zoom Roundtable event, where 20 of the contributing scholars will square off. All publications and events are public and of open digital access. 

 

CONTENT:  Ayodhya Mosque One aim of SHARIAsource is to archive contemporary primary sources in support of research on salient topics. One set of sources pertains to the ongoing legal debates surrounding the disputed land in the Ayodhya region in the District of Faizabad, India, where the 16th century Babri masjid once stood. In recent news, the Indo-Islamic Cultural Foundation‘s futuristic design of the new Ayodhya Mosque, planned to be built on the site of the Babri Masjid that was demolished in 1992, sparked debate in the country. This mosque will be built on a 5-acre plot of land that was given to the Sunni Waqf Board following the 2019 Supreme Court decision regarding the disputed land. The court decided that the 2.77 acres of land be transferred over to a governmental trust for the purpose of building the Ram Janmabhoomi temple and an alternative 5 acres of land be given to the Sunni Waqf Board in order to build a mosque. This decision overturned the 2010 decision by the Allahabad High Court to divide the disputed land among three litigants. Our portal houses the 2019 Supreme Court case, as well as the 2010 Allahabad High Court case that it overturned. 

 

CONTEXT:  Spring Calendar of Events We are pleased to announce an exciting lineup of virtual events this Spring 2021! Our ongoing Roundtable on Islamic Legal History and Historiography will culminate in  a live discussion on the work of contributors and offer a chance to reflect on the larger themes, questions, debates, and conclusions that came out of the online Roundtable. Next we have the Islamic Legal Genres monthly workshop, convened by Intisar RabbHakki Arslan, and Necmettin Kizilkaya which will explore the definitions and diversification of genres in Islamic law during the 14th to 19th centuries CE. Also occurring monthly is our Islamic Law Speaker Series, which provides a forum for established and emerging scholars to talk about their recent scholarship, works-in-progress, or developments in the field. This series continues this Spring with presentations by scholars Sohaib Baig and Issam Eido. For video casts of past events, visit the the PIL website and Vimeo. Last but not least in our Spring lineup of events is the Islamic Law, Data Science and AI Lab. This lab will focus on emerging tools in the Islamic digital humanities / data science space, and to developing new components of our in-house data science tools. Stay tuned for more! 

 

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March 2021

March 2021

Battle of the Historians:  Last December we launched our Roundtable on Islamic Legal History and Historiography featured on the Islamic Law Blog. This Roundtable brings together leading and emerging scholars of Islamic law and history to weigh in on diverse approaches to questions of method and meaning in Islamic law and legal history. February’s contributions include Haider A. Hamoudi’s (University of Pittsburgh) ”Islamic Law from the Internal Point of View,” Irene K. F. Kirchner’s (Georgetown University) “Measuring interpretive authority: a methodological reflection,” and Petra Sijpesteijn's (Leiden University) “The continuum approach: Multiple legal solutions to run a diverse empire.” Professor Intisar Rabb, who wrote the Roundtable’s introduction,  concludes the online contributions with "Legal Canons as Memes," in which she proposes a conceptual and computational means of exploring Islamic legal canons (qawāʿid fiqhiyya) in a “meme pool” of legal and historical sources. From start to finish, we published 21 essays in 2021, to culminate in an online conversation featuring most of the Roundtable contributors. Register today to participate in this Friday’s Live Webinar on Islamic Legal History & Historiography (Friday, March 5th, 12:00-1:30 pm EST), where most of the contributing scholars will square off, and will reflect on larger themes, questions, and debates that emerged in the online Roundtable. All publications and events are public and open-access. 

 

CONTENT:  Online Companion to Justice and Leadership in Early Islamic Courts (first published by HUP 2019) 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. Our latest feature on the SHARIAsource portal is the new Online Companion to Justice and Leadership in Early Islamic Courts, edited by Professor Intisar Rabb (Harvard University) and Professor Abigail Balbale (New York University)—providing online access to and primary source snippets of the 2019 print volumeThis companion serves as a resource for readers interested in deeper exploration of the sources underlying the administration of justice during Islam’s founding period, 632–1250CE. It includes chapters by ten leading scholars of Islamic law and over 130 diverse sources that illuminate a broader and deeper vision of law and society than traditional legal literature alone can provide, including historical chronicles, biographical dictionaries, legal canons, and exegetical works.  overturned. 

 

CONTEXT:   Islamic Legal Genres: Genre as a Tool for Understanding Islamic Law
Through Monthly Lectures on Islamic Legal Genres, convened by Intisar RabbHakki Arslan, and Necmettin Kizilkaya, a working group of scholars explore definitions and functions of popular genres in Islamic law from the 14th to 19th centuries. The 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. Last month, Professor Mohammad Fadel (University of Toronto) presented “Form, Function and Historical Development of Mukthasars in Post-Mamluk Islamic Law.” His presentation aimed to identify the historical relationship of the mukhtasar to its literary predecessors and sociological functions. His presentation followed Professor Murteza Bedir’s (Istanbul University), on “Form, Function and Historical Development of Uṣūl al-fiqh as a Genre.” Subscribe to our lists for the latest on this ongoing workshop.

 

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April 2021

April 2021

Battle of the Historians:  Last December we launched our Roundtable on Islamic Legal History and Historiography featured on the Islamic Law Blog. The Roundtable was prompted by three major shifts in the study of Islamic law and history: the rise of digital humanities, an increase in the publication of handbooks, and new attention to more expansive categories of study, such as legal canons. This online discussion brought together leading and emerging scholars of Islamic law and history to weigh in on diverse approaches to questions of method and meaning in Islamic law and legal history. From start to finish, we published 21 essays , culminating in a Live Roundtable Webinar in March to highlight and discuss the various ideas real-time. We divided the online conversation into three panels, each covering a major theme from the online Roundtable. Michael CookNajam HaiderCarl PetryYossef RapoportMarina Rustow, and Elizabeth Urban took part in the first panel on Legal texts as sources, where they discussed disciplinary differences in approaching sources and gave advice to legal historians-in-training. Ersilia FrancescaRob GleaveHaider HammoudiMarion Katz, and Sohaira Siddiqui debated Approaches to fiqh texts on the second panel. Finally, Metin CosgelBogac ErgeneIrene Kirchner, and  Intisar Rabb outlined new work on Quantitative methods: Computational approaches to Islamic Law and history, where they discussed what can be gained by blending quantitative and digital methods with traditional approaches. The full webinar is now available at the PIL website and Vimeo.

 

CONTENT:  SHARIAsource Portal SHARIAsource is a portal for Islamic law that collects, collates, and organizes primary sources in tandem with scholars from other institutions. Organized geographically and historically, the Portal’s primary sources demonstrate the long and diverse history of Islamic law. We recently created a new ‘Books’ sub-category under the ‘Historical Primary Sources’ category in our Portal, which currently includes 58 out-of-copyright books. The SHARIAsource portal solely houses primary sources. For research, commentary, and analysis, see the related scholarly research published regularly on the Islamic Law Blog, the Journal of Islamic Law, and the Book Series in Islamic Law, all of which create ample space for conversation, debate, and new methods on the rich troves of primary sources in the field. 

 

CONTEXT:   Islamic Law Speaker Series In our Islamic Law Speaker Series, Issam Eido of Vanderbilt University gave a lecture titled "Early Ḥanafī Approaches to Islamic Legal Interpretation, 3rd/9th – 4th/10th Century" which focused on ʿĪsā b. Abān – a 9th-century Ḥanafī legal scholar who studied with and influenced leading Ḥanafī scholars of his period. Eido's talk explores how, amid the contested debates about the validity of ḥadīth as a reliable source of law, Ibn Abān constructed new criteria for measuring the authenticity of ḥadīth based on legal canons (qawāʿid fiqhiyya), and analogical reasoning (qiyās) as valid bases for legal interpretation and derivation. Ahmed El Shamsy of the University of Chicago served as discussant. See the full webinar on Vimeo.

 

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May 2021

May 2021

Congratulations Class of 2021! A Remote Year in Review: Congratulations to the Class of 2021! Going remote last March first gave us the opportunity to be innovative as we shifted online, expanding our many resources and programming to an even wider community. As we conclude a full year during these unprecedented times, we want to reflect on all of the exciting programs and events that came to light this year, some of which are still underway at the Program in Islamic Law.

The start of the term began with the Roundtable on Islamic Legal History and Historiography on the Islamic Law Blog. From start to finish, we published 21 essays, culminating in a live webinar that highlighted the diverse approaches to questions of method and meaning in Islamic law and legal history. Soon thereafter, we kicked off the year-long monthly workshops on Islamic Legal Genres monthly workshop, convened by Intisar RabbHakki Arslan, and Necmettin Kizilkaya, to explore the definitions and diversification of genres in Islamic law during the 14th to 19th centuries. This Spring has so far featured scholars Murteza BedirMohammad FadelSohail HanifAhmed El Shamsy, and Samy Ayoub, with more in the months to come. Our Islamic Law Speaker Series, which provides a forum for established and emerging scholars to talk about their recent scholarship, works-in-progress, or developments in the field, also continued this Spring with presentations by scholars Sohaib Baig and Issam Eido sharing their forthcoming scholarship.

Then there are the (particularly exciting!) data science initiatives. The SHARIAsource Portal added more curated special collections alongside its cache of primary sources of Islamic law contributed by scholar-editors and libraries around the globe. We developed two new data science tools this year— soon to be made public:  Courts & Canons (CnC) and SearchMonger— and continue collaborative work on eScriptorium and the related CorpusBuilder. These three projects result from collaborations that we believe will revolutionize the field by facilitating new research and insights into Islamic law and history. Stay tuned for summer news as we embark on exciting next steps: opening up each project to researchers, editors, and data scientists ready to join the growing community around them. First stop: check out Omar Abdel-Ghaffar and Jamie Folsom will be presenting our Courts & Canons (CnC) project at the Digital Humanities Summer Institute. Next: check out the Lab sessions you missed at the  Islamic Law, Data Science and AI Lab, convened by Intisar Rabb and Zahra Takshid, where scholars, students, and professionals highlighted emerging data science tools for Islamic use and watch out for news of the next Lab sessions featuring our in-house data science tools.

In short, we've been up to a lot! All of this has been achieved with the continuing support and engagement of both the local community – including students of the Class of 2021 –  and members of the global community, such as yourself. Thank you!

 

CONTENT:  Courts and Canons Database The Program of Islamic Law is currently developing a suite of digital Islamic law tools to expand access to and facilitate research in the field. The suite includes the Courts and Canons project, which is an interactive, collaborative project that places the Islamic legal tradition in a historical, socio-political, hermeneutical, and geographic context. The project allows researchers to study Islamic legal canons  as part of dynamic legal procedures spanning centuries and continents. By connecting legal canons to court cases, legal schools, scholars, rationales, and various textual sources, the project places each canon in context, allowing the researcher to record how each canon emerged and related to others. Omar Abdel-Ghaffar and Jamie Folsom will be presenting this project at the Digital Humanities Summer Institute next Tuesday, June 8th. Register for the event here.

 

CONTEXT:  2021 Paper Prize for Islamic Law  We at the Program in Islamic Law would like to congratulate Iqra Saleem Khan LL.M. ’21, for receiving the Dean’s Program in Islamic Law Writing Prize! Her paper is titled “Unwilling Cowives and the law of Polygamy in Pakistan” and was supervised by Professor Janet Halley, the Royall Professor of Law at Harvard Law School. Despite the remote nature of the this year’s program, Khan and her classmates decided to make lemonade out of lemons in order to make the most of their LL.M experience. This summer, Khan, who focuses on feminist legal scholarship, will continue her work as a research fellow for Women Living Under Muslim Law on a project called “Women Claiming Public Space.” through which she is analyzing the Aurat March in Pakistan, an annual women’s rally Khan helped organize for the past two years. To read more about Khan, check out her Student Spotlight. We look forward to following her journey and future scholarship!

 

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June 2021

June 2021

2020-2021 Event Roundup: We looked back at the year and found silver linings to the online year: it was full of unexpectedly rich gatherings online as we expanded our scholarly community to include those all across the globe; welcomed dozens of scholars, students, and editors to the Islamic Law Blog with features of their work and participation in the Roundtable events that outline the state of the field in Islamic law and legal history today with leading and emerging scholars;  and hosted a range of speaker series that explored the new scholarship of our fellows, form and function of Islamic Legal Genres historically, and recent developments in Islamic law and data science through the SHARIAsource Lab. We’ve brought it all together with a video montage of the year in pictures, and include here links to all of the featured scholars and students here from throughout the year. Stay tuned for news about research and data science projects to come, which lie at the intersection of Islamic law and the past as well as, well, the future.

 

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July 2021

July 2021

Hot Off the (DIGITAL) Presses: JIL Volume Two is Finally Out!:  We are pleased to announce the publication of the second volume of the Journal of Islamic Law. This peer-reviewed online Journal—published together with a regular Forum—features new scholarship in Islamic legal studies. Focusing on historical, comparative, and law and society approaches to Islamic law, Journal editors also have a keen interest in featuring data science tools and approaches to scholarship in this field. The Journal features long-form articles, essays, case notes, and other new developments in the field. The more dynamic Forum provides space for timely scholarly engagement and debate: invited roundtables on thematic issues of the day, essays on manuscripts or recent scholarship, and reviews of data science tools for the field.

We invite you to digitally explore the second issue which includes in the main Journal two articles, by Sohaira Z Siddiqui and Tobias Scheunchen, and a case brief by Thomas Francis on recent developments and scholarship in Islamic family law. A set of student notes by Cem Tecimer, Ari Schriber and Limeng Sun comment on primary source materials on the status of the Hagia Sophia museum-turned-mosque in Turkey, questions of pandemics and plague in 19th-century Morocco, and regulation of Uyghurs in China, respectively. The Forum features selected essays from the Islamic Law Blog's Roundtable on Islamic Law & Legal History, with contributions from Intisar Rabb, Maribel Fierro, Marina RustowErsilia FrancescaNajam HaiderMarion KatzHaider HamoudiJoseph Lowry, Bogac Ergene, Metin Cosgel, and Hiroyuki Yanagihashi. Check out the new issue today!

 

CONTENT:  Courts and Canons Database The Program of Islamic Law is currently developing a suite of data science tools designed to expand access to and facilitate research in the field. Led by Professor Intisar Rabb, one of these tools is the Courts and Canons (CnC) project, which is an interactive, collaborative project that places the Islamic legal tradition in historical, socio-political, and geographic contexts. This tool will allow researchers to examine Islamic legal canons  alongside the historical figures who used them and the values behind them, as part of dynamic traditions spanning and sometimes defying genres over many centuries and continents. By connecting legal canons to court cases and scholars, varied interpretive approaches, and myriad sources, the project facilitates insights into how and why each canon emerged and related to others. Omar Abdel-Ghaffar and Jamie Folsom recently presented this project a the Digital Humanities Summer Institute on Tuesday, June 8th. You can watch the video of their presentation here

 

CONTEXT:  Monthly Lectures on Islamic Legal Genres Through Monthly Lectures on Islamic Legal Genres, convened by Professors  Hakki ArslanNecmettin 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 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. Maribel Fierro (CSIC-Madrid) recently presented "Fatawa Compilations: Exploring a Legal Genre in the Islamic West." Her presentation followed Samy Ayoub's (University of Texas) on "Creativity in Continuity: al-Rasa’il al-Fiqhiyya as a Genre for Legal Change Monthly Lectures on Islamic Legal Genres." You can watch previous lectures here and read their summaries on our blog.  Subscribe to our lists for the latest on this ongoing workshop.

 

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August 2021

August 2021

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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September 2021

September 2021

How to change the future of research, with open access and digital tools?: We are excited to share that the Program in Islamic Law has initiated an unprecedented, multifaceted collaborative effort with the Library of Congress to add open access texts with data science tools on sources for Islamic law, historically and in the modern world. The collaboration has two parts – identifying and displaying sources free from copyright, and creating search tools that allow researchers to find them and other texts. Librarians and researchers—including faculty, fellows, and students—will team up to identify, select and assess the copyright status of materials focusing on national legal gazettes in the larger Muslim world. These legal gazettes play a vital role in legal practice and in scholarship because they are the primary sources for law in foreign jurisdictions and are often the only place where a law is published in that jurisdiction. They are the equivalent of the U.S. reporters and codes, containing American judicial and legal decisions. This joint effort, headed by PIL Faculty Director Professor Intisar Rabb and newly appointed Law Librarian of Congress Aslihan Bulut, will greatly expand public access to the Library of Congress’ gazette collections, which have been acquired since the mid-19th century for about 300 national and subnational jurisdictions.

 

CONTENT:  Islamic Constitutionalism 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. Our latest feature on the portal is the new Islamic Constitutionalism Special Collection, edited by Dawood AhmedMoamen Gouda, and Tom Ginsburg. This collection provides a survey instrument codifying the thirty "Islamic clauses,” which are those constitutional clauses that make a reference to Islam or having an Islamic underpinning, modeled after The 1978 Al-Azhar Constitution. The Islamic Constitutions Index (ICI) measures the degree of Islamicity of the Constitutions within the Muslim majority countries. This collection contains nearly 500 constitutions from across the world and from different time periods. Check out this special collection today!

 

CONTEXT:  Afghanistan, the Taliban, and Islamic Law  We recently curated a Resource Roundup on Afghanistan, the Taliban, and Islamic Law on our Islamic Law Blog. These resources collectively point to diverse approaches within a 1400-year-old legal tradition, spanning the globe, comprised of multiple approaches to law that are equally authoritative and all trying to determine how best to order society. The sources represent extensive yet digestible research grouped around five, thematic questions: (1) the definition of sharī’a, or Islamic law, generally (2) the existing and possible applications of Islamic law in Afghanistan under the new regime (3) the status of Islamic law vis-a-vis the state in Afghanistan and by comparison in surrounding countries in South Asia (4) perspectives and positions on women and gender in Islamic law, with a focus on the region (5) criminal law and the laws of war under Islamic law. Explore the roundup today!

 

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October 2021

October 2021

How is the application of data science tools to Islamic law reshaping the ways we do research?: Last month, we began convening the SHARIAsource Lab which brings together scholars, students, and data scientists to explore the intersection of Islamic law and data science. Led by Professor Intisar Rabb and, PIL Data Science Fellow, Dr. Yusuf Celik, the lab is an incubator for Harvard students to collaboratively work on Islamic law research at the intersection of primary sources and data science tools.  Students spend a semester doing a deep dive into a research topic or tool for Islamic law, meeting biweekly in working sessions among student researchers, computer science students and developers, and research or data science fellows; the sessions are designed to create new avenues for research and experimental combinations of islamic legal sources with digital/online tools. Lab members work together to develop and employ for research use  a suite of digital Islamic law tools designed to expand access to sources and research. As part of our SHARIAsource, we also launched a 'CnC Research group' this term,  bringing together a group of leading and emerging scholars from across the world to discuss research questions on Islamic legal history and interpretation using our new beta Courts and Canons (CnC) tools (which focus on early Islamic courts and on Islamic legal canons (qawāʿid fiqhiyya) as tools for interpretation). The CnC group allows researchers to study Islamic legal canons as part of dynamic interpretive questions spanning many centuries and continents. By connecting legal canons to laws (court cases, juristic opinions), people (judges and jurists), and places (regional schools, varied empires and eras), CnC will enable new research insights into the social and interpretive history of Islamic law. Stay tuned for more about these projects in the months to come. 

 

CONTENT:  Islamic Law in the Age of Colonialism One aim of SHARIAsource is to provide access to primary sources of Islamic law to support research on salient issues of Islamic law and history. Our latest special collection to feature on the portal is Islamic Law in the Age of Colonialism Special Collection: a collection of over 3300 legal writings, compendia, and related studies commissioned by, or in relation to, colonial powers ruling Muslim societies in the 19th and 20th centuries. The documents date from the mid-1800s to the early 1900s, and fall into seven regional divisions: British India, Dutch East Indies,  Africa, and Ottoman Turkey. These sources were digitized by the Harvard Libraries.

 

CONTEXT: Rachel Scott Book Talk Earlier this fall, on Tuesday, Sep. 14,  Professor Rachel Scott, an associate professor of Islamic studies at Virginia Tech University, spoke about her new book, Recasting Islamic Law: Religion and the Nation State in Egyptian Constitution Making (Cornell University Press, 2021). Scott discussed the intersection of Islamic law, state law, and culture in the Egyptian nation-building process. She argued that shari’a, when attached to constitutional commitments, transformed significantly to accommodate modern state laws. Moderated by PIL Research Fellow, Dr. Hedayat Heikal, the video is now available online. 

 

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November 2021

November 2021

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 ArslanNecmettin 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.  
 

 

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December 2021

December 2021

PIL: Our Year in Review As we near the end this year, we reflect on the past year at the Program in Islamic Law. We’ve been up to a lot! Going remote during this pandemic gave us the opportunity to expand our many resources and programing to en even wider scholarly community. Check out our latest newsletter to read about all of our events, data science initiatives, publications, fellows, and students– including all of our fun! In short, there is a lot there, more to come, and plenty of ways to get involved or participate online. All of this has been achieved with the continuing support and engagement of both the local and broader global community members, such as yourself. Thank you, our work is made possible by you.

 

 

CONTENT: CnC Root Finder The Program of Islamic Law is currently developing a suite of digital Islamic law tools to expand access to and facilitate research in the field. The suite includes the Courts and Canons project, which is an interactive, collaborative project that places the Islamic legal tradition in a historical, socio-political, hermeneutical, and geographic context. One of our current lab experiments pertains to the development of a classical Arabic search indexer, where researchers will no longer need to specify exact phrases when searching for an expression, but can merely do a lookup via a related root. Whereas most search engines require you to specify terms independently, this indexer allows you to view a variety of terms that reference a related root. This gives the researcher immediate knowledge of the ways in which language is practiced, opening up doors of possibility!
 
 
CONTEXT: New Book! Leaving Iberia Last month we announced the publication of the latest book in our Harvard Series in Islamic Law,Dr.Jocelyn Hendrickson‘sLeaving Iberia: Islamic Law and Christian Conquest in North West Africa! This book examines Islamic legal responses to Muslims living under Christian rule in medieval and early modern Iberia and North Africa. The fall of al-Andalus, or reconquista, has long been considered a turning point, when the first substantial Muslim populations fell under permanent Christian rule. Yet a near-exclusive focus on conquered Iberian Muslims has led scholars to overlook a substantial body of legal opinions issued in response to Portuguese and Spanish occupation in Morocco itself, beginning in the early fifteenth century. Check out the book today!
 

 

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2020

Jan 2020
Jan 2020

As the Ottoman Empire declined, did its intellectual legal discourse? This month our blog features Necmettin Kızılkaya. His first post, entitled "Ottoman Shaykh al-Islāms of the Nineteenth Century and their Intellectual Biographies," questions the common narrative of an Ottoman empire in simultaneous political, military, and intellectual decline. Image credit: Encyclopedia Britannica

 

SHARIAsource PORTAL: Online Companion to Malik’s Muwa ṭṭ aʾ Just launched on the SHARIAsource Portal is an Online Companion to the Book, al-Muwaṭṭaʾ – Recension of Yaḥyā b. Yaḥyā (d. 234/848). The Online Companion includes historical maps of principal cities of the Umayyad empire where the text originated and spread from Mecca and Medina to the Maghreb and al-Andalus. Readers of the Muwaṭṭaʾ can also link the work to its greater context through links to the online roundtable's ten expert commentaries, read biographies of historical figures, and compare Arabic to English excerpts of the text. Stay tuned for the full Arabic and English text, to be posted! Image credit: SHARIAsource/Program in Islamic Law

 

BLOG: What is dark matter in Early Islamic Law? This month our blog features Marion Katz , who references Jack Tannous' "recent book The Making of the Medieval Middle East (Princeton University Press, 2018)" to discuss the importance of "be[ing] vigilant for f leeting glimpses of the interpretive activities of ordinary Muslims" in Late Antiquity Christianity and early Islam. These activities are the "dark matter" of Islamic law because " the lives of [ordinary] unlearned people accounted for the great bulk of the religious experiences of the past but are rarely directly represented in our sources." Check out all of Marion Katz's posts . Image credit: Phys.org

 

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Feb 2020
Feb 2020

conference participants at tablesSHARIAsource & OpenITI Workshop on Arabic OCRThe Open Islamicate Text Initiative and SHARIAsource at Harvard’s Program in Islamic Law last month co-convened a two-day workshop at the University of Maryland on developments in Arabic OCR. Funded by the Mellon Foundation, the conference brought together humanists and computer scientists to explore over a dozen solutions to crack the code of how to create a robust and reliable tool for Arabic OCR of historical texts. Workshop participants tackled all sides of an OCR job. How can librarians best digitize Arabic, Persian and other Islamicate texts? How do researchers create a “ground truth” of transcribed texts that an Arabic OCR tool will then convert automatically through Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning? How do we create the best UI/UX design – user interface and user experience that will make the experience seamless? Participants live-tweeted highlights and blurbs on the tools presented at the workshop under the hashtag #OpenITIAOCP. Read more.

 

SHARIAsource search portalCONTENT: Libyan Constitution and Country ProfileOne objective of the SHARIAsource Portal is to ease comparative Islamic law by giving users quick access to multiple primary sources. The Libyan constitution from 2011 is available on the Portal for close analysis. The Portal's country profile for Libya offers a quick summary of whether Islamic law has legal status in the country and to what extent.

 

Libyan flagCONTEXT: The Libyan Supreme Court and the Meaning of Ribā: A New Approach?"One of the most vexing problems that modern high courts face when interpreting and applying Islamic law concerns the taking of money interest," writes guest editor Haider Hamoudi (University of Pittsburgh Law School). He directs attention to "Libya’s most recent foray into this field...because it seems to be a subtle and yet important move away from the dominant interpretations of the meaning of the ribā ban in our times."

 

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Mar 2020
Mar 2020

screenshot of PIL staff Zoom conference callNew Associate Director for a New EraThe Program in Islamic Law at Harvard Law School is pleased to announce that Mona Rahmani has joined the Program as our new Associate Director. Mona comes to Harvard with deep experience and vast background in data-driven research, international relations, and higher education administration. During these times of change and remote learning that come with a global pandemic, Mona will be critical to shaping new projects that both preserve the best of the old ways of sharing knowledge, and promise to change the way we think about building and sharing new types of knowledge by using innovative methods in digitization and data science. We are pleased to announce two new members of the PIL community as well: Sohaib Baig of UCLA will join us as an incoming 2020–2021 Research Fellow; Henry Shull has joined the team as the new Program Administrator. Our work goes on with gratitude and hope. We are grateful to be able to carry on the research and other exciting work that we do, with the addition of and a warm welcome to an expanding community with which to work. We are hopeful that we and the world will keep an eye on and help address the most vulnerable who lack good health, a safe haven, and secure work or access to resources. We look forward to working with all scholars and fellows, staff, and students in both veins. With best wishes that all keep healthy and safe and mindful during these times.~Intisar Rabb, Faculty Director

 

SHARIAsource search portalCONTENT: The Islamic Law of PandemicsOne objective of the SHARIAsource Portal is to facilitate a look at comparative Islamic law by providing quick access to multiple primary sources. We’ve collected advisory opinions (fatāwā) on responses to COVID-19 from various standpoints in Islamic law from around the world. This roundup documents some of the varied ways that governments and private institutions are invoking Islamic law to fashion pandemic emergency policies.

 

flattening the epidemic curveCONTEXT: How Is COVID-19 Affecting Islamic Law?Many countries have canceled jumuʿah (Friday prayers) in response to COVID-19. Imam Dr. Khalil Abdur-Rashid, Harvard University Muslim Chaplain and Instructor of Muslim Studies, Harvard Divinity School, offers an analysis of this decision based on Islamic law, featured in a two-part series on the Islamic Law Blog about different countries' COVID-19 initiatives.

 

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Apr 2020
Apr 2020

illustration of laptop displaying booksA Field Guide to Digital Islamic Law ResourcesEducators and researchers around the world are navigating teaching and learning in response to COVID-19 related disruptions and closures. We've put together a list of digital resources for remote research, teaching, and learning in Islamic law & history, featuring instructive links and annotations to SHARIAsource and other Harvard resources, a Digital Islamic Law Collection, and collected teaching resources. If you would like to contribute a resource, please fill out this form! Image credit: theness.com

 

SHARIAsource search formCONTENT: OpenITI's Corpus of Primary SourcesOne objective of the SHARIAsource Portal is to provide resources that enable innovative research around the rich Islamic textual tradition. The Open Islamicate Texts Initiative (OpenITI) has constructed the first machine-actionable scholarly corpus of premodern Islamicate texts. Our partners over at OpenITI aims to provide the essential textual infrastructure in Persian and Arabic for new forms of macro textual analysis and digital scholarship. The entire corpus is searchable online, using this link. Image credit: SHARIAsource

 

infographic from Maxim Romanov's 'al-Raqmiyyāt'CONTEXT: A Retrospective on Digital Humanities in the Time of COVID-19Digital Humanities scholars are reflecting on the use of machines for historical research. Maxim Romanov of the University of Vienna offers an analysis of the volume of text reuse in 14th-century Syrian historian Ḏhahabī’s Taʾrīkḫ al-Islām (The History of Islam). We revisit his earlier foray in digital humanities that is especially relevant to our times. In it, Romanov notes how computational methods on digital texts allow scholars to discover connections between, and use of, Ḏhahabī’s sources themselves. Image credit: Maxim Romanov, al-Raqmiyyāt

 

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May 2020
May 2020

The Islamic Law of Plagues and Pandemics, in HistoryThe Islamic Law of Plagues and Pandemics, in History Alongside the well-known Justinian Plague and the Black Plague in medieval Europe came plagues and pandemics in the medieval Islamic world. Less well known, plagues in Islamic law and history come with a trove of writings, both medieval and modern, that reveal much about their effects on individuals and public health, on economics and Islamic law. We invited leading scholars of plagues in Islamic law and history, plus some advanced students, to explore some of these themes in a new Roundtable on Plagues and Pandemics in Islamic History on the Islamic Law Blog.

 

SHARIAsource search formCONTENT: Fatwā on Fasting during COVID-19
One objective of the SHARIAsource Portal is to archive contemporary primary sources in support of research on salient topics. As the month of Ramadan has started, many religious leaders have issued statements and fatwās responding to questions around fasting during COVID-19. For example, Supreme Leader of Iran, Ayatollah Khamenei issued a fatwā on the legality of fasting during COVID-19.

 

Mapping COVID-19 Fatwās CONTEXT: Mapping COVID-19 Fatwās
In an effort led by Professor Adnan A. Zulfiqar, SHARIAsource editor and Associate Professor of Law at Rutgers University, we have collected over 50 fatwās that have been issued over the past month. We mapped the fatwās according to their country of issuance, and the extent to which they follow a new trend of fatwā-by-video, in hopes of generating new scholarship around timely developments.

 

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June 2020
June 2020

A note from the Director
Congratulations to the class of 2020! All of us at the Program in Islamic Law at Harvard Law School extend a hearty congratulations on your extraordinary accomplishments in your time here at Harvard, and particularly this last semester where you have shown yourself to be an exceptional class in exceptional times. These times provide an opportunity for a collective conscientious pause [see video]. 

 

SHARIAsource search formCONTENT: Eid in the Time of Corona: Fatwās and Statements by Jurists and Religious Leaders by Video and Tweet
One aim of SHARIAsource is to provide access to primary sources of Islamic law to support research on salient issues of Islamic law and history. One set of sources points to the varied perspectives that Muslim jurists and religious leaders announced on remote participation in Eid activities during the time of Corona. The disagreements about a remote Eid suggested hidden questions of authority: who is to call for Eid, it is a collective or individual obligation or celebration, is it about dispersed communities or formal states? We've compiled a roundup of fatwās and statements related to Eid and a robust dataset of over 100 fatwās and statements related to COVID-19. 

 

CONTEXT: Can AI in Islamic law help bolster the case for a strong rule of reasonable doubt?
A core goal of combining Islamic law with data science is the ability to mine a corpus of texts that tell us something about Islamic practice and values: for example, just how widespread, historically, was the operation of reasonable doubt or rule by evidence in Islamic criminal justice? Professor Mairaj Syed, Associate Professor at the University of California at Davis, in collaboration with Professor Intisar Rabb and Dr. Mariam Sheibani, lead an innovative experiment using Google’s new beta tool for semantic similarity of texts to detect instances of the doubt canon–requiring judges to avoid criminal punishments in cases of doubt–in works of substantive Islamic law (fiqh). Read more.

 

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July 2020
July 2020

We are excited to announce the launch of the Journal of Islamic Law! This open-access, peer-reviewed journal features new scholarship in Islamic law, legal history, and data science. In addition to attracting cutting-edge scholarship from leading scholars in the field, two innovative new features make it stand out: links between the scholarship and related primary sources or data science tools on the SHARIAsource portal, and an ongoing Forum to highlight less formal and more timely conversations and debates among scholars on recent developments in the field.

 

 

CONTENT: Saudi Arabia's Ministry of Hajj and Umrah on Hajj 1441H/2020AD 
As part of its growing archive of contemporary fatwās and related materials SHARIAsource, features the documents giving voice to the recent decision in the Kingdom  of Saudi Arabia on Ḥajj, the pilgrimage slated to take place next month. The Kingdom made the decision to impose strict limitations on this year’s Hajj in light of the continued risks of the COVID-19 pandemic. This decision falls into a larger spate of over 100 pandemic-related statements and fatwās issued over the past month collected in our Mapping Covid-19 Fatwās Project led by Prof. Adnan Zulfiqar of Rutgers Law School. 

 

CONTEXT: NEW! Islam and Data Science Roundup
We recently launched a new Islam and Data Science Roundup. The weekly collection points to news and scholarship in fields at the intersection of Islamic law, Islamic history, and data science. We explore new developments in digital and AI tools as well as research about them or scholarship deploying them in the field. Recent highlights include Junaid Qadir and Amana Raquib award from Facebook’s Ethics in AI Research Initiative for their project on Islamic legal ethics and AI, and Professor Mairaj Syed's two part series on natural language processing, machine learning, and Islamic law. 

 

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August 2020
August 2020

 On the Turkish Decision on Hagia SofiaOn the Turkish Decision on Hagia Sofia
In a charged decision surrounding the famed Hagia Sophia (Tr. Aya Sofya) and the status of outmoded waqf property, a Turkish court made international news last month when it issued a decision paving the way for converting the architectural icon that was once a church and then a mosque, from a museum. Days later, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan issued the order restoring its most recent status as a mosque and transferred its upkeep to the country’s Ministry of Religious Affairs. His order in turn annulled Turkey’s founding president Mustafa Kemal Ataturk’s 1934 presidential order that had turned the contested building into a museum, which followed its earlier conversion from a church into a mosque in 1453. The current government quickly named three imāms and held their first Friday Prayer after a 86-year gap. This series of decisions is extremely consequential and is especially remarkable for the way that the proceedings draw on history—late antique religious history, medieval military-political history, and early modern Islamic legal history, and law—a combination of Islamic lawinternational law, and domestic law in Turkey. We collected and translated all of the relevant legal documents on the SHARIAsource Portal, and commentary about them from leading scholars in our “Case Roundup: On the Turkish Decision on Hagia Sofia.” See the original texts and the full English translation of the 18-page Turkish court decision

CONTENT: al-Ṯurayyā Project

CONTENT: al-Ṯurayyā Project
As part of its growing set of digital resources and data science tools for Islamic law and history, we feature Maxim Romanov’s al-Ṯurayyā Project, an online, interactive map of the classical Islamic world. It invites the reader to become a virtual traveler to over 2,000 geographic routes from al-Andalus in the Islamic West to Samarqand in the Islamic East.

 

CONTEXT: Digital Islamic Law Lab

CONTEXT: Digital Islamic Law Lab
In our Digital Islamic Law Lab (DILL) this summer, we investigated new ideas for applying data science tools to Islamic law. Last month, Professor Najam Haider, of Barnard College at Columbia University presented his work on historical mapping in early Shīʿī law and history could, with the right computational power, self-generate maps based on geographic designations of legal schools and colloquial language use. 

 

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September 2020
September 2020

An Unprecedented Academic Year Begins The community at Harvard Law School and the Program in Islamic Law continues to gather and work not in spite of the disruptions caused by the pandemics of health and racial justice, but in light of them. We welcome back all students and scholars joining us - from here in Cambridge to cities across the world - all Zooming in. We have an exciting lineup of new data science projects and programming that turn out to be remarkably well-suited to these remote times. The silver lining of this pandemic playbook is a new impetus to embrace technology in ways that accelerate our ability to develop and more broadly share access to knowledge, build new digital platforms for collaborative discovery, and connect to a global community interested in the same. In meeting this call, we also warmly welcome new staff and a fellow for this academic year: Anne Brown (HLS '18) joins us as the new Faculty and Program Assistant; Meera Seth is our new Publications Coordinator, joining us from Oxford University Press; and, Sohaib Baig, having recently received his doctorate from UCLA, is the 2020-2021 Research Fellow. We look forward to year that allows even greater engagement with students, faculty and staff, scholars and fellows, and the wider community. Onward, with best wishes for a healthy, safe, and thoughtful year of growth!

CONTENT: 2020 Speaker Series The Fall Speaker Series is now virtual! We launch on Tuesday, September 15, 12:00-1:00pm US EST via Zoom with Professor Nurfadzilah Yahaya  of the National University of Singapore, Dept of History) speaking on her new book, Fluid Jurisdictions: Colonial Law and Arabs in Southeast Asia (Cornell 2020). Dr. Iza Hussain of the University of Cambridge will serve as discussant. 
 
 
 
 

CONTEXT: NEW Podcasts & Videos We’re bringing the conversations at Harvard to you. Although we did not know that the pandemic would call for sheltering in place, we had the foresight to interview scholars of Islamic law who visited Harvard over the past two years for their thoughts on the latest scholarship in the field, global developments, and ongoing debates. And now you can access the podcasts that resulted from those conversations throughout the Fall. The first podcasts including Maya Shatzmiller on equity and equality looking at the economics behind women's property rights in Islamic law and Omar Farahat on the foundational of norms that traverse Islamic law and theology.

 

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October 2020
October 2020

Islamic Law + History + Data Science @ MESA 2020 The Middle East Studies Association's (MESA) Annual Meeting is currently underway from October 5 through October 17, 2020 and now completely virtual! The Program in Islamic Law (PIL) has curated a roundup list of panels related to Islamic law/Islamic history and data science/digital humanities. Upcoming presenters include PIL editors and partners in data science projects with two main sessions that showcase developments in the field: Maxim Romanov (University of Vienna) on Big Data and Mega Corpora in Middle East Studies (10.08.20 at 1.30p) as a part of panel highlighting digital corpora and emerging software tools that facilitate historical analysis; and Maxim Romanov together with Sarah Bowen Savant (Aga Khan University-ISMC) showcasing the power of digital humanities to transform our understanding of the social and cultural history of the Middle East (10.15.20 at 11a), including a close look at training data sets marking chains of transmission (isnads) and a new approach to master chronicling Islamic history. Other presenters have included PIL editors Mairaj Syed (University of California, Davis) on Cities of Hadith: A Big-Data Approach applying computational and statistical methods of analysis on the data found in the Gawami al-Kalim hadith software to quantify and locate in space and time hadith transmission in early Islamic history; Najam Haider (Barnard College / Columbia University) on a panel Promoting Public Scholarship in Middle East History. For a full roundup of Islam & Data Science, Middle East Medievalists, and Harvard faculty and affiliates at MESA, see the full roundups here.

 

CONTENT: Kariye Museum Conversion Alongside the now infamous decision to convert the Hagia Sophia into a mosque, Turkish President Recep Erdogan issued Presidential Decision Number 2840 to transfer the management of a second site, the Kariye Museum, the Ministry of Religious Affairs to similarly restore it as a mosque. His executive decision followed on a November 2019 Turkish Council of State Court Decision Annulling a Cabinet Decision of 1945 Converting the Kariye Mosque into a museum; that decision held that there had been a contravention of the waqf (trust) deed that had dedicated the building as a mosque. Read more on the Islamic Law Blog case roundup on the Turkish Decision on the Kariye Mosque.

 

CONTEXT: PIL Book Talk Webinar In the first of our book talk speakers series, Prof. Nurfadzilah Yahaya of the National University of Singapore discussed her new book’s concepts of “Fluid Jurisdictions” of Islamic law as applied to varied ethnic and racial populations under colonial rule  in Southeast Asia at a time of transition between Islamic, Dutch, and British rule. Key questions concerned the legal authority and regimes over Arab immigrants and indigenous Muslim populations. Dr. Iza Hussin served as a discussant, and examined the seeming paradox of fluidity and jurisdiction in the feedback loops between legal institutions, texts, and other actors. The full webinar is available on the PIL website and Vimeo

 

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November 2020
November 2020

How and Why to Study Islamic Law Online This Academic Year The elections are underway. The pandemics keep us remote. And the only thing we can say for sure is that our work is more vital than ever: an imperative to gain and share knowledge (above ‘truthiness’) with all that’s unfolding in the U.S., France, and across the Muslim world. We will do so, and get through these unprecedent times together. As many of you know, Dean Manning recently announced that Harvard Law School will remain online for the rest of this academic year. We support the decision because we are committed to the health and safety of the campus community, and because we are committed to pursuing our mission of promoting research and providing resources in the academic study of Islamic law. The good news is, we’ve found many ways to do just that, as we adapt to this new virtual environment.

The SHARIAsource Portal houses curated special collections and primary sources of Islamic law globally; and it also anchors our digital humanities and data science initiatives. Three major new projects are set to soon launch: Courts & Canons (CnC) is a tool designed for registered users interested in the history and operation of Islamic law, to enter and search data in and about early Islamic courts and legal canons—principles of interpretation—used within them. StackLife 2.0 will offer new ways to search and visualize the Islamic collections across Harvard Libraries. CorpusBuilder will offer the first accurate Arabic and Persian OCR system for reading scans of historical texts, to operate alongside the corpus in the Open Islamic Texts Initiative (OpenITI) and other corpora, for new possibilities in natural language processing and machine learning in our field. And, we have a broad swath of freely accessible online publications: a new Journal of Islamic Law, original podcasts, recorded videos of past events, and the Islamic Law Blog, that will soon feature a new roundtable convening leading and emerging scholars on all the new methods of Islamic legal history and historiography. The silver lining of all of this is: there is a lot there, more to come, and plenty of ways to get involved or participate online.

 

CONTENT: HLS Library Guide Harvard Law School Library released an updated Guide to researching Islamic Law by Librarian for Islamic Law, Gayle Fischer, and Research Librarian for Foreign, Comparative & International Law,  Stephen Wiles. This guide details a trove of electronic sources, including encyclopedias on Islam and Islamic law; field-specific dictionaries in English, Arabic, Persian, and Turkish; full-text sites for searching the Qur'an and its commentaries in Arabic and in translation;  hadith collections with side-by-side translation; bibliographies on Islamic law; introductory works in English and Arabic; digitized Islamic manuscripts; indexed journals and databases for full text publications and bibliographic citations; international law guides, national gazettes, and chronicles; and, fatwas.

 

CONTEXT: PIL Book Talk Webinar In our Islamic Law Speaker Series, Professor Elizabeth Urban of West Chester University discussed her new book on Conquered Populations in Early Islam bringing the liminality of three groups in focus characterized by “unfreedom”: conquered non-Arab Muslim converts,  enslaved women, and the children of mixed unions between enslaved and free peoples. She explores the integration of new Muslims of slave origins and the categories of unfreedom and ethnicity: who are the outsiders, how does one become an insider, and what do boundaries of conversion assimilation look like? Professor Matthew Gordon of Miami University served as a discussant, examining the changing historical contexts of institutional stratification. See the full webinar on the PIL website and Vimeo.
 

 

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December 2020
December 2020

PIL: Our Year in Review As we near the end of this unprecedented year, we reflect on all of the Program in Islamic Law's newly virtual world. We’ve been up to a lot! Going remote in March 2020 first gave us the opportunity to put on our creativity and innovation hats as we shifted online, expanding our many resources and programming to an even wider community. First, are the data science initiatives. The SHARIAsource Portal houses curated special collections and primary sources of Islamic law globally from scholar-editors and libraries; the Portal also anchors our digital humanities and data science initiatives that have taken off this year: Courts & Canons (CnC), StackLife 2.0, and CorpusBuilder. These three major new projects result from collaborations that we believe will revolutionize the field by facilitating new research and insights into Islamic law and history. We are now ready to embark on exciting next steps: opening up each project to the researchers, editors, and data scientists who wish to join in collaboration.

Then, there are several digital publications: This year alone, we have published dozens of stellar new works of scholarship on fully accessible online platforms. The Islamic Law Blog reaches tens of thousands of readers, features scholarly commentary from experts in the field, and features roundtables on topical issues such as conversations on pandemics in Islamic history. Other resources and publications include the new Field Guide to Islamic Law Online, the Journal of Islamic Law, and its related Forum on Brunei's new Islamic Criminal Code.

Alongside the online digital tools and publications is robust programming that brings it all to life in a community of students and scholars coming together from all over the world. This year, our Islamic Law Speakers Series has shifted to a Zoom webinar format; the recorded videos are also posted  on the PIL website and Vimeo channel with closed captioning for accessibility. For our students, we offer regular teaching and advising, convene a Digital Islamic Law Lab to explore the intersection of Islamic law and data science, and offer myriad opportunities for student fellowships, research assistantships, and to serve on the Journal editorial board. In short, there is a lot there, more to come, and plenty of ways to get involved or participate online. All of this has been achieved with the continuing support and engagement of both the local and broader global community members, such as yourself. Thank you, our work is made possible by you.

CONTENT:  Online Companion to Mālik's Muwaṭṭaʾ This time last year, we published the seminal English translation, Al-Muwaṭṭaʾ, the Royal Moroccan Edition: The Recension of Yaḥyā Ibn Yaḥyā al-Laythī by Mālik b. Anas as a part of the Harvard Series in Islamic Law by Harvard University Press, edited by Prof. Mohammad Fadel (University of Toronto, Faculty of Law) and Dr. Connell Monette (President, American College Casablanca). We are now happy to highlight the accompanying Online Companion to Mālik's Muwaṭṭaʾ featured on the SHARIAsource portal. This special collection  serves as a resource for introducing interested readers to the translation of this core work of Islamic law's founding period by including an online introduction to the print translation of the Royal Moroccan Edition of the Muwaṭṭaʾ, excerpts of the the English translation itself, and supplemental materials that will provide further biographical and historical background to the people, events, and ideas that inform the legal texts, including maps and timelines, biographies of major figures, and a history of the text. Special thanks to student research assistant Daniel Jacobs (PhD candidate in History at Harvard) who supported the project.
 

 

CONTEXT:  PIL Podcasts and Streaming Events This year, we released a series of original podcasts hosted by Prof. Dana Lee (former Program in Islamic Law Research Fellow and current Assistant Professor of Law and Mohannad and Rana Malas Scholar in Islamic Legal Studies at University of California at Irvine Law) and Ari Schriber (PhD Candidate in Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at Harvard). The stellar line-up of guests feature scholars of Islamic law informally discussing their open thoughts on the field: Prof. Khaled Abou El Fadl (UCLA Law) on reclaiming shariah in the modern ageProf. Mohammed Fadel (Toronto Law) on the al-Muwatta' of Malik b. Anas as well as Dr. Connell Monette (American College Casablanca) on the new al-Muwatta' English translationProf. Omar Farahat (McGill Law) on the foundation of norms in Islamic jurisprudence and theology,  Prof. Mohsen Kadivar (Duke) on toleration in Islam, Prof. Ahmed El Shamsy (Chicago) on the study of Islamic law, Prof. Maya Shatzmiller (NYU) on the economics behind women's property rights in Islamic law, and Prof. Sylvia Vatuk (University of Illinois, Chicago) on women, marriage, and Islamic law in India. All podcasts are featured on the PIL website and Soundcloud channel

 

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2019

Jan 2019

Jan 2019

New Paper by Will Smiley :: State Legislation Against Islamic Law (Forthcoming)  In the Program in Islamic Law’s first Occasional Paper, Will Smiley of the University of New Hampshire takes a close look at state legislative bans on Islamic law, or sharī ͑a , as foreign law. His paper identifies and critiques the range of state bans on Islamic law by reviewing the cases presented by the Center for Security Policy (CSP)’s report on them. In a close analysis of the case law, Smiley challenges the CSP claims that U.S. courts apply foreign law, rather than—as the analysis shows—ordinary state and federal laws, state public policy, and principles of comity when in accord with the latter two. "In none of these cases would the various forms of proposed legislation have been likely to alter the result," writes Smiley. He concludes then that the bans are both ineffective, unnecessary, and possibly in violation of the U.S. constitution, as the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals concluded with the one state ban to mention Islamic law explicitly in the Awad v. Ziriax case in 2012. He further argues that, even if the bans are not unconstitutionally discriminatory in their effect, they nevertheless fail to achieve their claimed purpose. For the full article, read the Occasional Paper —also to be published as the lead article for our new journal, forthcoming in Spring 2019. Image credit: Southern Poverty Law Center

 

CASE :: Awad v. Ziriax (10th Cir. 2012): Federal Court Enjoins State Ban on “Sharīʿa Law” In the single case of explicit state bans to go up to a federal appeals court, Petitioner Muneer Awad sued defendant members of the Oklahoma Election Board. He sought to prevent certification of the election results of a proposed state constitutional amendment that would have prevented Oklahoma state courts from considering "Sharia Law." The Petitioner argued that the ban would have violated his federal constitutional First Amendment rights and sought an injunction against it. The Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals agreed, stating that Awad "will suffer such a condemnation injury [government condemnation of one’s religion] in violation of constitutional rights." It therefore determined that the Petitioner asserted the kind of direct injury-in-fact necessary to create First Amendment Establishment Clause standing, and that he had a likelihood of success on the merits of having the ban declared unconstitutional. It therefore confirmed the District Court’s injunction, making it permanent. Read more. Image credit: United States Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit/Wikimedia

 

PODCAST :: Islam: An American Religion : Interview with Nadia MarzoukiIn a new podcast series, the Program in Islamic law features Nadia Marzouki of CNRS Paris, discussing her book Islam: An American Religion(2013). SHARIAsource Deputy Editor Sharon Taiinterviewed her about the social-legal implications of Islamic law in the United States. This podcast is the first in a series of conversations that we will have and share with scholars in Islamic legal studies, writ large. Listen to the interview and read the transcript. Image credit: Columbia University Press

 

 

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Feb 2019

Feb 2019

Eid al-Ad ḥ a -- The Islamic Holiday of Sacrifice: A Temporal Difficulty? Student editor Sheza Alqera Atiq analyzes the EU Court of Justice decision on a preliminary ruling first issued by a court in Belgium in 2017 governing the regulation of animal slaughter, of the type in which Muslims engage once a year. As a part of the religious ritual practices surrounding the Ḥajj pilgrimage and to commemorate Abraham’s sacrifice of a ram in lieu of his son, each Muslim household sacrifices an animal that they then give part of in alms. The regulation essentially barred the “temporary slaughterhouses” that Muslims set up for this purpose and which previously had been approved by the Belgian government until 2015, and required all animal slaughter to take place in approved slaughterhouses. The Atiq explains that Eid, “with its accompanying sacrificial rites,” has “raised questions as to the neutrality of Regulation 1099/2009, and whether it constitutes an infringement upon religious freedom.” On her analysis of the Advocate-General’s remarks, Atiq writes "the preliminary ruling was not neutral” as claimed. They justified the decision on grounds that “temporal difficulties,” meaning that the yearly surges in demand for animal slaughter created shortages in the capacity of existing slaughterhouses, and raised questions about who should bear the increased costs. In Atiq’s view, the distinction between ‘temporal difficulties’ and regular practices “seems to be a false dichotomy; what appears to be a temporal problem of temporary slaughterhouses for the government arising from the specific occasion of ‘īd ul-aḍḥa still remains an essential religious feature for Muslims in Belgium, and across the EU .. and disproportionately discriminates against Muslims” The Muslim communities objected, leading to the EU Court of Justice review. Atiq reviewed the arguments on both sides, with an aim of offering alternative solutions to the problem. Read the full commentary. Image credit: Arab News

 

CASE ::  Liga van Moskeeën en Islamitische Organisaties Provincie Antwerpen and Others, C-426/16 (Court of Justice of the European Union, 2017) This EU Court of Justice ruling, delivered by Advocate General Wahl on 30 November 2017, addresses the controversy surrounding the Eid al-Adḥā ritual sacrifice case initially brought in Belgium. The AG heard the case upon a request for a preliminary ruling from Nederlandstalige rechtbank van eerste aanleg Brussel. The decision addresses Regulation (EC) No 1099/2009’s ban on slaughter in temporary slaughterhouses, which raised questions as to the neutrality of the Regulation, and whether it infringes on Muslims’ religious freedom. Read more . Image credit: United States Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit/Wikimedia

 

EU PROFILE :: The Court of Justice of the European Union The SHARIAsource Portal provides context for the status of Islamic law for every country and major region in the world, including the EU. For background on the legal and governmental structure, relevant cases, and constitutions of member nations, see the set of cases from the Court of Justice of the European Union, as well as the various constitutions and laws of EU member nations, such as Belgium, where the case of Eid al- Adḥā first arose . Image credit: Wikipedia

 

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Mar 2019

Mar 2019

SPECIAL COLLECTION :: Muftī Opinions on Family Law from 20th-Century Thrace (Komotini/Gumulcine)The SHARIAsource Portal collects and houses primary sources on Islamic law from all over the world. One such collection that we recently published on the Portal is a set of muftī fatwā s   from 20th-century Thrace. Ilker Tsavousoglou,  scholar of Islamic law in the region, collected this set of ten colorful documents that shed light on various aspects of family law in the religiously semi-autonomous region of Thrace, Greece (in Komotini/Gumulcine). Written in parallel Greek-Ottoman Turkish texts between 1946 and 1992, the documents are a peek into the daily operation of Islamic law in the region. Student editor Cem Tecimer  has provided summaries for each of the documents from the Ottoman Turkish of the opinions—which range from resolution of disputes over inheritance distribution , division of property between a woman's son and daughter , and Christian adoption of a child whose parents are Muslim. The documents also include notices granting  power of attorney , commenting on the position of  mu'adhdhin,and the duties of khatīb (who delivers Friday sermons). Read the opinions and their summaries here. Image credit: SHARIAsource Portal

 

CASE:: Molla Sali v. Greece (ECHR 2018): The European Court of Human Rights Rules Against Forcing Greek Muslim Minority to Follow Islamic Law In December 2018, the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) considered the question whether Muslim citizens who lived in the Greek province of Thrace could be required to submit to the jurisdiction of Islamic law, as detailed by local experts called muftīs. In Greek law, Islamic law usually governs matters of family law—such as marriage, divorce, and inheritance—in cases involving the Muslims in Thrace. In this case, the ECHR examined a Muslim man's will, which left all his property to his wife to the exclusion of his sisters, who challenged the testator on the grounds that muftīs’ authority in the region had been improperly circumvented. The Court determined that Muslims could not be forced to follow that authority. Read the full summary by Marzieh Tofighi Darian.  Image credit: Wikipedia

 

SOURCES :: Islamic Law in GreeceSHARIAsource’s Special Collections aim to facilitate research for Islamic law and comparative law scholars. In addition to primary sources that contextualize Islamic law's contemporary history in Thrace, the Greek region from which Molla Sali v. Greece emerged, the Portal provides sources on the larger context of the Greek legal system. See the Greece Country Profile (in the Country Profiles Special Collection) to see  proposed legislation " designed to prioritize Greek civil law over religious (namely Islamic) family law," the Greek constitution , and the fuller profile of Greece and its legal system. Image credit: Wikipedia

 

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Apr 2019

Apr 2019

Sports Law Conference Keynote Event :: Fireside Chat with Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf on Civil Rights, Social Justice, and the First Amendment  As the keynote address to the 2019 Harvard Sports Law Symposium on Apr 1, former NBA player and civil rights activist Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf spoke about his childhood, basketball career and experience advocating for social justice in the United States. Professor Intisar Rabb initiated the conversation in a “fireside chat” with questions about Abdul-Rauf’s inspiration for playing basketball, desire to become a legend in the league, and 1996 decision to not stand for the national anthem. This had been his way of bringing attention to hidden injustice, which he felt was his obligation, because “you can’t be for God and oppression.” Full details. Image credit: SHARIAsource

 

Spotlight on Andalusian Legal History :: The 11th-Century Toledan Heresy Trial and the Right of the Accused to Challenge Witnesses Maribel Fierro  examines 11th-century  reports   of a  case in which "a Toledan man named Ibn Ḥātim was accused of being a heretic by sixty witnesses on the initiative of a fellow Toledan called Ibn Labīd al-Murābiṭ."  At the time, Muslim-ruled  petty  kingdoms (mulūk al-ṭawāʼif )  were still reverberating from the shock of Barbastro's fall into Christian hands , and felt anxious about  a Christians’ military threat.   When the accusation came before him, the judge consulted with local jurists and eventually sentenced  the accused to death —but not without ensuring some legal process before the sentence could be carried out. The case proceeded as follows: The judge “ granted the accused the right to challenge the witnesses ( iʿdhār ). Ibn Ḥātim escaped from Toledo and found refuge in the neighboring kingdom of Badajoz. Ibn Labīd went after him, carrying a copy of the judge’s sentence ( tasjīl ) along with the legal opinions of a number of non-Toledan jurists. In Badajoz, the ruler withdrew his support from Ibn Ḥātim, who fled again, this time to Cordoba. While in Cordoba, the 'moral' police arrested Ibn Ḥātim, and the judge imprisoned him, giving him two months to prove his innocence. Unable to do so, Ibn Ḥātim was crucified alive." Fierro supposes  that the arguments against Ibn Ḥātim — a man whose reputation was once so excellent  that  he himself  was asked to testify about the reliability of  other  witnesses ( tazkiya ) — were influenced by the fraught political climate. "Disagreements between [scholarly Toledan] factions may have extended beyond the acceptance or rejection of the non-Islamic sciences to include disputes over social, economic, and political issues, especially concerning the relationship with nearby Christian powers."  The proceedings of this politically-tinged case raises  several questions of law:  should the right to challenge witnesses accrue to those accused of heresy? Should others grant refuge to those so accused? How should officials dispose of the estate or inheritance of someone executed for heresy? Can  one  judge vacate or reverse a sentence  handed down  by another judge?  For discussion of these and other questions, read the full analysis. Image credits: Google Earth/Luis Molina and Víctor de Castro 

 

SOURCE :: Two Fatāwā on Ibn Ḥātim's Charge of Heresy In his case against  Ibn Ḥātim, Ibn Labīd asked the resident jurists of five towns  in medieval al-Andalus  their opinions on Ibn Ḥātim's  heresy charge .  The five questions were as follows:  "1) Should the judge grant Ibn Ḥātim the option to challenge the witnesses ( iʿdhār )? 2) Might Ibn Ḥātim challenge the witnesses on the grounds that there was a prolonged time-gap between his alleged heretical expression and their testimony against him in court? 3) Who could inherit Ibn Ḥātimʼs property [were he convicted for heresy]? 4) Did Ibn Ḥātimʼs flight from Toledo legitimate the confiscation of his inheritance for the public treasury ( bayt al-māl ) prior to his execution? 5) Was it legal to provide Ibn Ḥātim refuge?"  Maribel Fierro  provides an overview of two opinions (fatāwā) : those of  Ibn ʿAttāb and Ibn al-Qaṭṭān , alongside discussion of the related judicial procedures in Córdoba. Read the fatāwā and proceedings. Image credit: Fanack.com

 

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May 2019

May 2019

Roundtable :: Tunisian Inheritance Law Reform Katarzyna Sidło  (Center for Social and Economic Research) organized an online roundtable on Tunisian president Beji Caid Essebsi's 2017 proposal to amend inheritance laws. She introduces the Roundtable by noting that, under the country’s current Personal Status Code – passed in 1956 – Tunisian citizens may not “allocate their inheritance freely and must follow” the inheritance divisions elaborated by Muslims jurists based on the Qurʾān (4:11-14) and  sunna  (reports of the prophetic example). The proposed amendment, if passed by parliament, will allow Tunisians choice: equal shares of inheritance between male and female heirs would become the default rule, from which those wishing to follow traditional Islamic legal rulings could opt out. In her own analysis for the proposed amendment, Sidło examines the issue with an economic lens . The common argument defending the traditional rules and upholding this type of legal gender discrimination in Tunisia is an interpretation of a Qurʾānic verse stipulating that men spend money to support women (Qurʾān 4:34) and thus require more inheritance money. Sidło disagrees, underscoring the contemporary realities of a large female labor force and wages in the MENA region. Mohammad Fadel  (University of Toronto) takes a pragmatic approach that helps explain why this proposal has raised so much controversy: "While the new law, if implemented, may not make a substantial tangible difference in people’s lives – especially given the ease with which ordinary Tunisians can continue to adhere to the previous inheritance law, regardless of the final form of the legislation – it does raise thorny theoretical questions about the nature of the Tunisian state, and the meaning of Islamic law in the modern world."  Request access to the full symposium to read and respond. Image credit: Nawaat

 

Country Profile on Tunisia The SHARIAsource Portal’s Country Profiles aim to facilitate research for Islamic law and comparative law scholars by detailing the history, role, and source of Islamic and other state laws in each country. The Tunisian Country Profile provides sources on the larger context of the Tunisian legal system, along with expert analyses on the religion-state divide in the MENA region. See the Tunisia Country Profile (in the Country Profiles Special Collection). Image credit: AliExpress

 

female labor force participation 2017Spotlight :: Gender and InheritanceSHARIAsource houses a number of primary sources and expert analysis on laws concerning gender and inheritance in the Muslim world, outside of Tunisia. A search of laws on gender and inheritance shows that each manifests in legal structures and proceedings differently. For some examples, see Pakistan's 2006 Protection of Women Act , various court cases from Indonesia, and an earlier symposium presenting perspectives from Chinese Muslim legal scholars on female clerics. Image credit: Our World in Data. Image credit: Our World in Data

 

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Jun 2019

Jun 2019

FEATURE :: Islamic Law Lecture Series The  Program in Islamic Law hosted a stellar set of scholars and public figures in the course of this year’s Islamic Law Lectures. If you missed them, you have not missed out. The  lectures are now available online! Just visit our Vimeo page. Our featured events include: Marion Katz on Wives, Housework, and the Changing Boundary between Islamic Law and Ethics, Mohammad Fadel on Spousal Abuse and Islamic Law Reform, and a fireside chat with Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf hosted by Professor Intisar Rabb as the keynote event of the 2019 HLS Sports Law Symposium. Image credit: Program in Islamic Law

 

Commentary :: Right to Counsel and the Problem of Distrust Student editor Marzieh Tofighi Darian traces the evolution of the right to counsel in criminal investigations in Iran, as highlighted in the process of drafting the country’s new Criminal Procedure Code in 2014 (amended in 2015). She argues that "the legislature missed a unique chance to make up for its long-time practice of ignoring this right," and thus "exacerbated the tenuous relationship between the judiciary and bar associations." Read more. Image credit: Geology.com

 

Spotlight :: Islamic Criminal Law The SHARIAsource Portal’s collections include criminal procedure codes from different regions that use interpretations of Islamic law as a source of legislation. For example, Iran recently enacted parliamentary revisions to its code . Indonesian-Aceh criminal laws came into force around the same time, including the procedures at the sharīʿa court of first instance . Fifteen years earlier, state councils in Northern Nigeria passed criminal procedure codes as well–now analyzed by a team of Nigerian and international scholars. Together, these new codes suggest a growing appeal of sharīʿa in criminal law. Image credit: The Conversation/Shutterstock

 

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Jul 2019

Jul 2019

NEW :: Islamic Law Blog The Program in Islamic Law is pleased to announce a new and improved Islamic Law Blog . Building on an old SHARIAsource blog, this new blog features roundups of scholarship and recent developments in Islamic law, and it welcomes contributions from scholars and students in the field. The new design makes it easy for both the novice and the adept to navigate content and get all the latest updates on Islamic law: from discussions on key issues of the day, roundtable-style debates on important cases, and reflections on historical and historiographical methods to a series of podcasts, reviews of scholarship “in plain English,” and a global calendar of all known events and opportunities related to Islamic law and history. With easy links to related projects, you can also easily search for sources on the SHARIAsource portal, check out the projects and events at the Program in Islamic Law, and soon read cutting-edge scholarship in the soon-to launch Journal in Islamic law. With thanks to the efforts of our new lead blog editor, Mariam Sheibani, we are especially excited to announce that this Fall will feature guest bloggers Mohammad Fadel, Ahmad Atif Ahmad, Marion Katz, and more!  Image credit: Program in Islamic Law

 

SHARIAsource Partners at UMD & OpenITI Receive $800k Mellon Grant to Create Arabic OCR Tool The Mellon Foundation recently announced it is awarding SHARIAsource partners at UMD &OpenITI an $800,000 grant to build out “Corpus Builder”—the first Arabic OCR tool for historical texts, and an integral tool for research on Islamic law and history. The team at SHARIAsource provided the platform and other significant support in building the initial infrastructure forCorpusBuilder 1.0 and will play a lead role in creating CorpusBuilder 2.0 together with in collaboration with the OpenITI team. Read more .Image credit: Open Islamicate Texts Initiative (OpenITI)

 

SPOTLIGHT: Digital Islamic Law Lab (DILL) The Mellon Foundation recently announced it is awarding SHARIAsource partners at UMD &OpenITI an $800,000 grant to build out “Corpus Builder”—the first Arabic OCR tool for historical texts, and an integral tool for research on Islamic law and history. The team at SHARIAsource provided the platform and other significant support in building the initial infrastructure forCorpusBuilder 1.0 and will play a lead role in creating CorpusBuilder 2.0 together with in collaboration with the OpenITI team. Read more .Image credit: Open Islamicate Texts Initiative (OpenITI)

 

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Aug 2019

Aug 2019

SPOTLIGHT :: India’s Criminalization of Extrajudicial Divorce The Indian legislature recently passed a legislative response to the country’s Supreme Court decision two years ago condemning a form of extrajudicial divorce in India, by which Muslim men pronounce the Arabic word for divorce three times (“triple ṭalāq“) and claim the practice to be authorized by classical Islamic law. The judges in the 2017 Shayara Bano case called their claim into question, and asked Parliament to intervene . In reviewing the case, LUMS Professor and SHARIAsource editor Zubair Abbasi in Pakistan noted that the Court had outlawed the practice of triple  ṭalāq   because it violated Muslim women’s constitutional rights. The Court gave the legislature six months to pass legislation that would address the problem. The legislature took up the charge but only passed legislation two years later, earlier this summer in 2019. Reviewing that legislation, Abbasi now assesses whether the law can protect women through criminalizing the practice among the men: "The Act, as its name suggests, is to protect the rights of married Muslim women by safeguarding them from being instantly divorced by their husbands. The Act does so by declaring triple  ṭalāq  to be 'void and illegal' and subjecting the offender husbands to imprisonment of three years and an unspecified fine."  Critics of the law raise concerns that it will prosecute Muslim men but has not taken affirmative measures to protect women. Abbasi's concedes to the critics' concerns and underscores the importance of focusing on how the law might protect Muslim women. Read more . Image credit: BBC

 

New Legislation :: Muslim Women Act of 2019 [India] In  Shayara Bano v. Union of India  (2017), the Supreme Court of India declared the practice of triple  ṭalāq  (instant divorce) to be an unconstitutional violation of Muslim women’s rights. Recently passed legislation, the Muslim Women (Protection of Rights on Marriage) Act of 2019 is the legislative response to that judgment . It criminalizes the practice of extrajudicial divorce through triple  ṭalāq with the aim of protecting Muslim women subjected to it. Read more . Image credit: India Today

 

CNEWS: New PIL Website We are happy to announce the launch of our new program website. Here, you can meet the evolving group of dynamic professors, fellows, and students working in the field, find out about our events at Harvard, and discover the range of global events and opportunities through a constantly updated clearinghouse of  jobs, conferences/CFPs, and grants in Islamic legal studies and related fields around the world. Scholars may be especially interested in our fellowship announcementspublications, and projects. Students can learn about relevant courses at Harvard and area schools, opportunities for travel grants, and an annual paper prize sponsored by the dean’s office at HLS.  A one-stop shop for all things related to the academic study of Islamic law and history.  Image credit: PIL

 

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Sep 2019

Sep 2019

Is Islamic Purposivism (Maqāṣid Al-Sharīʿa) a Thinly-Disguised Form of Utilitarianism? We are happy to welcome Mohammad Fadel (University of Toronto) as the ISLAMICLAWblog 's first guest blogger. His first piece grapples with academic critics of maqāṣid al-sharīʿa (translated by Fadel as "purposivism"), who "have latched on to the inherent connection between purposivism and the idea of maṣlaḥa (often translated as “benefit,” “interest,” or “public interest”) to argue that much of modern Islamic reform is little more than utilitarianism in an Islamic garb, with concepts such as “need ( ḥāja )” and “necessity ( ḍarūra )” displacing the rigorous moral and legal reasoning of prior Muslim jurists." Fadel argues that while some "appeals to purposivism" should indeed be treated with a healthy dose of skepticism, the absolute conflation of purposivism and subjective utilitarianism is misguided. Fadel turns to historical jurists, including Abū Isḥāq al-Shāṭibī, to distinguish between the two and argue for the consideration of the former in Islamic legal reform. Read more . Image credit: McGeddon/Wikimedia/Creative Commons

 

Recognition and Regulation of Muslim Marriages in South Africa In 2018, the Western Cape High Court in South Africa ordered the South African government to legislatively recognize Muslim marriages within 24 months. Waheeda Amien (University of Cape Town) considers the ramifications and efficacy of the order. "I have repeatedly argued," Amien writes, "that recognition of Muslim marriages, while necessary, is not sufficient to afford adequate protection for women’s rights. Regulation of the features of a Muslim marriage and divorce is also required." She goes on to say, "It is therefore fortifying to see that the language of 'recognition and regulation' of Muslim marriages ...is peppered across the judgment." Read more . Image credit: Creative Commons/Wikimedia

 

New Trends in Regulating Risk in Islamic Finance Innovation occurs as well in ways less tangible than what is traditionally defined as 'technology,' as UAE editor Paul Lee's piece on Islamic finance suggests. Lee details how U.S. and U.K. courts have attempted to marry Western and Islamic finance without compromising the principle of fair competition. Unlike patents or licenses, however, financial contracts must prioritize uncertain results, acknowledged by Islamic legal systems as ghararand Western court systems' approaches to regulation. Partly due to this uncertainty, and different strategies in accounting for it, an optimal compromise between Islamic and Western finance remains to be created. As of yet, such regulatory inventions occur on an ad hoc basis. Read more. Image credit: Blog: Brave Organization Never Dies

 

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Oct 2019

Oct 2019

Does Islamic Law Support Human Cloning? As a part of the 2019 Digital Islamic Law Lab (now published on the Islamic Law Blog), student editor Nicholas Kellum examines Resolution 100/2/10 on Human Cloning, issued in 1997 by the International Islamic Fiqh Academy (IIFA), located in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. Kellum's analysis discerns how one group of jurists makes arguments for and against cloning in Islamic law. In stark contrast from the reasoning used in Iran (and Shīʿī law) to get at similar outcomes, the Academy's resolution prohibits human cloning but permits other forms of cloning. The Saudi jurists questioning human cloning concluded from a syllogism based on two premises that human cloning was impermissible. But they left open the question of whether a prohibition on cloning would apply to complex forms of cloning that might help reduce human disease. In such cases, suggests Kellum, "the legal canons ‘harm must be eliminated’ and ‘acts are judged by their goals and purposes’ might permit greater human intervention." How jurists will address looming cloning questions remains to be seen; this case and these canons provide a starting place. Read more. Image credit: Wikimedia/Creative Commons

 

SOURCE SPOTLIGHT: Saudi Islamic Fiqh Academy Resolution on Cloning International Islamic Fiqh Academy Resolution 100/2/10 on Human Cloning (“Resolution”) cites a mixture of Islamic texts and scientific facts to determine the permissibility of cloning. Specifically, the Resolution cites the Qurʾān and ḥadīth, as well as a range of general scientific definitions and experiments. From the texts, the Resolution provides an overview of Qur’anic excerpts describing the purity of God’s creation of man and proscribing manipulations and interventions in it. The Resolution then defines ‘cloning’ as either cloning by division or nuclear transfer—both of which depend on intervention in the divine process of creation. Juxtaposing the two, the Resolution concludes that “[i]t is prohibited to clone human being[s] … by any [] method that results in the multiplication of human specie[s].” Read more. Image credit: International Islamic Law Academy 

 

NEWS: Program in Islamic Law Awarded Harvard Library's S.T. Lee Innovation Grant The Program in Islamic Law has received an S.T. Lee Innovation Grant, awarded to a collaborative effort led by Professor Intisar Rabb and Harvard Law School Library Associate Director Kevin Garewal. The grant "funds creative partnerships between Harvard faculty and Harvard Library staff that improve access to information and the experience of using library resources at Harvard University." PIL received the grant to work on StackLife: a tool designed for SHARIAsource to digitally aggregate disparate sources on Islamic law around the world and throughout history, permitting new possibilities for search, filtering, and visualization of key collections—filling a major gap in the current library cataloging systems. Image credit: Harvard Library

 

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Nov 2019

Nov 2019

Harvard Series in Islamic Law: Announcing a New Translation of Malik’s Muwa ṭṭ aʾ by Mohammad Fadel & Connell Monette The Harvard Series in Islamic Law's eighth volume is now available for purchase through Harvard University Press . Al-Muwaṭṭaʾ, the Royal Moroccan Edition: The Recension of Yaḥyā Ibn Yaḥyā al-Laythī is edited and translated by Professor Mohammad Fadel (University of Toronto Faculty of Law) and Professor Connell Monette (American Academy Casablanca). The Program in Islamic Law will celebrate the publication of the English translation of this seminal text with a scholarly symposium (invitation required) and a public book launch . See excerpts from the translators and RSVP to the events. Read more . Image credit: Program in Islamic Law

 

ONLINE SYMPOSIUM: Online Symposium on the New Translation of Malik’s Muwa ṭṭ aʾ The ISLAMICLAW blog is geared up to feature a special roundtable on the publication of Malik’s Muwaṭṭaʾ in translation, with author-translators Mohammad Fadel and Connell Monette discussing its importance together with scholars who regularly appeal to this early treatise of Islamic law . These scholars will contribute essays to the symposium on the text’s historical context; its reception in Medina, al-Andalusia and Subsaharan Africa, and beyond; and its significance for the very history of Islamic law. Symposium participants include Maribel Fierro , Marion Katz , Jocelyn Hendrickson , Ebrahim Moosa , Delfina Serrano , Ahmed El Shamsy , and more! Image credit: Creative Commons/Wikipedia

 

PORTAL: Online Companion to the New Translation of Malik’s Muwa ṭṭ aʾ The Portal will house the Online Companion to Al-Muwaṭṭaʾ . The Companion enriches the printed text by featuring maps of germane regions and biographies of relevant personages. Organized chronologically, these sources illuminate the social, political, and regional conditions in which Al-Muwaṭṭaʾ was originally written. Read more. Image credit: Samī b. ʿAbd Allāh b. Aḥmad al-Maghlūth

 

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Dec 2019

Dec 2019

Launched: A New Translation of Malik’s Muwa ṭṭ a ʾ by Mohammad Fadel & Connell Monette by Mohammad Fadel & Connell Monette On December 9th, scholars around the world came together to officially launch the new publication of Malik b. Anas’s Muwatta’ —an early treatise on Islamic law. PIL hosted ten scholars on the online roundtable featured on the Islamic Law Blog in the lead up to the public book launch. Convened by Professor Intisar Rabb (Harvard Law School) and Dr. Dana Lee (Harvard Law School), the events underscored the text’s historical and modern importance. The author-translators, Professor Mohammad Fadel (University of Toronto) and Dr. Connell Monette (American College Casablanca), discussed the contours of the work and the Herculean effort of its translation with three panelists, Professor Kecia Ali (Boston University), Professor Ahmed El Shamsy (University of Chicago), and Dr. Mariam Sheibani (Harvard Law School). Representatives from Morocco’s Ministry for Endowments and Islamic Affairs, which published the Arabic critical edition that served as a basis for this translation, attended as well: His Excellency Minister Ahmed Toufiq and Minister Delegate Driss Ouaouicha —their presence attesting to the international reach of the work. This book, the eighth volume in the Harvard Series in Islamic Law , is now available for purchase through Harvard University Press . Image credit: Program in Islamic Law

 

SHARIAsource PORTAL: Online Companion to Malik’s Muwa ṭṭ aʾ Just launched on the SHARIAsource Portal is an Online Companion to the Book, al-Muwaṭṭaʾ – Recension of Yaḥyā b. Yaḥyā (d. 234/848). The Online Companion includes historical maps of principal cities of the Umayyad empire where the text originated and spread from Mecca and Medina to the Maghreb and al-Andalus. Readers of the Muwaṭṭaʾ can also link the work to its greater context through links to the online roundtable's ten expert commentaries, read biographies of historical figures, and compare Arabic to English excerpts of the text. Stay tuned for the full Arabic and English text, to be posted! Image credit: SHARIAsource/Program in Islamic Law

 

BLOG: What is dark matter in Early Islamic Law? This month our blog features Marion Katz , who references Jack Tannous' "recent book The Making of the Medieval Middle East (Princeton University Press, 2018)" to discuss the importance of "be[ing] vigilant for f leeting glimpses of the interpretive activities of ordinary Muslims" in Late Antiquity Christianity and early Islam. These activities are the "dark matter" of Islamic law because " the lives of [ordinary] unlearned people accounted for the great bulk of the religious experiences of the past but are rarely directly represented in our sources." Check out all of Marion Katz's posts . Image credit: Phys.org

 

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2018

Jan 2018
Jan 2018

Islamic Early International Law: An 18th Century Ottoman Declaration of War with Russia Guest contributor Michael Talbot delineates the way a beyānnāme (declaration) sent in 1768 by the Ottoman reʾīsül-kuttāb (chief scribe) to Britain's ambassador to the Ottoman Empire sought to justify the Ottoman declaration of war on Russia in an Islamic law framework. The beyānnāme cast Russia's actions as a violation of treaty obligations by uses of the term naḳẓ-ı ʿahd G (breaking the treaty), which in turn has its origins from the Qurʾān. Through use of these and other related concepts, the document thus gives insight into eighteenth-century Ottoman attitudes to international law and its relationship with Islamic law.  Image credit: Wikimedia Commons

 

An Ottoman-Islamic Declaration of War against Russia, 1768 This document is a beyānnāme , or declaration, sent by Recāī Efendi, the Ottoman reʾīsül-kuttāb (chief scribe), to Britain's ambassador to the Ottoman Empire. It justifies the Ottoman declaration of war on Russia by casting Russia's actions as a violation of treaty obligations, giving insight into eighteenth-century Ottoman attitudes to international law and its relationship with Islamic law. Image credit: Wikimedia Commons

 

Webb v. City of Philadelphia (3d Cir. 2009): Ḥijāb with Police Uniform In recent developments in law and religion in U.S. law, female Muslim police officer Kimberlie Webb sued the City of Philadelphia under Title VII and the Pennsylvania Religious Freedom Protection Act. Alleging religion- and gender-based discrimination, she objected to the City barring her from wearing a headscarf ( ḥijāb ) with her police uniform, and argued that the prohibition amounted to a failure to accommodate her right to free exercise of religion under the First Amendment. The City argued that the bar was consistent with Philadelphia Police Directive 78 and that allowing her to wear religious garb would cause an undue burden on the City and the Police Department, in that it would compromise a look of cohesiveness and uniformity among officers. Find out how the Courts decided the case. Read more. Image credit: Wikimedia

 

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Feb 2018
Feb 2018

Should State Law limit the Scope of Speech about Islamic Law? On Egypt's Decision to Vet Fatwas Egypt’s Supreme Media Regulatory Council ( al-Majlis al-Aʿlā li-Tanẓīm al-Iʿlām ) recently decided to allow only fifty select individuals to issues opinions on Islamic law ( fatwā s). Professor Mohammad Fadel considers the implications of that decision, as well as any Islamic law or historical precedents for it. He observes that " classical Islamic law gave the ruler a substantial role to play in the public regulation of Islam." Fadel also emphasizes, however, that "it is important to note that the Islamic Middle Ages and early modernity were characterized not only by a normative pluralism in law...but effective toleration of religious dissenters, not only non-Muslims but also Muslims who dissented from theological orthodoxy." Egypt's move to centrally control the dissemination of dangerously incorrect ideas may depart from this historical practice and may undermine the very goal of countering extremism that is behind the decision in the first place. Image credit: Reuters/Darren Staples

 

Expanding the Jurisdiction of Pakistan's Federal Shariat Court Renowned Pakistani human rights lawyer Asma Jehangir passed away this month. Noor Zafar 's commentary examines one of her landmark cases,Abdul Waheed v. Asma Jehangir , which, she argues   expanded Pakistan's Federal Shariat Court's (FSC) jurisdiction. At the core of this conflict was whether the Lahore High Court must consider as binding precedent the FSC's judgment that the consent of a male guardian ( wali) is not required for a young Muslim girl to legally get married. The Supreme Court decided in favor of what it termed a "harmonious interpretation," ruling that "the interests of uniformity and notice dictate that the FSC be granted the authority to bind lower courts on certain issues implicating Islamic law, even if this authority transcends constitutional bounds." Read more. Image credit: The Express Tribune

 

The Muslim Family Laws Ordinance [Ordinance No. VIII of 1961] This regulation was issued to give effect to certain recommendations of the commission on marriage and Family Laws in Pakistan . The ordinance is crucial to the Pakistani Supreme Court case Abdul Waheed v. Asma Jehangir , which examined whether the Lahore High Court was bound to a decision of the Federal Shariat Court regarding Muslim Personal Law (MPL) in Pakistan. The relevant provision makes no mention of a requirement that a wali (male guardian) be present for a young Muslim girl to legally marry. Read more. Image credit: Dunya News TV

 

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Mar 2018
Mar 2018

SYMPOSIUM :: Does Islamic Family Law in the UK Need State Regulation? Last month, the British Home Office published a report   on the operation of Islamic family law in the UK: " The Independent Review of Sharia Law in England and Wales. " The UK Home Office produced the report as an official part of the British government's counter-terrorism efforts. Report authors sought to assess whether the UK's sharīʿa councils--groups formed of Muslim religious officials who mediate matters of family and personal law--discriminate against women and whether they should be brought within the purview of the British legal system. In a new symposium that assesses these developments, SHARIAsource invited academic experts in Islamic law in the UK to comment.  Professor Shaheen Sardar Ali   of the University of Warwick and  Professor Ralph Grillo   of the University of Sussex give their takes on the report. They critically assess and comment on the report and query whether its objectives are relevant to Islamic family law practices (e.g.,  nikāḥ religious marriage contracts, divorce) as they intersect with state civil marriage requirements (e.g., registration, solemnization) in the UK. Image credit : Kirsty O’Connor/PA

 

CASE :: The Prosecution of an Unregistered Married Couple in Aceh, Indonesia The distinction between state law and religious law remains administratively murky in many countries, including in the Muslim world. Student editor Waskito Jati  illustrates how a current case in Aceh, Indonesia, exemplifies the problems that result from poorly defined laws. In this case, a couple's marriage was deemed illegitimate because it had not been registered with the civil were accused of "committing  khalwat  (Ar. khalwa , the act of being in a secluded place between unmarried man and woman)"--a new crime specified by the Islamic Criminal Code in Aceh. Aceh still uses the secular Indonesian Marriage Law of 1974 in determining the legitimacy of a marriage, under which the couple would not have been subject to criminal charges even if their marriage was not registered, which was the basis for the conclusion of illegitimacy. This case exemplifies the dangers of new Islamic criminal law codes, especially where they attach criminal consequences to family matter. Image credit: Wikimedia Commons

 

IJMES Roundtable:: Digital Islamic Law: Purpose and Prospects SHARIAsource founding editor Intisar Rabb and deputy editor Sharon Tai write in the February 2018 issue of the International Journal of Middle East Studies on the main principles driving SHARIAsource's development. As it grows, SHARIAsource continues to integrate collaboration, accessibility, and usability within its approach to digital Islamic law, comparative law, and humanities. Read more. Image credit: International Journal of Middle East Studies/Cambridge University Press

 

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Apr 2018
Apr 2018

Avoiding Execution in a Medieval Andalusian Court: Religious Belief versus Judicial Procedure Cases of religious dissent in courts in the Andalusian Umayyad Caliphate provide insight into how one Islamic judicial system established procedures protecting non-Muslim constituents without undermining the sovereignty of the Islamic government.  Dr. Maribel Fierro of the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (The Spanish National Research Council) examines one such case as related by tenth-century biographer Ibn Ḥārith al-Khushanī, in which a Cordovan judge, Aslam b. ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz, is asked to decide the case of a Christian man who wished to be executed, even though he had committed no crime. He wished to die in imitation of Jesus. The Christian man claimed that, like Jesus, his true self, his spiritual self, would not feel pain if violently treated, and that only his earthly self would die. The judge ordered the Christian flogged in order to disprove that claim. This move "emphasizes the necessity of a ‘common sense’ approach to dispensing justice, given the probability that the claimants will act in folly." Furthermore, "the narrative presents violent penalties as a tool employable at the judge’s discretion," which, in this case, enabled the judge to acknowledge the desire of the Christian without acceding to his beliefs in court as a matter of law. Read more. Image credit : Abd-ar-Rahman III and his court in Medina Azahara receiving the Monk Juan de Gorza in 959 AD, by Dionisio Baixeras Verdaguer/Qatar Foundation

 

CASE :: The Case of the Christian Who Wanted to be Executed Maribel Fierro   translates Ibn Ḥārith al-Khushanī's report of a case from the Umayyad West, in which a Christian man appeared before the judge Aslam b. ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz, petitioning to be executed. The judge rebuked the man because he had committed no crime. The Christian contested that he wished to die as an act of virtue, as had Jesus, and further claimed that he would feel no pain because only his earthly body would perish. The judge ordered him flogged to disprove the Christian man's claims and avoid execution. Read more. Image credit: Ken Welsh/Getty Images

 

A Petition to the Ottoman Sultan from Egypt, 1155 AH (1742-3)s James Baldwin   of the University of London examines the close links between the Ottoman Empire's two methods of dispute resolution in two different venues: the sharīʿa courts and the Dīvān-i Hümāyūn (The Imperial Council). While the former was more procedural, the latter is understood to have been more patrimonial by virtue of the Sultan's magnanimity. However, in the resolution of this dispute between a Muslim and a Christian, it is clear that "petitioning was not a vehicle for the imposition of arbitrary justice based on the discretion of the Sultan or Grand Vizier ... the Dīvān-i Hümāyūn recognized the limitations imposed by the lack of a full adjudicatory process, and so often declined to make a definitive judgment, instead deferring to local authorities who were in a position to investigate a petitioner’s claim." Read more. Image credit: Jean Baptiste Vanmour - The Yorck Project/Public Domain

 

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May 2018
May 2018

SHARIAsource Special Collections :: The Nigeria Papers: Sharīʿa Implementation in Northern Nigeria SHARIAsource has launched a new set of Special Collections ! These Special Collections are curated resources in Islamic law compiled by staff and editors working in collaboration with SHARIAsource at Harvard Law School. Each is designed to focus on resources that facilitate research and teaching in historical, contemporary, and digital Islamic law. The first collaborative Collection is now available: The Nigeria Papers. Compiled and curated by independent scholar  Philip Ostien, and edited for the Collection by SJD student editor Rabiat Akande , The Nigeria Papers provide  a comprehensive collection of documentary materials and scholarly analysis on the programs of “sharīʿa implementation” undertaken by twelve northern Nigerian states beginning in 1999 and continuing today. The materials include various Northern Nigerian state statutes establishing Sharia Courts and other institutions, Northern Nigerian Islamic Criminal Law and Criminal Procedure Codes; and select court cases that have been widely publicized and criticized; and analysis of how Northern Nigerian officials are applying the new laws. Read more. Image credit : SHARIAsource

 

The Nigeria Papers:: A Sourcebook Volume I: Historical Background The first part of The Nigeria Papers Special Collection is the a Sourcebook that contains five volumes. Each volume covers a different topic regarding the implementation of a Northern Nigerian version of Islamic law. For example, Volume I provides historical background. It documents Nigeria’s “Settlement of 1960”, under which, as part of the run-up to Nigerian Independence, important changes were made to the laws and legal institutions of the Northern Region. These changes included abrogation of the previous Islamic criminal laws (as well of all varieties of “ethnic” criminal laws and custom that were formerly applied), and adoption of new Criminal Law and Criminal Procedure Codes that Northern Nigerian officials determine to be applicable in all courts in that region. In addition to the Sourcebook, with an additional set of materials, Phil Ostien provides a qualitative and quantitative overview of civil procedure in the new courts, of jurisdiction and judges, of the court caseloads, and of judgments imposed by the courts between 2011 and 2015.  Read more.  Image credit: Panos/BBC

 

SHARIAsource Selects 2018-2019 Visiting Fellow ILSP: SHARIAsource is very pleased to announce that  Mariam Sheibani will be joining us for the 2018-2019 academic year as a Visiting Fellow. We are excited to support her project  Islamic Law in an Age of Crisis and Consolidation: ‘Izz al-Dīn Ibn ‘Abd al-Salām and the Ethical Turn in Medieval Islamic Law . While this year’s pool was competitive, Mariam’s work stood out for its relevance and clarity of thinking. We are very much looking forward to having her here this fall after she receives her PhD from the University of Chicago and begins her career as a young scholar. Read more.  Image credit: Mariam Sheibani

 

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Jun 2018
Jun 2018

Today: Islamic Law in SCOTUS Senior Scholar Noah Feldman commented today in Bloomberg News on the U.S. Supreme Court “travel ban” case,  Trump v. Hawaii , calling the Court’s 5-4 decision to uphold the Executive Order restricting immigration to the U.S. of citizens from seven countries—most of which are predominantly Muslim— "a decision that will live in infamy." He had previously suggested  that " Justice Elena Kagan has a plan to end Trump’s travel ban. " But Feldman noted today that Justice Kagan " joined [pragmatist Justice Stephen Breyer ] in a more cautious dissent focused on the system of exemptions that the executive order permits ... [which, if used] would lend some credence to the idea that the ban was actually motivated by national security. " Feldman took issue with this approach: "Unfortunately, the wrongness of the travel ban lies as much in its symbolic effect as in its exclusion of people from five Muslim-majority countries. This wasn’t the right case for Breyer and Kagan to be quite so pragmatic." Related to Islamic law, the Executive Order bans immigrants from mostly Muslim-majority countries on grounds that falsely conflate Islam and Muslims with notions of sharīʿa or jihād as inherently violent. For example— as noted by counsel, lower-court judges, and the Justices who did not prevail— the presidential campaign statement initially calling for the ban falsely proclaimed that “Shariah authorizes such atrocities as murder against non believers who won’t convert, beheadings and more unthinkable acts that pose great harm to Americans, especially women.” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote the  majority opinion upholding the Order . In it, he focused on the "broad" and "ample" scope of presidential authority to regulate matters of national security and foreign affairs under the Constitution and under the Immigration and Nationality Act.  But the Court did not reach the Establishment Clause claim. Image credit: Wikipedia

 

Spotlight on Ismāʿīlī Law: A Case Study of Family Law Jurisdiction in Kenya This month, student editor Aleema Jamal places the spotlight on otherwise often elusive Ismāʿīlī law as it operates in modern courts. The Aga Khan, leader of the Ismā ͑īlī community— who refer to themselves in full as Shī ͑ī Imāmī Ismāʿīlī Muslims— sought to unify his followers under an Ismāʿīlī Constitution in 1986. The Constitution laid out a dispute resolution system that was meant to create a sense of community identity and ethos for a group dispersed across different states, even though it did not preclude the practice of state law on citizens of those various states. Two divorce cases in Kenya, Nurani v. Nurani in 1982 and TSJ v. SHSR in 2014 illuminated whether and how that goal operated in practice. According to Jamal, for the dispute resolution system to be effective internally, it had to be “subservient to, and reliant upon its relationship with the modern nation-state." Initially, the Nairobi Court of Appeal recognized and legitimized the Ismāʿīlī Constitution’s dispute resolution systems by providing a high degree of deference to the Ismāʿīlī Arbitration Council in the country's Kadhi courts. But by 2014, the Nairobi High Court determined that the Ismāʿīlī Council could only deal with matters 'not within the exclusive jurisdiction of either the ordinary courts or the Kadhis’ …courts.'"   Read more. Image credit: Wikipedia

 

Nurani v. Nurani (Nairobi Court of Appeal): Kenyan Ismāʿīlī Divorce Case of 1982 The Nairobi Court of Appeal adjudicated Nurani v. Nurani in 1982, a divorce case involving Ismāʿīlī parties seeking to separate. The Court held that it had concurrent jurisdiction with the Ismaili Conciliation and Arbitration Board for Kenya—deemed a “sectarian tribunal”— when, as here, both husband and wife submitted to its jurisdiction. Accordingly, the Court issued a decision on issues arising from the couple's divorce. The Court also clarified the role of the sectarian tribunal as a part of Kenya's pluralist legal system. Read more. Image credit: Wikipedia

 

TSJ v. SHSR (Nairobi High Court): Kenyan Ismāʿīlī Divorce Case of 2014 In TSJ v. SHSR , the Nairobi High Court concluded that the Ismaili Conciliation and Arbitration Board for Kenya lacked the jurisdiction to adjudicate a matter of divorce despite the fact that both husband and wife had initially submitted to its jurisdiction. Reversing a 1982 precedent laid out in Nurani v. Nurani , the Court rolled back the jurisdiction of “sectarian tribunals” and determined that only either ordinary courts or Kadhi Courts could have exclusive jurisdiction on such matters. Read more.  Image credit: Capital News of Kenya  

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Jul 2018
Jul 2018

Faith and Inheritance: A Case of a Vizier and Public Officials in 9th-Century Spain This month, Maribel Fierro examines a case concerning an accusation of apostasy during the reign of the Cordoban Umayyad emir Muḥammad (r. 238–273/852–886) from Ibn Ḥārith al-Khushanī’s collection of judicial anecdotes from al-Andalus. A jealous vizier, Hāshim b. ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz, "conspired to confiscate [the] fortune" of the emir's secretary Qūmis b. Antunyān al-Naṣrānī after his death by accusing him of apostasy. Qūmis had converted to Islam from Christianity, but the vizier sought to prove in court that Qūmis had never converted. To do so, he "acted clandestinely through two different channels. On one end, Hāshim b. ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz got a muḥtasib (a layperson who served as a market inspector) to collect attestations of the deceased secretary’s apostasy and bring the case before the Cordoban judge, Sulaymān b. Aswad al-Ghāfiqī. At the same time, Hāshim b. ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz brought the case to the emir’s attention, advising the emir that he might have rights to the inheritance of Qūmis b. Antunyān, if it could be proven that Qūmis died a Christian." The case was eventually brought to court, where the judge Sulaymān b. al-Aswad presided. The judge would not accept Hāshim’s attempt to manipulate the testimony and instead informed the emir that "the accusations against Qūmis were not verified and that those who had provided testimony against Qūmis could not be accepted as witnesses." Hāshim's fortune was thus distributed to his heirs. Fierro's analysis of the case takes into consideration the role of witness selection and procedure in accusations pertaining to faith and the legal consequences that follow in medieval Islamic law.   Read more. Image credit: Wikipedia

 

The Case of Asia Bibi : Apostasy, Public Opinion, and the Law The Asia Bibi case is one of the recent manifestations of blasphemy laws in Pakistan. The Applicant, Asia Bibi, a Christian woman, was sentenced to death by the trial court after allegedly uttering blasphemous statements against the Prophet Mohamed to fellow Muslim field workers. Student editor Aleema Jamal argues that Pakistan’s blasphemy laws and the public opinion that surrounds them creates a situation that makes it very difficult for those facing accusations to have a just legal proceeding.   Read more.  Image credit: Wikipedia

 

Spotlight:: Asia Bibi v. The State & Another (Lahore High Court of Pakistan): A Blasphemy Conviction In a recent manifestation of Pakistani blasphemy laws and the miscarriages of justice that can result, Asia Bibi was a Christian woman, sentenced to death by a trial court in Pakistan after allegedly uttering blasphemous statements against the Prophet Muḥammad to her fellow Muslim workers. Despite serious questions about the quality of her defense and the truthfulness of the allegations against her, her conviction stood as the Lahore High Court dismissed her appeal.  Read more.  Image credit: Times of Islamabad

 

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Aug 2018
Aug 2018

Dispute Resolution in Islamic Legal History: Mediation in Late Seventeenth-Century Cairo This month, Ottoman editor James Baldwin examines a court case, Shukr ibn ʿĀmir v. Shaʿbān ibn Nāfiʿ, from Cairo, dated 3 August 1667. In this case, the two parties bring charges against each other, Shukr accusing Shaʿbān of theft and Shaʿbān accusing Shukr of assault. Shaʿbān is able to produce evidence to substantiate his accusations, but Shukr cannot. Yet in the end, Shukr would receive thirty silver  coins, and "the two would declare that neither had any claim against the other, and [they would declare] a general, complete absence of debts," with no mention of compensation for Shaʿbān as victim of an alleged assault. Though each party started off presenting a serious grievance against the other,Baldwin notes that " it seems likely that the mediator sympathized with Shukr, " likely on the basis of class biases, even though Shukr failed to substantiate his claim. Followers of contemporary US and European law may recognize something familiar in this case : the decision to use ṣulḥ (mediation) yielded a different outcome than litigation, and the appearance of class status seemed to have something to do with the outcome.   Read more. Image credit: Ottoman History Podcast

 

Shukr b. ʿĀmir v. Shaʿbān b. Nāfiʿ: (Ottoman Cairo 1667) In this court record from Ottoman Cairo, dated 3 August 1667, two connected disputes are resolved by ṣulḥ (mediation) rather than litigation. Shukr b. ʿĀmir accuses Shaʿbān b. Nāfiʿ of theft, while Shaʿbān accuses Shukr of assault. Shukr fails to provide evidence to substantiate his claim, while Shaʿbān provides two witnesses for his claim. If the dispute had been adjudicated, the judge would have dismissed Shukr's claim of theft and held him liable for the assault. However, the litigants chose to enter mediation, which resulted in a very different settlement: Shaʿbān was ordered to make a modest payment to compensate Shukr for the alleged theft but dropped his claim of assault.  Read more.  Image credit: Encylopedia Britannica

 

SHARIAsource New Feature :: Special Collection: Country Profiles Under the direction of Library Editor Aslihan Bulut, SHARIAsource has rolled out a new resource that presents Islamic law profiles of every country of the world. Each Country Profile provides a basic overview of the legal history, institutional structures, and role (or lack thereof) of Islamic law in each country: divided according to member countries of the  Organisation of Islamic Cooperation, which includes some non-Muslim-majority countries,  and non-members. This collection of Country Profiles was developed in collaboration with or draw s in substantial part on research produced by the  Library of Congress , GlobaLex  at NYU, and  The Constitute Project  at the University of Chicago.   Read more.  Image credit: The Indian Express

 

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Sep 2018
Sep 2018

Roundtable of Scholars Weigh in on Major UK Islamic Family Law Case: Akhter v. Khan (July 2018) At the tail end of last month, a UK court decided a case of family law that has reverberated in legal-academic and media circles alike: what is the status of Islamic law in UK courts? Should state courts recognize Islamic marriages that have not been registered? Does religious law stand in the place of state law? Mr. Justice William touched on these questions in Akhter v. Khan (July 2018), his  decision issued from the High Court  of Justice of England and Wales. We provide a summary of the lengthy case in the SHARIAsource Case Brief   — outlining the facts and presenting excerpts from the original case, which may be found  here . We then rounded up six scholars of Islamic family law and related areas to weigh in and debate the implications of the case. Ralph Grillo (University of Sussex) provides an anthropological perspective ; Ralf Michaels (Duke Law School) discusses the ambiguous nature of the decision , while Rebecca Probert (University of Exeter Law School) critiques the decision's "failure to engage with the actual terms of the Marriage Act of 1949." Intisar Rabb (Harvard Law School) notes that the decision renders the union "something akin to what classical Islamic law would label a 'defective marriage.'" Hadeer Soliman , a practicing attorney, and Vishal Vora (Max Planck Institute) assess the practical repercussions of the decision , and discuss what it may signal about the direction of Islamic marriage and marriage as a whole within the UK. Read more. Image credit: Getty Images

 

Commentary :: DNA Tests in Morocco: Marking a Historic Turn in Islamic Law Guest writer Zaynab El Bernoussi (Al Akhwayn University in Ifrane) underscores the October 2017 decision of the Tangiers First Instance Court in which DNA tests were admitted as evidence in a family law case. The plaintiff was a mother who wanted to prove the paternity ( bunuwwa ) and lineage ( nasab ) of her daughter born out of wedlock. This historic move led the Moroccan court to "recognize paternity outside of wedlock," which was "was relatively unheard of due to the common practice of considering kinship [or paternity] claims in conjunction with lineage and the associated rights to title, names, and surnames." El Bernoussi explains the domestic and international law implications of this decision.  Read more.  Image credit: Wired

 

Case:: Moroccan Courts Recognize Then Reverse Paternity Recognition of Children Born out of Wedlock (Court of Appeals of Tangiers) A child born out of wedlock is typically not entitled to paternity recognition in Morocco. In an unprecedented move , the First Instance Family Court in Tangiers recognized the familial relationship connecting a father to his biological daughter. The Court also required the man to pay 100,000 MAD (10,500 USD) to the child through her mother for the material and moral harms caused to the child from denial of paternity or familial relations. The defendant appealed the judgment. On October 9, 2017, the Tangiers Court of Appeals overturned the First Instance Court decision, rejecting the DNA tests and any recognition of familial relations. The Court also invalidated the lower court’s use of international conventions, explaining that the child is so “foreign” to or removed from her father that the possibility of their future marriage would not be overruled. Read more. Image credit: Lucid Chart

 

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Oct 2018
Oct 2018

Sharī ʿa vs. the Constitution: Ex Ante Judicial Review of Iran’s New Criminal Procedure Code Student editor Marzeh Tofighi Darian considers the recent jurisprudence of Iran’s Guardian Council – the legislative-cum-judicial body in Iran tasked with assessing the compliance of state law with Islamic law and with the constitution. Iran’s parliament recently adopted a Criminal Procedure Code 2014 (amended in 2015). Tofighi Darian examines the Guardian Council's ex ante review of Iran’s 2014/2015 draft Criminal Procedure Code to illuminate the scope of the Council's jurisdiction and its role in Iran's legislative process. She outlines the range of strategies that the Guardian Council takes upon objections to proposed articles: (1) declaring draft articles generally invalid, (2) declaring draft articles to be “in violation of the Constitution," and (3) declaring draft articles to be “in violation of  sharīʿa .” Upon review, it turns out that, in most instances, the Guardian Council issues its rulings without citing  sources—neither those “of Islamic law or  sharīʿa , nor the Iranian Constitution as justification.” Moreover, most objections fall into category 3 – violations that it understands “to be against sharīʿa ." Arguably, there are negative long-term implications for Iranian legislation and legitimacy if the Guardian Council continues to invalidate parliamentary-drafted laws on the basis of sharīʿa but without a state rationale. The practice enlarges the role of Muslim jurists beyond the revolutionary constitutional mandate, and it raises serious questions for the institutional legitimacy of both parliament and the Council. Read more.  Image credit: Wikipedia

 

Iranian Criminal Procedure Code (2014) After several revisions made to the original Criminal Procedure Bill in answer to rulings by the Guardian Council, the Iranian Criminal Procedure Code became final and entered into force in 2014, with amendments in 2015. Read more. Image credit: Iranian Parliament/SHARIAsource

 

Professor Khaled Abou El Fadl on "Islamic Law in an Age of Fear" On October 1st, 2018, Professor Khaled Abou El Fadl spoke to a gathering of around 40 students and scholars at Harvard Law School for a SHARIAsource lunch talk entitled "Islamic Law in an Age of Fear." He discussed themes from his most recent book, Reasoning with God , focusing on the widening epistemological gaps between historical practice and modern consciousness. "The more law stops making sense to its audience, the more law has to resort to apologetics to legitimize itself ... inflating its own legitimacy at the expense of social reality [and] the more it moves towards a coercive system," (paraphrased) Abou El Fadl proposed. The event was livetweeted. More is to come when SHARIAsource releases a new podcast series with an episode featuring Professor Abou El Fadl and ILSP Visiting Fellow Mariam Sheibani. Image credit: ILSP: SHARIAsource

 

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Nov 2018
Nov 2018

Roundtable on Blasphemy Law in Pakistan: Asia Bibi v. The State (Nov 2018) Last month the Pakistan Supreme Court acquitted Asia Bibi of blasphemy charges, bringing Asia Bibi v. The State to a judicial conclusion. Asia Bibi's case has drawn international attention since she was sentenced to death for allegedly insulting the Prophet Muhammad in 2010. A controversial case both domestically and abroad, the October 8th decision was not made public until earlier this month. The Pakistan Supreme Court's decision brought forth questions about evidence, judicial independence, procedure, and the state's authority in matters of law and religion. A detailed summary and text of the Supreme Court decision may be found here; the appeal — originally dismissed by the Lahore High Court—may be found here. Three scholars of Islamic constitutionalism and law in Pakistan weighed in on the implications of the decision. Zubair Abbasi (LUMS) underscores how the judgment conveys to the general public that "only the State has the authority to prosecute for the offense of blasphemy through its courts." Imran Ahmed (UNE) points to the procedural problems of prosecuting blasphemy. And Rachel Mazzarella (Georgetown) advises that the Supreme Court judges highlighted several factors that complicate the history of blasphemy law in Pakistan as a result of complex interactions between British colonial rulers and Islamic legal norms. Read the full Roundtable. Image credit: Wikipedia

 

Asia Bibi v. The State (2018) : Pakistan Supreme Court Vacates Blasphemy Conviction of Christian Woman The Pakistan Supreme Court has acquitted Asia Bibi of blasphemy charges, removing her from death row. A Pakistani Christian woman, Asia Bibi, was arrested in 2010 after a dispute with her Muslim co-workers in which they claimed that she insulted the Prophet Muhammad. The state prosecutor charged her with blasphemy and the trial court sentenced her to death. The courts subsequently dismissed her appeal to the Lahore High Court . After a lengthy series of appeals, the Pakistan Supreme Court acquitted Asia Bibi of blasphemy charges, vacating her sentence. The decision navigates between affirming the law and reversing its application to Ms. Bibi. Read more. Image credit: Supreme Court of Pakistan/Wikimedia

 

Asia Bibi v. The State & Another (Lahore High Court) : Trial Court Blasphemy Conviction of a Christian Woman in 2014 The Asia Bibi case presents a recent manifestation Pakistan’s blasphemy laws. At trial, the Court sentenced Asia Bibi, a Christian woman, to death after accusers alleged that she uttered blasphemous statements against the Prophet Muhammad to fellow Muslim field workers. Despite serious questions regarding the quality of her defense and the credibility of the allegations against her, and despite the questionable Islamic legal basis for the decision, the trial court convicted her and the Lahore High Court dismissed the appeal. Read more. Image credit: Lahore High Court/Wikimedia 

 

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Dec 2018
Dec 2018

Vishwa Lochan Madan v. India (2014): The Legal Standing of Non-State Muslim Courts (Dar ul Qaza) and Their Fatwās In India Many governments around the world have grappled with the question of whether and how  to recognize Islamic family law stipulations in the courts. Should state courts recognize the individuals to whom religious communities turn for expertise  on issues of marriage and divorce? The United Kingdom says “no”: it rejects local Muslim Arbitration Tribunal decisions. The United States says “it depends”: courts will only recognize religious or foreign law provisions that accord with U.S. law or do not violate public policy. Editor  Jeffrey A. Redding  (University of Melbourne)   recently examined this question in India. In Vishwa Lochan Madan v. India (2014), the petitioner  asked the  Indian Supreme  Court to ban all non-state  forms of Islamic dispute resolution—including the  issuing  of  fatwās. The Court's decision  would  have been pivotal.  Instead, the Court  punted.  Nine years after the case was first filed, the Court maintained the cloud of  ambiguity  hanging over  the legal standing of   the  relevant piece of legislation that would answer the question. As Redding explains, the All India Muslim Personal Law Board (AIMPLB) is a non-state, private organization that runs Muslim tribunals called dar ul qazas, which can fairly be analogized to performing the role of Alternative Dispute Resolution. For Redding, the Court’s failure to recognize that analogy raised several questions. It leaves confusion about “what precisely differentiates non-state articulations of Muslim Personal Law from other forms of Alternative Dispute Resolution (ADR) in India, or even the informal operations of  lok adalats  ( a secular ADR mechanism in India)." Read more. Image credit: The Hindu

 

When a Fatwā Becomes Law: Examining the Fatwā's Place in the Malaysian Islamic Legal System Student editor Alizeh Ahmad explores recent developments in Malaysia, wherein local courts recognize certain  fatwā s as binding law. She notes that the situation and process of recognition seems rather unique, thus exploring the  "complex system that governs the institutionalization of a fatwā ’s authority." Read more. Image credit: Microsoft

 

LEGISLATION: Malaysian Law on Local Fatwā s as Law In Malaysia, state officials passed The Administration of the Religion of Islam (State of Selangor) Enactment  in  2003,  establishing a fatwā-legalization process. The law also outlines the role of the muftī as chairman of Selangor’s state fatwā committee. As the main piece of legislation governing Selangor's sharīʿa (Bahasa: Syariah) courts, Islamic finance  practices , and conversions  to Islam, the law serves as umbrella legislation for  Islamic  practices that  the state wishes to regulate. Full text and summary, by student editor Alizeh Ahmad. Image credit: Public domain/Selangor government

 

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2017

Jan 2017, no. 1

Jan 2017, no. 1

The Treatment of Women: Applying Islamic Law in Greek Thrace Greek expert Ilker Tsavousoglou (Ghent University) examines developments in Western Thrace, inGreece, to illustrate the complexities of modern legal pluralism where secular states have some jurisdiction for Islamic law. Greece recognizes an Islamic law jurisdiction in Thrace, whereby it accords muftī tribunals – muftīs being expert jurists who typically give advisory opinions in Islamic law – the authority to oversee and enforce Islamic law in the region. To some observers, this system limits Muslim women’s access to equal justice under the laws of Greece, because the Islamic laws governing their lives are uncodified and often permit differential treatment. This arrangement results in a type of “legal disorder”, Tsavousoglou argues, that twists legal pluralism into a “dysfunctional mechanism” for legal regulation. Moreover, the disparities that the different systems operating in a single region create are, he argues, unconstitutional under Greek law. Accordingly, the Commissioner for Human Rights of the Council of Europe and the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) have paid special attention to Greece on assessing the status of women in the region. Both organizations found “discriminatory treatment of Muslim women as an outcome of an extensive application of Sharia in their family and inheritance relations.” In response, they issued proposals designed to accord equal rights and opportunities to Muslim minority women, including educating legal professionals and religious leaders on the “norms and principles of [CEDAW].”The operation of Islamic law in Greece exemplifies the practical difficulties legal pluralism. Yet overall, the proposed solutions may “enhance the notions of legal pluralism and multiculturalism and effect the improvement of the levels of legal culture in Greece.” Read more.  Image credit: Library of Congress

 

REPORT: National Commission on Human Rights Decisions on Marriages by Proxy (Greece, 2003) Greece's National Commission on Human Rights has been taking a close look at Muslim women's access to justice in Thrace, Greece. Although the Greek government has carved out an Islamic law jurisdiction in Thrace, the state continues to question the legality of marriage by proxy and marriage of minors—two modes of marriage that the local practice of Islamic law permits. This document outlines the Greek government's analysis of whether marriages by proxy are compatible with "the national public order" and Greece's "obligations to international conventions." Read more. Image credit: Public Domain/Flickr

 

LEGISLATION: Introductory Report to the Bill, ‘Amendment of Provisions of Family Law’ (2010) Greek parliamentarians have signaled that they are concerned about the rights of Muslim women, especially young women in Thrace–which permits the operation of Islamic law to certain areas. A group of parliamentarians recently drafted a bill designed to prioritize Greek civil law over religious (namely Islamic) family law. One intent shared by the sponsors of the bill was to abolish sharīʿa altogether. However, the bill was never brought before Parliament. Read more. Image credit: The Worldly

 

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Jan 2017, no. 2

Jan 2017, no. 2

The Need for an Islamic Bankruptcy Code Student editor Esther Agbaje (HLS 17) suggests that sukuk (commonly called Islamic bonds) are insufficient to handle bankruptcy in financial systems operating with respect to Islamic law, or sharīʿa compliance. Banks and other financial institutions or municipalities that issue sukuk intend for these instrument to organize debt and therefore to be insulated from default. This idea seeks to implement the Islamic law financial principle of profit/loss sharing, designed to limit exposure to default by making both parties invested in the success of the venture. Thus, the Accounting and Auditing Organization for Islamic Financial Institutions – the premier regulatory authority in the Gulf for financial institutions engaged in Islamic finance – defines sukuk as “not debts from the issuer,” but as “fractional proportional interests in underlying assets, usufructs, services, projects or investment activities.” Usingsukuk for sharīʿa-compliant financing, the East Cameron Gas Company defaulted in 2008.With this example, Agbaje argues that sukuk offer an imperfect means of organizing debt or debt-organization schemes, the latter of which can often fail. In short, the East Cameron Company failed to pay its sukuk holders, investors that had loaned money to the company. In the end, a Chapter 11 (U.S. Bankruptcy Code) reorganization reset things by “transform[ing] the sukuk holdings into preferred stock options,” leaving the sukuk scheme Islamic in name only. If sukuk is not protected from default, then it stands to reason that other debt structures within Islamic finance are likely to be susceptible to failure using sukuk. The logical conclusion, Agbaje argues, is that countries that want to rely on Islamic financial instruments still need to develop (or borrow) bankruptcy codes to both support Islamic finance principles and to standardized regulations for handling loan defaults in cases of insolvency. Read more. Image Credit: SHARIAsource

 

REPORT :: East Cameron Gas: A New Frontier in Sukuk? This report assesses the attempts of a major oil company, East Cameron, to operate a large oil and gas company with respect to Islamic finance principles (so-called sharīʿa compliance). The bankruptcy proceeding that follows hints at the difficulty and potential conflicts of interest in creating sharīʿa-compliant financial instruments that permit company independence without sufficient mechanisms to avoid default. Read more. Image credit: Public Domain/Flickr

 

STANDARDS:: Auditing and Accounting Organisation for Islamic Financial Institutions' (AAOIFI) Sharīʿa Standards for Financial Institutions (2010) In 2007, the Auditing and Accounting Organisation for Islamic Financial Institutions (AAOIFI) considered about 85% of sukuk (commonly called Islamic bonds) to be non-sharīʿa-compliant. In 2010 they released these comprehensive guidelines on Islamic finance, including a section on sukuk (pg. 303), which outlines factors to consider when creating Islamic bonds. One such factor is industry, which affects how the terms of the sukuk should be decided. Read more. 

 

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Jan 2017, no. 3

Jan 2017, no. 3

The Danial Latifi Case and the Indian Supreme Court’s Balancing Act Islamic law is before the Supreme Court of India again, with the question of whether triple-ṭalāq is a valid way of dissolving a marriage: by a man simply pronouncing that his wife is divorced by saying that word three times. To understand where the Court might be going requires a bit of background. Following the 1985 Shah Bano case in India, the Indian Supreme Court was faced with protests from the Indian Muslim community over its perceived interference in Islamic personal law. This response revealed the political complexity of executing the Supreme Court's dedication to defending the constitutional rights of all its citizens. India editor Akhila Kolisetty uses the passage of the 1986 Muslim Women (Protection of Rights on Divorce) Act in 1986 and the Danial Latifi v. Union of India (2001) that followed to explicate the Indian Supreme Court's unenviable position of balancing gender and religious equity. The Muslim Women Act of 1986 limited maintenance payments to the iddat period (the three-month waiting period for divorce in Islamic law), leading to negative responses from women's rights organizations. Danial Latifi, Shah Bano's lawyer, challenged the constitutionality of the Act, calling it discrimination against Muslim women on the basis of their religion. Under the Act, women were excluded from the protections of the Indian Constitution's Articles 14, 15, and 21. The Court resolved this constitutionality quagmire by finding that a Muslim husband must pay the "reasonable and fair amount needed to maintain his ex-wife for the rest of her life...in total during the iddat period." This type of understated but sufficient solution "exemplifies a pattern within the Supreme Court’s approach to Muslim personal law: claims that "promote Muslim women’s gender equity while also limiting [the Court's] intervention into Islamic personal law to avoid potential backlash." Read more. Image credit: Wikipedia

 

LEGISLATION:: Muslim Women Protection Act of 1986 The Muslim Women Protection of Divorce Rights for Muslim Women Act was passed in 1986 in response to the Muslim Indian community's outcry against the Indian Supreme Court's decision in the Shah Bano case (1985). The Court held that a Muslim husband must pay maintenance amounts to his ex-wife for life-maintenance during the divorce waiting period. But many Muslim leaders considered this to be an intrusion onto their practice and perspectives on traditional Islamic personal law. The Act in effect overrode the Court's decision of 1985, limiting maintenance provisions to those that would be due during the divorce-waiting period alone (traditionally three months). Read more. Image credit: India Times

 

TRENDING: When Is a Texas "Poll" about Sharīʿa Not Really a Poll and Not Really about Sharīʿa? A Texas state legislator, Representative Kyle Biedermann, recently sent out what he called a poll to mosques across the state. It was a seven-page series of documents that selectively drew on false notions of Islamic law (i.e. sharīʿa) that are uninformed by fact, history, or sociological practice.  Sharīʿa , in fact, is the Arabic word for an ideal of justice, and often is used to refer to  fiqh  -- manmade constructions of that ideal. To refer to either is to refer to a broad and diverse legal system that is informed by different cultural contexts, scholarly interpretations, and community discussions over time and space. These facts' absence from the poll underscore the need for more informed discussion about Islamic law, or sharīʿa, especially as it becomes more and more a matter of  local  and  national  debate in our legislatures and  courts. Image Credit: SHARIAsource

 

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Jan 2017, no. 4

Jan 2017, no. 4

Women’s Right to Divorce under Islamic Law in Pakistan and India Indian Muslim women's rights are once again manifesting as debates over talaq (divorce). Shayara Bano, who holds an advanced degree in sociology, petitioned the Indian Supreme Court last year to rule on the constitutionalism of triple-talaq, in which a Muslim husband may divorce his wife by simply saying "talaq" three times with our without her consent. After she suffered fifteen years of mental and emotional abuse from her husband, he surprised her with a divorce, leaving her with little recourse for arguing terms. Shayara Bano v Union of IndiaWrit Petition (Civil) 118 of 2016 continues the pattern of using divorce cases as proxies for progressing women's rights. Pakistan editor Zubair Abbasi notes that this is not unique to India; Pakistani judges have also "tried to ensure gender equality under Islamic divorce law, but adopted entirely different approaches." Different judgments on various landmark cases inform these approaches. Citing the Qur'an, the Indian Supreme Court ruled in Shamim Ara v. State of U.P. (2002) that a Muslim man may not divorce his wife without reasonable cause, in effect limiting a Muslim husband's prerogative to divorce. In comparison, the Lahore High Court in Pakistan chose an opposite approach in the 1959 Balqis Fatima case by expanding Pakistani Muslim women's judicial right to khul' (a woman's limited right to divorce). The Supreme Court of Pakistan agreed with this reasoning nearly a decade later in the Khurshid Bibi case, citing the Qur'an to emphasize a husband and wife's mutual rights and obligations. Both approaches theoretically advance the cause of gender equality, but Abbasi emphasizes the unequal results. For women such as Shayara Bano who live in fear of surprise divorces, the Pakistani approach would have provided her with the agency to declare a definite divorce, an arguably more effective and desirable outcome than the possibility of forced reconciliation. Read more. Image credit: Newsgram

 

JUDGMENT :: Fatima vs Qureshi (Pakistan, 1959) Judged by the Lahore High Court in Pakistan, this case advanced Muslim wives' divorce rights in Pakistan.Three judges ruled that Islamic law -- that is, according to the Hanafi School prevalent in Pakistan -- requires a harmonious marriage. Should this not be possible, a woman is within her rights to obtain a khul' (divorce declared by the wife) as long as she is willing to return any benefits received from her husband.The Supreme Court of Pakistan would go on to uphold this reasoning in later cases. Read more. Image Credit: Wikipedia

 

AALS Leadership Issues Statement: Of Commitments to Academic Freedom, Diversity, and Faculty Safety, including the Section on Islamic Law In a message to member law schools of the Association of American Law Schools (AALS), officers of AALS remarked on ideological attacks against members who are affiliated with Islamic law, either professionally or personally. The Association stated its commitment to the safety of faculty at members schools and reiterated its “core values” of academic freedom and diversity. Should any members witness threats to academic freedom or safety of faculty, AALS will be ready to assist. Read more. Image credit: AALS

 

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Feb 2017, no. 1

Feb 2017, no. 1

The Dubai International Financial Centre and a Systems-Based Model for the Regulation of Islamic Finance UAE editor Paul Lee explains how the Dubai International Financial Centre's systems-based model is one solution for creating a sharīʿa-compliant financial system. "The Dubai International Financial Centre (“DIFC”) is a parallel legal system to the legal systems of the Emirate of Dubai and the UAE as provided for by a series of federal and local laws. The Constitution of the UAE generally confers exclusive authority to the federal government to regulate enumerated areas including, among other matters, 'civil and commercial transactions and company law,' while conferring residual authority to the individual emirates.However, the UAE amended its Constitution in 2004 to allow for legislation governing the establishment of Financial Free Zones, which are 'exempted from having to apply the rules and regulations of the Union.'” Read more. Image Credit: Wikipedia

 

LEGISLATION:: Dubai Law No. 12 of 2004: Judicial Authority in the DIFC This legislation established the Dubai International Financial Centre's court system. Read more. Image credit: Business Dubai

 

CASE: Jihad v. Fabian (D. Minn., USA, 2010) This case examines religious accommodation of Muslim prisoners in Minnesota prisons. The plaintiff claimed that adequate services were not offered for prayer and dietary requirements.  Read more. Image credit: J. Scott Applewhite | Star Tribune

 

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Feb 2017, no. 2

Feb 2017, no. 2

Gender Issues Are a National Problem, Not Just a Muslim Problem: A Response to Baroness Cox’s Statement Guest contributor Hadeer Soliman counters Baroness Cox's statement proposing Amendment 219(C) to the Policing and Crime Bill. "Baroness Cox, a cross-bench member of the UK House of Lords, recently proposed Amendment 219(C) to the Policing and Crime Bill, which would require celebrants of religious marriages to take all reasonable steps to ensure that the marriage complies with the marriage laws of England and Wales. The Amendment attaches criminal sanctions of up to three years of imprisonment for the failure to comply. Although the law does not specify a religious group, Cox said in her statement proposing the Amendment that it has “specific relevance for Muslim women who are adversely affected by the discriminatory rulings of many Sharia councils.” In her statement, Cox said that she was motivated by “deep concern” for women. Despite her claims that the amendment does not subscribe to anti-Muslim or anti-Islam sentiment, Cox’s proposal raises concerns about the way public officials approach and understand Islamic law and customs. Cox’s statement does not address how this amendment would solve the problem of unregistered marriages, given that the current language of the existing Marriage Act of 1949 already recognizes marriages only if they are solemnized by authorized individuals, marriages solemnized under the Church of England, practices of the Quakers or of the Jewish faith, or marriages that take place in a registered building." Read more. Image credit: Getty Images 

 

LEGISLATION :: Arguments on Amendment 219 (C) to the Policing and Crime Bill (UK, 2016) Proposed by MP Baroness Cox, the amendment requires all religious marriages to comply with English and Welsh marriage laws. Read more. Image credit: Creative Commons

 

CASE: Shamin v. Siemens Indus. (N.D.Ill., USA, 2012): Workplace Retaliation Claim In a case of discrimination in the workplace, on the basis of a Muslim plaintiff’s practice of Islamic ritual law, the plaintiff claimed he was unfairly discharged from a hostile work environment a few years ago. He alleged that derogatory comments about his religion and ethnicity were directed at him. These charges were brought against his former employer under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Respondents filed a motion to dismiss, stating the plaintiff's claims were procedurally barred. Read more.  Image credit: J. Scott Applewhite | Star Tribune

 

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Feb 2017, no. 3

Feb 2017, no. 3

Legal History of Religious Accommodation and Muslim Prisoners Guest contributor Bernard Freamon discusses the history of religious accommodation in prisons. "Four Muslim prisoners incarcerated in four prisons in the Michigan prison system just settled a federal lawsuit against prison officials. The lawsuit, Conway v. Purves, No. 13-cv-10271 (E.D. Michigan, 2017) alleged that the prisoners were denied sufficient nutrition when they fasted during Ramadan in 2011 and 2012. Although the Michigan prison system employs dietary policies allowing prisoners to fast during Ramadan, the prisoners claimed that the caloric intake provided to them fell far below national standards, resulting in the deprivation of a healthy diet resulting from their choice to follow Islamic ritual laws mandating a fast during daylight hours during the month of Ramadan. The prisoners alleged that this set of circumstances violated their constitutional right to the free exercise of religion, to be free from cruel and unusual punishment while incarcerated, and to equal protection of the laws, and that the prison officials also violated various federal statutory provisions...This settlement should not surprise anyone familiar with federal law or with the legal history of claims by incarcerated Muslims seeking recognition of their right to appropriately fast during Ramadan, in accordance with the dictates of Islamic law. In point of fact, there is an important history of claims by Muslim prisoners seeking the right to pray, fast, provide and receive charity, name themselves, marry, dress, employ hygienic practices, and engage in other behaviors mandated by Islamic ritual law. Consider the famous episode of Muhammad Ali and his use of Islam to appeal to social justice and to advance U.S. civil rights. Such claims can be traced back to the 1940’s, when Elijah Muhammad and members of the Nation of Islam were incarcerated for refusing to submit to draft board orders to join the U.S. military and fight in World War II, as in Clay v. United States. His fight was a prelude to the fight that these prisoners continue. In that sense, the actions of the Nation of Islam, and its campaign to achieve recognition and protection in America’s prisons, have been described by one author as 'landmarks in American religious and legal history.'" Read more. Image credit: Lucy Nicholson/Reuters

 

CASE: Conway v. Purves (E.D. Mich. 2013): Dietary Accommodations during Ramadan Four Muslim prisoners brought a suit against the Michigan Department of Corrections, claiming that the meals that were provided to them during the month of Ramadan provided inadequate nutritional and caloric value. They cited violations of their First and Eighth Amendment rights. Read more. Image credit: J. Scott Applewhite | Star Tribune

 

EVENT: Khizr Khan Speaks at the Kennedy School Retaliation Claim Khizr Khan spoke at the Harvard Kennedy Schoolon February 15th, discussing the recent election among other topics. HLS professor and SHARIAsource founding editor-in-chief Intisar Rabb moderated the forum, asking Khan to share his personal insights on issues of public policy.  He focused on the Constitution as a guiding force for his moral compass, especially in times of personal conflict. Watch here. Image credit: Harvard Center for Public Leadership

 

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Mar 2017, no. 1

Mar 2017, no. 1

CASE: Aleem v. Aleem (Md. Ct. App. 2008): Barring Unilateral Divorce Abed Awad, U.S. Editor, summarizes one of his recent cases on family law in which the plaintiff claims his maʿzūn-authenticated ṭalāq defers judgment of the divorce to the Family Court in Egypt."The story of Fouad v. Magdy, No. 312366/15, 2017 WL 485798 (N.Y. App. Div., 2017) starts in Egypt. In 2006, Dina and Amr—both Muslim Egyptian citizens—fell in love. They married shortly thereafter in Egypt and had two children. Amr accepted a job in Dubai, where the couple lived until 2012, when Amr was admitted to the MBA program at MIT. After his graduation in 2014, the family moved to New York City when Amr accepted an investment associate position at Deutsche Bank. It seemed like the parties had everything going for them, until Amr admitted he was having an extramarital affair. Amr convinced Dina to return to Egypt temporarily to give them space to work on their marriage. In July 2015, Dina and the children went to Egypt to stay with her parents. Sometime in October of that year, Dina realized that Amr was not interested in salvaging their marriage. On October 9, 2015, Dina filed for divorce in New York. Shortly thereafter she filed a motion seeking temporary financial support while the divorce action was pending. On October 20, 2015, eight days after being served with Dina’s New York divorce complaint, Amr, through a proxy, met with a maʿzūn—a government official similar to a municipal clerk. He asked the official to preside over and memorialize his ṭalāq (a type of divorce in Islamic law initiated by the husband) in an administrative action designed to dissolve his marriage. The law seemed to be on his side in Egypt. In Egyptian law, the maʿzūn possessed the authority to preside over marriages and these types of male-initiated divorces. In addition, Egyptian law, like Islamic law, permits Muslims to marry and divorce by proxy, that is, to have a representative in his or her stead to marry or divorce on his or her behalf. (In Egypt, a marriage is dissolved through either judicial dissolution or administrative dissolution. Amr chose to go the administrative route.). Dina was not present, but she would theoretically thereafter receive a copy of the completed ṭalāq decree notifying her that Amr had divorced her." Read more. Image credit: Billy Hathorn/English Wikipedia

 

CASE: Aleem v. Aleem (Md. Ct. App. 2008): Barring Unilateral Divorce During trial court proceedings in which a Muslim couple was dividing their marital property, the husband, Mr. Irfan Aleem, attempted to perform a “triple ṭalāq” divorce—a form of final, irrevocable dissolution of marriage under Pakistani law, initiated unilaterally by the husband. The Court refused to honor this type of divorce, concluding that it violated due process rights guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment by not giving Mrs. Farah Aleem any role or voice in the divorce proceedings. Read the case or see our simplified narrative. Image credit: J. Scott Applewhite | Star Tribune

 

EVENT: Amna Akbar on U.S. Law Enforcement and Counter-Radicalization Efforts SHARIAsource recently hosted noted scholar and civil rights attorney Amna Akbar, Assistant Professor of Law, The Ohio State University. Akbar provided a series of research findings from her study of counter-radicalization efforts by US law enforcement. Using her clinical practice as a source for discussion, Professor Akbar highlighted the impact these efforts have on social cohesion and community building. Read more. Image credit: Darrick Northington/SHARIAsource

 

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Mar 2017, no. 2

Mar 2017, no. 2

Freedom of Religion Under Threat Across Europe After EU Court Rules Employers Can Ban Headscarves Guest contributor Sara Silvestri examines the latest in the recent developments of the European headscarves debate."Employers across Europe have been given the green light to ban staff from wearing religious and political symbols after a ruling by the Court of Justice of the European Union (ECJ). The ruling opens up a Pandora’s box and could disproportionately affect Muslim women facing requests to remove headscarves in some places of work across Europe. But it is also likely to affect other people that display their religious affiliations through their dress, such as Sikh men, Orthodox Jewish women, nuns working in hospitals or schools, or those who overtly display their political affiliations or sympathies. The ECJ ruling related to two cases brought by national courts in France and Belgium, regarding Muslim women who had sued their employers. The women argued that they had been discriminated against at work for being asked to remove their veils – one by the employer and the other by a customer and subsequently by her employer – and were sacked when they refused to do so. Within the EU, national laws about equality and non-discrimination in the workplace are governed by an overarching EU directive from 2000, and the French and Belgian courts wanted clarification from the ECJ around how to interpret the law in these cases. The ruling will not allow employers to systematically ban the hijab and other religious and political symbols in all workplaces, but it does provide ammunition for those who want to ask their staff not to display religious symbols. The ECJ decided that if an employer’s goal is to provide services to customers in a neutral way, it is entitled to request its employees to remove visible religious or political symbols. But this logic around respecting the neutrality of the employer’s goals remains fuzzy, and seems to go against a previous ruling from the European Court of Human Rights, which has upheld the rights of employees to display religious symbols at work as part of their religious freedom." Read more. Image credit: Shutterstock

 

CASE: EEOC v. Abercrombie & Fitch, 575 U.S. __ (2015): "Ḥijāb Case" Facts: Respondent (Abercrombie) refused to hire Samantha Elauf, a practicing Muslim, because the headscarf that she wore pursuant to her religious obligations conflicted with Abercrombie’s employee dress policy. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) filed suit on Elauf’s behalf, alleging a violation of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which, inter alia, prohibits a prospective employer from refusing to hire an applicant because of the applicant’s religious practice when the practice could be accommodated without undue hardship. Read the case. Image credit: J. Scott Applewhite | Star Tribune

 

The Ongoing Public Debate on Islam in the Netherlands Jan Jaap de Ruiter discusses the public debate on Islam and sharīʿa in the Netherlands shortly before the March 15th parliamentary elections. "The public debate on Islam and sharīʿa in the Netherlands is lively. A danger overshadowing this discussion is the polarizing rhetoric of populist parties. " Read more. Image credit: Daily Mail

 

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Mar 2017, no. 3

Mar 2017, no. 3

Pakistan’s Federal Shariat Court and the Islamization of Prison Laws Judgment of 2009: Continued Expansion of Jurisdiction Student editor Noor Zafar examines how the Federal Shariat Court of Pakistan expanded its jurisdiction through its interpretation of "injunctions of Islam." "In the 'Islamization of Prison Laws' judgment of 2009, the Federal Shariat Court of Pakistan (FSC) expands its original jurisdiction by broadly construing the term 'injunctions of Islam.' It construes the term to both include general Islamic principles and 'the letter and the spirit' of said principles. This latter construction also gives the FSC wide interpretive discretion. In this judgment, the FSC was required to determine whether certain aspects of the Prison Rules of 1978, The Prisons Act of 1894, and the Code of Procedure of 1898 were 'repugnant to the injunctions of Islam' and in violation of the Pakistani Constitution. The petitions were filed by individuals complaining about, among other things: the unequal treatment of prisoners based on social class, the placement of women in the custody of male wardens, and various inequities in criminal procedure of hearing.The FSC is jurisdictionally limited to reviewing only laws that are potentially repugnant to Islam, that is, on constitutional grounds. Before it can proceed to the merits of the case, it engages in a three-part repugnancy test to determine whether the challenged laws fit within its jurisdiction.

  • Step 1: Determine whether the stated injunction of Islam covers the impugned provision of law or both are related.

  • Step 2: Determine whether the provision of law being challenged and the injunction of Islam can be harmonized.

  • Step 3: Determine whether the impugned provision of law can be given effect without violating 'the letter or spirit' of the injunction of Islam." Read more.

Image credit: Pakistan Supreme Court

 

Pakistan Penal Code (Act No. XLV of 1860) "This is the original and current Pakistani criminal code, dating from the British Raj. It has been amended and revised over the years." Pakistan's Federal Shariat Court analyzed this code, along with many others, for its 2009 "Islamization of Prison Laws” judgment of whether contemporary penal codes were in violation of Islam.  Read the code. Image credit: The Express Tribune Blog

 

Islamic Law in U.S. Courts: Husein v. Husein and Husein, WL 842023 (Ohio Ct. App. 2001) This case examines how matters of divorce and inheritance under Islamic law can be decided in U.S. courts when the circumstances have multiple people claiming to be a deceased individual's living spouse. This is part of SHARIAsource's Islamic Law in U.S. Courts series. Read more. Image credit: United States Supreme Court

 

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Apr 2017, no. 1

Apr 2017, no. 1

Review :: Fadel on the Function of the “Interest Ban” in Islamic Finance Student editor Alicia Daniel reviews Mohammad H. Fadel, Ribâ, Efficiency and Prudential Regulation: Preliminary Thoughts, 25 Wisconsin Journal of International Law 655 (2008)"Islamic finance creates financial products specifically aimed at Muslims that are sharīʿa compliant. Many scholars have condemned Islamic finance for condemning ribā (interest) on the one hand, particularly where usurious, but then many others have created workarounds that allow modern big-finance firms to avoid it in name only on the other hand. Those who argue against the workaround argue that nominal interest-avoidance goes against the spirit of the guidelines set forth in Islamic law (sharīʿa). Weighing in on the controversy, University of Toronto Law Professor Mohammad Fadel considers whether ribā might serve a function that goes beyond simple definitions of it as either interest or usury. Historically, the prohibition on interest was a means of regulating medieval financial industries, in ways that have little application to the modern financial instruments. The medieval prohibitions and the modern controversies about Islamic finance then, he argues, are misaligned and need rethinking. This post provides a “plain English” review of the article: Mohammad H. Fadel, Ribâ, Efficiency and Prudential Regulation: Preliminary Thoughts, 25 Wisconsin Journal of International Law 655 (2008)." Read more. Image Credit: SHARIAsource

 

Reconciling the Impermissibility of Conventional Options Contracts with the Bai’ al-Urbun Guest contributor Meagan Froemming counters critics of modern Islamic finance practice by highlighting overlooked innovations of some financial instruments. Read more. Image credit: Raconteur/Russian Council

 

Islamic Law in U.S. Courts: Vinewood Capital v. Dar al-Maal al-Islami Trust (5th Cir. 2008) This case examines a mudaraba agreement signed in Texas, and whether its signatories are subject to its arbitration clause when the signatories have also signed a prior contract.  This is part of SHARIAsource's Islamic Law in U.S. Courts series. Read more. Image credit: United States Supreme Court

 

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Apr 2017, no. 2

Apr 2017, no. 2

What Does it Mean for U.S. Court Decisions to be “Based On” Islamic Law? SHARIAsource editor Will Smiley questions the strength of the arguments behind proposed "anti-sharīʿa" legislation in Montana, including claims of Islamic law undermining American law. "Americans continue to debate, as they have since at least 2010, whether states should ban their courts from considering Islamic law, or “foreign” law more generally, in their decisions. Montana’s pending SB 97, if passed, would be one such ban, preventing courts from “bas[ing] its ruling or decision on a law, legal code, or system that would not grant the parties affected by the ruling or decision the fundamental liberties, rights, and privileges granted under the Montana constitution or the United States constitution.” A recent editorial in the Montana Standard, written by Cindy Sanderson, advocates this bill by citing several cases in which courts, she argues, have cited Islamic law. This list of cases, however, conflates several different things. Some of these decisions involved parties who tried to rely on Islamic beliefs in their arguments; others involved parties who made agreements based on their understanding of Islamic law; and others still involved court decisions from foreign countries whose law is partly inspired by Islamic law. These are all different situations. More importantly, just because all of these cases involved Islamic or foreign law in some way, does not mean that courts followed Islamic law, or based their decisions on Islamic law. That is the critical issue, because only decisions based on foreign law would be banned by Montana’s SB 97. Only a few of the cases Sanderson cites have been based on foreign law, and only after courts considered whether that law met American standards. This is clear by reviewing a few of the cases at issue." Read more. Image credit: KBOW550

 

Country Profile on Bahrain This Country Profile provides a basic overview of the legal history and institutional structures of the Kingdom of Bahrain (Mamlakat al Bahrayn), which is a member state of the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation. This Profile is based on research produced by GlobaLex at NYU Law School and the Library of Congress. Under Bahrain’s Constitution, Islamic law (sharīʿa or fiqh) is a principal source for legislation. Read more. Image credit: BBC/Getty

 

Islamic Law in U.S. Courts: Balk v. New York Inst. of Tech (E.D.N.Y. 2013) This case examines whether U.S. Courts are allowed to compel witnesses for violations of U.S. law in Bahrain. The case specifically examines violations of Title VII. This is part of SHARIAsource's Islamic Law in U.S. Courts series. Read more.  Image credit: United States Supreme Court

 

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Apr 2017, no. 3

Apr 2017, no. 3

Islamic Law Lexicon :: Ḥadīth SHARIAsource regularly draws on the work of Senior Scholars to illuminate complex topics in Islamic law “in plain English” and to showcase some of the diversity of thought and legal debates that arise around applications of these concepts in Islamic legal history and practice. This week, Joseph Lowry(University of Pennyslvania) succinctly defines and analyzes the term ḥadīthḤadīth is basically defined as “the corpus of traditions from the Prophet”; the reports of words and sayings attributed to the Prophet Muḥammad (for Sunnīs) as well as to a series of Imāms who succeeded him (for Shīʿa); and the text of the second source of Islamic law. Now for more context: Muhammad is undoubtedly one of the central figures in Islamic law and authority. His legal authority emanates from two primary phenomena. First, he is the transmitter of God’s divine revelation, that is, the Qur’an. Therefore, he is the immediate, although not ultimate, source of divine commands. Second, a complex set of prophetical sayings and teachings is attributed to the Prophet (hadith). Though inspired by divine will, these sayings constitute Muhammad’s direct contribution to Islamic law, consolidating his centrality to Islamic authority. " Read more. Image credit: The Centre for Academic Shi’a Studies

 

CCASE: The State of Bombay v. Narasu Appa Mali In Narasu Appa Mali in 1952the Bombay High Court limited its own ability to address the constitutionality of Muslim personal law in India, holding that personal laws are not “laws in force” within the purview of Article 13 of the Constitution, and thus need not satisfy the fundamental rights test. Read more. Image credit: Local Press Co.

 

EVENT: Shah Waliullah Dehlavi and His Neglected Views on Islamic Law Islamic Legal Studies Program SHARIAsource / Fulbright Fellow Dr. Mubasher Hussainintroduced the work of Shah Waliullah Dehlavi to the Harvard community on 17 April 2017. Hussain discussed Shah Waliullah often-overlooked thoughts on Islamic jurisprudence, focusing on the ways in which he differentiated between scholars of Islamic law labeled “first rank independent muftis” and “first rank affiliated muftis.” Read more.  Image credit: Darrick Northington

 

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May 2017

May 2017

Religion vs. State in the Arab World: Comparing Constitutions Nathan Brown, Professor of Political Science and International Affairs at the Elliot School of International Affairs at George Washington University, asserts that "Arab constitutions are not abnormally religious," even though they legally integrate religion in different ways. "Religion appears in the constitutions of the Arab world, almost all with Muslim majorities, in a variety of ways. But aside from ensuring a public role for religion, most of these states are not theocratic. Instead they show considerable diversity by invoking religion (including clauses religious exercise and religious freedom) in at least six ways. Read more. Image credit: Wikimedia

 

RESOURCES: Country Profiles on Islamic Law SHARIAsource's resources now include country profiles! These profiles outline the contemporary legal landscape, and the status of Islamic law within each, of the countries and major regions of the world. For example, Bahrain's Country Profile  includes its  constitution and other sources in Arabic and English to help users conduct research or contextualize analyses about Islamic law in that country.  Image credit: National Geographic

 

EVENT:: The Transformation of Anglo-Muhammadan Law: Muslims on British Benches On April 25th, SHARIAsource Fellow, Dr. Sohaira Siddiqui, at the Islamic Legal Studies Program used the 1881 case of Fidayat ul-Nissa and others  v. Muhammad Ismail Khan (India) to frame her discussion of the creation of Anglo-Muhammadan law. Like the other five cases that she has researched during her fellowship this year, this case  demonstrates the complexity of this hybrid legal system that combined British law with Islamic law in helping to usher on modern models of Islamic law in nation states today. Image credit: Darrick Northington 

 

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Jun 2017

Jun 2017

Sharīʿa Clauses in Constitutions of the Muslim World: Where Did They Come From? What Do They Mean? This week focuses on the meaning of Islamic constitutionalism -- the practice in some Muslim-majority countries of including Islamic law (or sharī ͑a) as a part of state law, together with rights and structures that borrow from American and European constitutions. Alicia Daniel reviews senior scholar Clark Lombardi's article, “Constitutional Provisions Making Sharīʿa ‘A’ or ‘The’ Chief Source of Legislation: Where Did They Come From? What Do They Mean? Do They Matter?” Called “sharīʿa clauses,” these provisions typically name some undefined version of Islamic law as “a chief source” or “the chief source” of national state law. Although the phrasing of these clauses seems quite similar, aside from the use of "a" or "the," some scholars and government officials have ascribed special significance to the differences between them. But the history and interpretation of these sharīʿa clauses reveals otherwise. Moreover, examination of these clauses historically and in view of court precedents from the constitutional courts interpreting each, suggests important insights into ways in which sharīʿa clauses interact with liberal ideas about governance and about the role of religion in law in Muslim-majority countries that officially recognize some aspect of Islamic law. Read more. Image credit: The National (UAE)

 

Islamic Finance: New Developments in Morocco’s Sharīʿa-Compliant Banking Morocco editor Ari Schriber recently interviewedNour-Eddine Qaouar, a sharīʿa auditor at Dar Assafaa, the Islamic window of Attijariwafa Bank in Morocco. The interview sheds light on Morocco's recent efforts to develop a system of sharīʿa-compliant banking. The interesting feature of Morocco's attempts is that it must confront Issues unique to its preferred school of law, Mālikism, with the other main Islamic finance systems (in SE Asia and in the Gulf), which tend to adopt the interpretations of other Islamic legal schools of how a sharīʿa-compliant financial system should look. Read more. Image credit: Morocco News

 

Circulaire Bank al-Maghrib The shari’a board of the Central Bank of Morocco issued a new memorandum (circulaire) in January 2017 with a diverse set of fatwās and regulations governing Islamic financial instruments in Morocco. This new memorandum follows a recent  practice of The Central Bank, which has been gradually increasing the rate at which it issues such memoranda since the Participatory Finance Law 103.12 was issued in 2015 in favor of Islamic finance industry. See the document. Image credit: Middle East Confidential

 

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Sep 2017

Sep 2017

Response to the Indian Supreme Court’s Recent Decision on Triple Ṭalāq: A Legislative Proposal In a recent blockbuster case, the Indian Supreme Court declared triple ṭalāq unconstitutional, and gave the legislature six months to decide on appropriate reforms. Pakistan editor Zubair Abbasi responds to the decision and outlines considerations the legislature might address if it is open to engaging in comparative analysis by "taking into account the applicable Muslim divorce laws in various countries." Read more.  Image Credit: Wikipedia

 

Indian Supreme Court Judgment Declaring Triple Ṭalāq Unconstitutional In a 3-2 decision, the Supreme Court of India declared triple  ṭalāq  unconstitutional and gave India’s parliament six months “to consider legislation” for revising the practices previously addressed through triple  ṭalāq . In its opinion, the Court cited global advances in Islamic family law (in India, called Muslim personal law), including Islamic law jurisdictions (which India is not) as evidence of the need for legislative reform. Read more.  Image credit: Wikimedia

 

Round-up on Triple Ṭalāq The Indian Supreme Court's recent decision on the constitutionality of triple  ṭalāq is built upon cases from past decades. In this post, we round up some of those cases and commentary about them by editors who work on the region. India editor Akhila Kolisetty addresses the underlying tension between gender equity and a secular state demonstrated in the Danial Latifi case; Pakistan editor Jeffrey A. Redding argues that the crucial 2002 Shamim Ara case telegraphs the judiciary's intention to assert the unique authority of the modern Indian state. Read the full round-up. Image credit: Indian Supreme Court

 

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Oct 2017

Oct 2017

South African High Court Rules the “Wills Act” of 1953 Unconstitutional Citing Discrimination Against Muslim Marriages Contributor  Katherine Gonzalez  considers how the recent decision of the Western Cape High Court in Cape Town, South Africa regarding the term “surviving spouse” applies to Muslim marriages. The High Court reasoned that the 1953 Wills Act was inconsistent with the South African Constitution because it discriminated against Muslims. In her post, she further reviews that ways in which the Court sought to rectify the constitutional violation. Read more. Image Credit: Wikipedia

 

Moosa No. et al. v. Harnaker et al. (Western Cape High Court, South Africa, 2017) In a recent and long-anticipated decision issued in September 2017, a Western Cape High Court in Cape Town, South Africa declared the 1953 Wills Act inconsistent with the South Africa Constitution. The Court reasoned that the statute’s provisions were previously interpreted to recognize only legal marriage (according to civil law) and not Muslim marriages. This, it concluded, was inconsistent with the anti-discrimination provisions of the South African constitution. Read more. Image credit: Alcuin TK Lai/Flickr

 

Country Profile & Constitution: South Africa SHARIAsource has completed a series of Country Profiles outlining the structure, sources of law, and constitutional status of Islamic law in most countries of the world; and we have collected the constitutions of the world through The Constitute Project. This South Africa Country Profile provides a basic overview of the legal history and institutional structures of the Republic of South Africa. Under South Africa's Constitution, Islamic law (sharīʿa  or fiqh) has no legal status. Image credit: Nations Online Project

 

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Nov 2017

Nov 2017

SHARIAsource Book Release: Justice and Leadership in Early Islamic Courts ILSP: SHARIAsource will be releasing the next book in the Harvard Series on Islamic Law this winter. Edited by Intisar A. Rabb and Abigail Krasner Balbale , this book presents an in-depth exploration of the administration of justice during Islam’s founding period, 632–1250 CE. Inspired by the scholarship of Roy Parviz Mottahedeh and composed in his honor, this volume brings together ten leading scholars of Islamic law to examine the history of early Islamic courts. This approach draws attention to both  how and  why  the courts and the people associated with them functioned in early Islamic societies: When a dispute occurred, what happened in the courts? How did judges conceive of justice and their role in it? When and how did they give attention to politics and procedure? Each author draws on diverse sources that illuminate a broader and deeper vision of law and society than traditional legal literature alone can provide, including historical chronicles, biographical dictionaries, legal canons, exegetical works, and mirrors for princes. Altogether, the volume offers both a substantive intervention on early Islamic courts and on methods for studying legal history as social history. It illuminates the varied and dynamic legal landscapes stretching across early Islam, and maps new approaches to interdisciplinary legal history. Image credit: Harvard Law School Library

 

Codifying Polygamy in the 1957 Moroccan Mudawwana Earlier this year, Tunisia lifted the 1973 ban on Muslim women marrying non-Muslim men and is considering equalizing inheritance laws for men and women, on arguments based on the post-Arab Spring 2014 constitution calling for gender equality. This development follows in a line of earlier precedent for personal status code reforms, and the recent actions beg the question about comparative practice based on modern interpretations of Islamic law or Mālikī law. For perspective on both, student editor Ari Schriberdiscusses Morocco's 1957 Personal Status Code as the country's first unified set of family law statutes. Read more. Image Credit: Wikipedia

 

Sharifian Decree of 1957 - The Mudawwana : Law of Personal Status This section of  Morocco’s Official Gazette, al-Jarīda al-Rasmiyya , officially promulgates the first two books of the Moroccan Personal Status Code, the  Mudawwana . The first book presents the stipulations concerning marriage, including issues such as the contract, dowry, and inhibitors (like number of wives). The second book deals with the dissolution of marriage, thus addressing conditions of repudiation, women’s repudiation, and the  ʿidda (the woman’s waiting period until she may remarry).   Read more. Image Credit: Wikipedia

 

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Dec 2017

Dec 2017

Ijāra Financing and Religious Tax Exemption Status of Financed Property U.S. Editor Abed Awad examines the implications of the 6th Circuit's decision in October regarding the financing of an Islamic Center through ijāra. To fund construction for a new building without violating their understanding of an Islamic law prohibition against usury (or interest), the Islamic Center of Nashville (ICN) entered into an ijāra agreement with Devon Bank. Under the agreement, Devon Bank had legal transfer of the building's title until ICN could fully purchase the building's construction, similar to a rent-to-own arrangement. After ICN paid off the building loan, ownership was transferred to ICN from Devon Bank. When ICN applied for a property tax exemption, the state of Tennessee denied the exemption for the period in which Devon owned the building, but granted it for the time after. ICN appealed, seeking a full tax exemption for the entire period. But the court dismissed the appeal on grounds that it lacked subject matter jurisdiction. Abed Awad commented that: "These types of ijāra transactions are common and routine. There is nothing unusual or extraordinary about the Islamic Center’s ijāra financing transaction, except that the Islamic Center of Nashville is a tax-exempt not-for-profit religious organization. Once title to the property was transferred to the Lender, the Nashville tax authorities returned the property on the Tax Rolls. The Islamic Center objected to the taxation, arguing that nothing had changed insomuch as the property continued to be exclusively occupied by the Islamic Center and continued to be utilized exclusively for the Center’s tax-exempt religious purposes." The decisions suggests a need for more deliberation about compliance of Islamic finance agreements with U.S. Laws and regulations in order that the private agreements of the former comply with and benefit from the latter. Read more. Image credit: Islamic Center of Nashville

 

Islamic Center of Nashville v. Tennessee ( M.D. Tenn 2016 & 6th Cir. 2017 ): Tax Status of I jāra -Financed Center When the Islamic Center of Nashville sought to finance its center without paying interest, it entered into an agreement with a local bank that might have complied with Islamic law but been at odds with current understandings of tax exempt law. The state of Tennessee denied the Center's request for tax exemption for the time period in which the local bank owned the building. ICN appealed the decision, but the trial court found that it had no subject matter jurisdiction to hear the case. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit affirmed the district court's decision. Read more.  Image credit: Wikipedia

 

Muslim Cmty. Ass'n of Ann Arbor & Vicinity v. Pittsfield Charter Twp. (E.D. Mich. 2013): Discrimination in Zoning Regulations The Plaintiff, the Muslim Community Association of Ann Arbor, challenged the Pittsfield Charter Township for its refusal to re-zone the area surrounding the Plaintiff so that the Plaintiff could expand and build a school. Although an independent outside planner endorsed the rezoning, the Plaintiff alleged that the Respondents denied rezoning due to concerns stemming largely from an animus to the Islamic faith. The Plaintiff claimed that the Respondents discriminated against the organization in violation of the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act, the Fourteenth and Fifth Amendments of the U.S. Constitution, and "state law claims" in the Michigan state constitution. Read more. Image credit: Wikipedia

 

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2016

Jul 2016, no. 1
Jul 2016, no. 1

SHARIAsource Hosts Major Conference on Judicial Procedure As a flagship project of the Islamic Legal Studies Program (ILSP), SHARIAsource hosted a conference on Courts and Judicial Procedure in Early Islamic Law this spring at Harvard Law School. The conference honored Professor Roy Mottahedeh's retirement with an impressive array of scholarship on questions about the actual practice of Islamic law in its founding period. We may know much about the substance of early Islamic law, but even as we contest it, we know little about the procedures that litigants followed when they came to early Islamic courts. Participants from around the globe addressed this theme as a way of gaining insight into the full workings of Islamic law--both its substance and procedure. Read more. Image credit: ILSP at Harvard Law School 

 

SHARIAsource blog is Now LIVE SHARIAsource's blog is now live! We'll be updating regularly with experts' insights into Islamic law and policy. If you have questions or ideas, f eel free to email us with a post or article pitch. Read more. Image credit: SHARIAsource

 

What Kind of Islamic Law Debates Arise after Violent Acts? On our new blog, Iran editor Roozbeh Jabbarizadeh organizes his thoughts about the pressure on Muslims to respond after violent acts. He reflects on how the response demanded is usually one of justification or defense.  Read more.  Image Credit: http://www.factcheck.org/2015/12/dearborns-anti-isis-rally/ 

 

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Jul 2016, no. 2
Jul 2016, no. 2

Paul Beran Joins SHARIAsource as Executive Director Paul Beran joins SHARIAsource as its executive director. Beran joins SHARIAsource from the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, and will be drawing from deep wells of experience in leading academic and policy-oriented projects. ILSP Director and SHARIAsource founding editor-in-chief Intisar Rabb expressed her excitement at Beran’s hire and confidence in his contributions and leadership of the ongoing operations. Echoing the sentiment were Jonathan Zittrain and Chris Bavitz,  both faculty directors at Berkman Klein Center, which supports SHARIAsource. Beran joins at a time where SHARIAsource is needed more than ever, and will help shepherd an array of new activities and initiatives in the months ahead.  Read more. Image credit: ILSP

 

Orlando and the Narrative of Good Muslim/Bad Muslim South Asia/Pakistan editor Jeff Redding parses the violence and motives behind last month's attack in Orlando. Warning against the media and public's tendency to reduce Muslims to "good" or "bad," Redding's piece encourages readers to think about such attacks within more nuanced frameworks.  Read more. Image credit: Gillian Blease, patheos.com 

 

No, Newt: Rhetoric Doesn't Change the Law U.S. editor Abed Awad summarizes the intentional inaccuracy of Newt Gingrich's comments from last Thursday. Like many other current politicians', Gingrich's comments further the mistaken conflation of shari'a and Islamic law. Read more. Image credit: Reuters

 

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Jul 2016, no. 3
Jul 2016, no. 3

When State Legislative Bans on Islamic Law Contravene Federal Constitutional Law Guest blogger Saeed A. Khan argues that “anti-sharia” bills now popular in many states are tools that are often explicitly designed to win elections, but that implicitly infringe on constitutional values ranging from free exercise of religion to women’s access to reproductive health care. On his analysis, “80% of 102 anti-Sharia bills introduced between 2011 and 2013 were sponsored or co-sponsored by a legislator who supported other rights-restricting laws. Most notably these included voter ID and right-to-work laws, measures that impact disproportionately on the rights of other groups including Latinos, African-Americans and women.” His findings are illustrated in an interactive map made by Hassan Jibril at the Institute for Social Policy and Understanding; it charts over 1,600 instances of restrictive legislation in all 50 states. Click on the image above to access it.  Read more. Image Credit: https://www.ispu.org/visualization

 

CASE COMMENTARY: The Shah Bano Case as a Marker of Constitutional Conflict in India’s Muslim Family Law India editor Akhila Kolisetty highlights the Shah Bano Case as a marker of constitutional conflict between the Indian government's civil laws and its Muslim citizens' personal status laws. The Indian government hoped to reconcile the tension through its 1986 Muslim Women (Protection on Divorce) Act, which left open for interpretation the status of Muslim women under the Indian government. Read more. Image credit: India Today 

 

CASE DOCUMENT: Moh'd Ahmed Khan v. Shah Bano Begum et al. (Supreme Court of India, 1985) The Shah Bano case is a landmark and controversial case in India’s Supreme Court that dealt with the question of the length of time a Muslim ex-husband would have to provide his ex-wife with monthly maintenance payments after a divorce, under Muslim personal law and Indian civil law. Much debated in classrooms and casebooks on comparative constitutional law, it is one of the cases featured on SHARIAsource with commentary that helps place it in context.  Read more. Image credit: mediadefence.org 

 

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Aug 2016, no. 1
Aug 2016, no. 1

The Question of Sharīʿa in Denmark Denmark contributor Niels Vinding comments on recent discussions of sharīʿa in Denmark that have arisen on the basis of uninformed media reporting, which has had the consequence of sparking legislation that may have discriminatory effects on Muslims. These developments come in the wake of the Danish documentary Under the Veil of the Mosque, which he labels a misguided attempt to pin the difficulty surrounding Muslim integration into liberal Danish society on the moral preaching of conservative Muslim clerics. He disassembles the documentary and its implicit conclusion that "sharīʿa councils were working towards keeping parallel societies for Muslims within Denmark," which led to calls for limits to be placed on freedom of religion or belief for Muslims, supposedly in the interest of maintaining public order. The documentary depicts an imām’s clerical advice as an active disregard of Danish law, but Vinding argues that it is in fact an exhortation to his followers to refrain from sin; it is not an order, but an entreaty that demonstrates full awareness that his moral discourse based on a theological understanding of sharīʿa has no legal enforcement under Danish law. Read more. Image credit: Reuters/Facebook 

 

Headscarves and the Court of Justice of the European Union: Two Opposing Opinions Guest writer Erica Howard discusses the decision facing the European Court of Justice on two cases concerning headscarves worn by Muslim women at work in Belgium and France, respectively, in accord with their beliefs and practice of Islamic law. Two advocates general heard the cases in a consolidated hearing and came to two different conclusions – albeit citing many of the same articles of the EU law governing religious discrimination and accommodation in the workplace: Directive 78/2000/EC. Howard credits their differences to differing interpretations of 'occupational requirement,' and how liberally this should be defined with respect to religion. The ECJ must now resolve the issue, which could set the tone for how employers regard questions sharīʿa in the EU workplace. Read more. Image credit: NBC 

 

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Aug 2016, no. 2
Aug 2016, no. 2

What is the Right Definition of Sharīʿa: Medieval or Modern? In a recent interview aired on NPR, senior scholar Khaled Abou El Fadl disentangles historically-grounded definitions of sharīʿa from public misunderstandings of it. The problems fueling those popular misunderstanding are twofold. First, there is a conceptual problem. Most of the public does not know what sharīʿa means. On a basic level, he defines it as "the law of goodness," which individuals must struggle to interpret in a way that brings that ideal to reality in their own lives and laws. Second, there is a political fear. The policies that some individuals fear from sharīʿa are artifacts of medieval applications of it that today are simply not feasible or effective, even for Muslims. With that idea in mind, Abou El Fadl separates the conceptual definition of sharīʿa from its violent image, and points out the modern failures of the states and non-state actors that perpetuate certain medieval policies, which sometimes inform this violent conceptualization. In doing so, he illustrates the fallacy of fearing sharīʿa itself and instead invites listeners to learn more about sharīʿaRead more. Image credit: NPR

 

CASE COMMENTARY: Pakistan’s Federal Shariat Court Expands its Jurisdiction through the Protection of Women Act 2006 Guest contributor  Noor Zafar argues that the Federal Shariat Court of Pakistan used Pakistan's Protection of Women Act of 2006 as part of its efforts to broaden its jurisdiction. To do so, it sought to redefine Islamic criminal law in that country: the body of law called hudud crimes. Ostensibly, the Court used a new definition of crime to regain some of the control it had under the Hudud Ordinances of 1979. But the effects were broader. The crime-redefinition created Federal Shariat Court with an expansive jurisdiction over civil and criminal law. Read more. Image credit: The Express Tribune

 

CASE DOCUMENT: Protection of Women Act 2006 (Pakistan) In response to international criticism of the 1979 Hudood Ordinance, which set forth harsh penalties for criminal law violations, the Pakistani parliament enacted the Protection of Women Act ten years ago. That aftermath is relevant once again with the protests against recent legislation called the Punjab Protection of Women against Violence Act. The first Act removed the crimes specified in the Hudood Ordinance from the Federal Shariat Court(FSC)'s exclusive jurisdiction. This move set off a flurry of petitions, one of which claimed that the Act itself was unconstitutional, because Pakistan's constitution deferred to the FSC for judgment of Islamic criminal law in Pakistan. As a result, theFSC expanded its jurisdiction. The question that now arises with the new Act is whether the FSC’s jurisdiction extends to the new Act, and  how it will respond to the protestors claiming that the new legislation is in violation of Islamic law. Read more. Image credit: Dawn

 

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Aug 2016, no. 3
Aug 2016, no. 3

Rational Actors in Sharīʿa?: An Interview with Professor Anver Emon Senior scholar Anver Emon spoke with SHARIAsource Research Editor Sharon Tai about the role of the state and rationality in Islamic law. Speaking as a legal historian, Emon discusses how the misunderstandings of Islam have led American foreign policy to interpret Islam and sharīʿa as an ideology, leading to failures of foreign policy that mimic those of the Cold War. He points out the fallacy of this reduction by calling the idea of "obedience to the divine" found in Islamic law as "not the site of irrationality, but rather the site of creative rationality," one that deals with the "epistemic gap" between knowing that one cannot know the divine law and attempting to create a moral legal system that aims at its ideals nonetheless. To find out how, read more. Image credit: http://www.anveremon.com/

 

Legal Entrepreneurs in the Halal Industry: The Case of Sharīʿa in China China editor Matthew S. Erie assesses the Chinese government’s attempts to legally respond to its Muslim Hui population’s calls for greater regulation of halal food to accommodate this group of over 10 million Chinese citizens who identify as Muslim. In Erie’s estimation, both the call and response counter the original secular intentions of a socialist legal system. As the Muslim concerns grow for regulation in line with Islamic law, the PRC wishes to treat all its citizens the same: as a religious citizens. With that wish becoming untenable, do questions of Muslim minorities in China become one of contemplating legal pluralism and ensuring domestic peace? Read more. Image credit: Xiao Lu Chu, Getty Images

 

The Limits of State Religion and Non-Muslim Minorities: The Moroccan ‘Baha’i Affair’ of 1962 Amidst the tensions raised by Islamic constitutional states as they deal with non-Muslim minorities, worth considering is how Muslim-majority states have resolved the issue in the past. Morocco editor Ari Schriber considers the political ramifications of Islamic laws governing religious minorities in an episode that faced Morocco as it gained independence: Morocco's 1962 Baha'i Affair. Morocco's then-recent independence heralded a progressive government set on both protecting non-Muslims and affording Islam priority as a state religion. Schriber uses the Baha'i Affair to exemplify the tension between these two governmental aspirations, and to discuss how this tension resonated with legal and communal structures in its aftermath.  Read more. Image credit: stock-clip.com

 

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Aug 2016, no. 4
Aug 2016, no. 4

SHARIAsource and the Need for Islamic Digital Humanities: A Response to “A Political History of Digital Humanities” in the LA Review of Books Editor-in-chief Intisar Rabb brings SHARIAsource and the study of Islamic law into the greater discussion of technology and the humanities. She responds to recent arguments made against digital humanities. In a recent article in the LA Review of Books, Daniel Allington and his colleagues suggest that digital platforms may distract from text-based analyses. But those very platforms may remind readers of the difficulties some fields, such as Islamic law, face in accessing these very texts. Scholars and researchers of Islamic law still face a dire need for greater accessibility, and the "digital humanities" projects that aim to give it – like SHARIAsource and Brown University’s Digital Islamic Humanities project – assuage these difficulties by bringing together experts, making way for more comparative research, and helping to facilitate qualitative and quantitative research results. Read more. Image credit: http://www.digitalmeetsculture.net/

 

Intellectual Property for Islamic Law? Deriving Similar Patent Regimes from John Locke and the Qurʾān When it comes to new technology and Islamic law, it turns out that the principles of Western intellectual property law are quite similar to Islamic property and contract law, according to Turkey editor Gizem Orbey. On her analysis, the latter permits the same applications as the former. Consider John Locke's considerations on property in his Second Treatise on Government. They compare closely to the Qurʾān’s proclamation that, although all property belongs to God in its natural state, people may create ownership by making something useful through labor. Because a patent or license can be considered a contract between a state operating as an individual and the inventor, copyright and ownership laws would, she argues, be in line with the Islamic law of property. Read more. Image credit: SlideShare

 

New Trends in Regulating Risk in Islamic Finance Innovation occurs as well in ways less tangible than what is traditionally defined as 'technology,' as UAE editor Paul Lee's piece on Islamic finance suggests. Lee details how U.S. and U.K. courts have attempted to marry Western and Islamic finance without compromising the principle of fair competition. Unlike patents or licenses, however, financial contracts must prioritize uncertain results, acknowledged by Islamic legal systems as ghararand Western court systems' approaches to regulation. Partly due to this uncertainty, and different strategies in accounting for it, an optimal compromise between Islamic and Western finance remains to be created. As of yet, such regulatory inventions occur on an ad hoc basis. Read more. Image credit: Blog: Brave Organization Never Dies

 

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Sep 2016, no. 1
Sep 2016, no. 1

SYMPOSIUM :: ISLAMIC LAW IN CHINA Chinese Muslim Scholars Respond to "Is there an Islamic Law Basis for the Authority of Female Clerics among Chinese Muslims?" China editor Matthew Erie turns to four prominent clerics and scholars in China to address the striking feature of Islamic law’s operation in China: female clerics who have equal standing to male clerics among the Hui Chinese Muslims. Called nü ahong, these female clerics assume the roles of imām (prayer leader), khaṭīb (sermon giver), and mediator. In a secular, state-controlled system such as China's, Muslim clerics have no means of legitimizing their own interpretations of Islamic law (fiqh) through state-sanctions channels. And yet these female clerics have been able to do so, without any sort of government ordinance. Moreover, they act without any explicit Qurʾānic directive. Measured against traditional interpretations of Islamic tradition, it is curious then that Chinese Muslims accept the authority of these female clerics as equal to that of their male counterparts; and the legal basis for the practice remains a point of contention among Chinese scholars of Islamic law. Erie takes up this question. He "examines the question of the legal basis for Hui female clerics through the opinions of leading clerics and scholars—female and male—from China, most of who are themselves Hui." This symposium is meant to "open up a space for reflection on and deliberation about an enduring feature of Muslim life in China and its connections to gender, culture, custom, and Islamic law," and its four opinions hint at the variety of perspectives. As Erie's introduction reveals, Mai Fenlian's necessity argument counters Liu Xueqiang's more traditionalist considerations, while Ge Caixia's historically-based perspective challenges the views influenced by "custom-based, gender relations" held by some of the Hui women interviewed for Man Ke's piece. Each opinion is posted in its original Chinese, with Erie's English summary of it. Image credit: NPR

 

SYMPOSIUM :: The Case for Female Clerics in Islamic Law: Textual Bases,Old and New, Religious and Secular Mai Fenlian (买粉连) is a former cleric who argues that there is a textual basis in Islamic law for female clerics. She suggests that evidence can be found in the Qurʾān and ḥadīth (prophetic reports) supporting "women's equal footing in religious life" and legitimizing "women's activities in social activities, from education to war." To be sure, she hedges the textual argument with an argument about the benefits, commenting that having more knowledgeable Hui women would lead to "more harmonious families and communities." Another scholar, Ge Caixia (葛彩霞), also uses Islamic law texts as the basis for her main argument in favor of female clerics’ authority, citing a ḥadīth relaying that "the Prophet Muhammad’s wife Aisha taught Islamic law, among other topics, to women." She complements the Islamic law texts with an argument from modern Chinese law, which "defines the requirements for an 'Islamic staff member' [to be] gender-blind." Image credit: BBC 

 

SYMPOSIUM :: The Case Against Female Clerics in Islamic Law: A Cultural Basis Does Not a Legal Basis Make Cleric Liu Xueqiang (刘学强) examines arguments rooted in cultural norms to find a legal basis for female clerics. He concludes that "female clerics originate[d] in the particular historical-cultural environs of the Central Plains of China," out of the region's "traditions of scriptural education." For him, though, these origins are at odds with fundamental Islamic principles espousing gender complementarity rather than sameness. Professor Man Ke's (满珂) assessments confirm Liu's cultural argument about the origins of the practice. She finds that "custom-based gender relations influence" Salafī women– that is, those who adhere to Saudi Arabia-inspired conservative interpretations of Islamic law that purport to go back to Islam’s founding period – to "consistently" believe that women can only be "female teachers," and never authorized clerics. Image Credit: Wikipedia

 

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Sep 2016, no. 2
Sep 2016, no. 2

Does a Muslim Inmate Have a First Amendment Right to a Halal Meal? U.S. editor Abed Awad contrasts an inmate's right to religious practice with the responsibility of correctional facilities. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) recently filed Gannon Thomas v. Boon County Sheriff on behalf of Gannon Thomas, an inmate in Indiana who claims he has a right to halal meals as a practicing Muslim. Awad considers Gannon's claim of violated religious rights within the narrative of past cases pertaining to religious diets and the American penitentiary system.  Read more. Image credit: Getty Images

 

The Anatomy of SHARIAsource: An Interview with Research Editor Sharon Tai Sharon Tai spoke with journalist Noor Ali for the September/October 2016 issue of Islamic Horizons. Tai summarized the mission of SHARIAsource, which is to make content and context on Islamic law accessible to a wide audience. A central part of this effort is the creation of an online portal of Islamic legal texts and relevant expert commentaries, both historical and contemporary, to facilitate global information-sharing, exchange, and debate. In addition to highlighting the current and future features of the portal, Tai addressed the academic complexities and potential challenges of the project. Read more. Image credit: Islamic Horizons Sept/Oct issue

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Sep 2016, no. 3
Sep 2016, no. 3

A Court by Any Other Name: State 'Courts' and Sharīʿa Councils Southwest Asia/Pakistan editor Jeff Redding compares ongoing debates in Britain about the use of Islamic law in courts with those in India, based on his own research on India's dar ul qazas (so-called sharīʿa courts). In Vishwa Lochan Madan v. Union of India, the Supreme Court of India threatened to dismantle the dar ul qazas in a controversy about whether these forums for dispute resolution, which were not state-associated, count as courts. In that sense, Redding suggests that the controversy became a "nomenclature debate" that should be about more than just words. For Redding, these courts, state-associated or not, function by following some formalized proceedings. On that view, he proposes shifting the debate from one about semantics or definitions to focus on "what we want to see in a proceeding, rather than whether it is a 'court' proceeding per se." Read more. Image credit: Glenn Harvey/The Sun

 

CASE DOCUMENT: Vishwa Locan Madan v. Union of India (Supreme Court of India, 2005) A landmark case that began in 2005, Vishwa Lochan Madan v. Union of India brought to bear the legal status of dar ul qazas, or sharīʿa courts, in India. The Supreme Court of India issued a decision in 2014, stating that non-state sanction courts of Islamic law have "no legal sanctity" in India. Nonetheless, the constitutional entanglements with legal pluralism, secularism, and rule of law that this case illuminated for Indian courts will be occupying legal scholars for years and cases to come. Read more. Image Credit: Wikipedia

 

Islamic Law and Policy: A Brief History of the French Burkini Ban UK/Europe/Southeast Asia editor Rachel Mazzarella chronicles the history of the French burkini ban in the context of French-style secularism, laïcité. She explores the extent to which this system permits or constrains accommodations of Islamic law and practice against the recent history of similar cases. The last ten years saw a litany of French bans on religiously-affiliated attire, which subordinate Muslim individuals' conceptions of 'awra (privacy, which is closely related to rules for modesty) to a government-informed definition of social integration. Read more. Image credit: Vantage

 

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Sep 2016, no. 4
Sep 2016, no. 4

The Construction and Failure of Islamic Laws of Evidence in ISIS's State-Building Project Guest contributor Mara Revkin outlines the legal infrastructure of ISIS. She argues that the movement's barbarism and apparently wanton acts of terrorism belie a self-contained legal system based on Islamic law – including the Islamic law of evidence. Using interviews with eighty-two Syrians and Iraqis, Revkin reconstructs how evidence is used within ISIS's purported borders. However, although ISIS leaders aim to consistently use the evidentiary laws to aid in their state-building endeavors, she argues, they ultimately undermine that very code of evidence and the state-building efforts because of the increasing internal corruption and impunity of actions within their ranks. Read more. Image credit: Mara Revkin/Brookings

 

Does ISIS Really Follow the Salafī Version of Islamic Law and Theology? Guest contributor Jacob Olidort critically examines ISIS's claim of adherence to the doctrine of Salafism, a popular orientation among conservative Muslim clerics who attempt to model their actions on a certain vision of law and theology in the early Muslim community. A scholar of modern Salafī thought himself, Olidort concludes that ISIS's claims are at odds with Salafī doctrine. Contrary to conventional Salafī doctrines, ISIS displays more affinities to politics than theology; many of its state-building activities are at odds with traditionally Salafī teachings, including the very concept of a caliphate. ISIS uses Salafism as a political vehicle, concludes Olidort, to establish credibility for their ambitions. Read more. Image credit: Sudan Tribune 

 

In Summary: SHARIAsource Events ILSP: SHARIAsource hosted the first of its lunch discussions on Sep 16, entitled “From Big Law to Public Service in the White House,” featuring Raheemah Abdulaleem, JD’01, who serves as Associate General Counsel in the Executive Office of the President in the Office of Administration at the White House. Abdulaleem spoke to current HLS students about her first years as a newly minted lawyer in private practice, her later pro bono and civil rights work at the DOJ, and the path that she eventually took to the White House. On Sep 16 - 17, Intisar Rabb and Paul Beran convened with scholars at the workshopActivism, Advocacy, and Scholarship on Islam in the Digital Realm at Boston University’s Pardee School of Global Studies. Hosted by Michael Pregill, the workshop explored new problems and prospects of building out resources in digital Islamic humanities. On Sep 21, SHARIAsource, hosted an open house, where faculty and staff welcomed members of the HLS and University community to the SHARIAsource offices in Austin Hall – which is now open as a research and gathering space for students and scholars working on Islamic law. A full crowd included a mix of JD, LLM, and PhD students, scholars in related fields, law librarians, and members of the wider community with a general interest in Islamic law. Read more. Image Credit: SHARIAsource

 

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Oct 2016, no. 1
Oct 2016, no. 1

CASES TO WATCH: Can a Judge Determine Acceptable Religious Attire in a Quebec, Canada Courtroom? Guest contributor Jennifer Selby uses the recent case of Rania El-Alloul in Quebec, Canada to situate the ongoing debate occurring at the intersection of secularism and religious freedom. Calling her courtroom a "secular space," provincial court judge Eliana Marengo dismissed Rania El-Alloul from her courtroom for wearing a headscarf (ḥijāb). Selby examines the legality of this decision by appealing to both text and precedent. In her estimation, although previous judicial decisions allow women to cover even more, with face veils (niqābs) in the courtroom, those precedents do not bar Marengo's decision. El-Alloul's case, challenging that decision, is significant for determining "whether judges will continue to set these parameters" for what they deem to be an acceptable practice of religion generally, and of Islamic beliefs in particular, within the Canadian courtroom. Read more. Image credit: Steve Rukavina/CBC

 

CASE: 2012 Judgment on Wearing a Niqab in a Canadian Court (Canadian Supreme Court, 2012) In N.S. and the Queen v. Ontario Human Rights Commission et al, the Canadian Supreme Court, 2012 was asked to determine whether a woman was impermissibly barred from wearing a face veil (niqāb) in court during a sexual assault trial. N.S., as she is referenced in court documents to protect her identity, wore a face veil (niqāb) in her daily life. Chief Justice Beverly McLachlin concluded that the answer, in short, depends. While declining a bright line rule against permitting veil removal or barring it, the Court held that a judge must strike a “just and proportionate balance between freedom of religion and trial fairness, based on the particular case before the court.” The case has since proved to be key in the debate between secularism and religious freedom, showing that the two ideals are not dichotomous. Read more. Image credit: Straight Good News,

 

In Summary: SHARIAsource Joins in the Launch of t he Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society: On Power and Participation in the Networked Public Sphere A stellar line-up of Berkman Klein directors, fellows, former fellows, and project directors formed a panel that discussed avenues for conversation and collaboration on cutting-edge scholarship and technology both within and outside of established distribution mechanisms. Professor Intisar Rabb, SHARIAsource founding editor-in-chief, spoke about her role in and the compelling reasons for forming SHARIAsource, which immediately garnered the support of the Berkman Klein Center in 2014. She pointed to the need for an academic and public understanding of what sharīʿa is and is not. With collaborations facilitated in part by Berkman Klein colleagues, the project has taken up several questions that seek to make academic information on Islamic law accessible and useful to specialists and non-specialists alike: How can we collect sources on Islamic law and organize vast quantities of information in a way that provides a viable research tool on par with U.S. and other legal databases? How can we ensure that the diversity of Islamic law is maintained even as we seek to facilitate scholarly and public engagement about particular pressing problems of the day? How do we help inform academic, policy, and media conversations about Islamic law? Professor Rabb also discussed how a greater understanding of the context and nuance of Islamic law can impact the construction and implementation of law in a diverse number of societies. The event – organized by the Berkman Klein Center to celebrate its renaming with a gift from Michael Klein – attracted approximately 100 people in Wasserstein Hall, including Mr. Klein, and was followed by a reception and dinner at the Harvard Art Museums. Image Credit: SHARIAsource

 

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Oct 2016, no. 2
Oct 2016, no. 2

Heterodoxy Among Muslim Judges: On Attempts at Jokes and Judicial Constraints Incoming Senior Fellow at ILSP: SHARIAsource, Maribel Fierroexamines a scene of heterodoxy in therecently published English translation of The Ultimate Ambition. Translated from Arabic into English for the first time in full by Elias Muhanna of Brown University, The Ultimate Ambition was written in the 14th century by a retired Egyptian bureaucrat named Shihab al-Din al-Nuwayri. Fierro looks at a scene in which the judge Yaḥyā ibn Aktham is asked to explain the meaning of desire. When he gives a humorous answer, the theologian Thumāma expresses displeasure. Fierro portrays the theologian's reproach as an expression of his anxiety about the prevailing attitude of being "relaxed" about codified practice and decorum. But, Fierro observes, the judge's attitude was not unique to his time. She discusses ways in which exchanges like that one continue to this day. Read more. Image credit: Public Domain

 

Book Profile: The Ultimate Ambition in the Arts of Erudition The Ultimate Ambition in the Arts of Erudition by Shihab al-Din al-Nuwayri, edited and translated from Arabic by Elias Muhanna, Manning Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature, Brown University, (New York: Penguin, 2016).

This incredible work provides background for Maribel Fierro’s post on joking judges in early Islamic courts, and shows how the encyclopedic works of Mamlūk times can be a source for Islamic law. The following summary comes from the publisher, Penguin Random House.
 
“For the first time in English, a catalog of the world through fourteenth-century Arab eyes—a kind of Schott’s Miscellany for the Islamic Golden Age. An astonishing record of the knowledge of a civilization, The Ultimate Ambition in the Arts of Erudition catalogs everything known to exist from the perspective of a fourteenth-century Egyptian scholar and litterateur. More than 9,000 pages and thirty volumes—here abridged to one volume, and translated into English for the first time—it contains entries on everything from medieval moon-worshipping cults, sexual aphrodisiacs, and the substance of clouds, to how to get the smell of alcohol off one’s breath, the deliciousness of cheese made from buffalo milk, and the nesting habits of flamingos. Similar works by Western authors, including Pliny’s Natural History, have been available in English for centuries. This groundbreaking translation of a remarkable Arabic text—expertly abridged and annotated—offers a look at the world through the highly literary and impressively knowledgeable societies of the classical Islamic world. Meticulously arranged and delightfully eclectic, it is a compendium to be treasured—a true monument of erudition.”
Image Credit: SHARIAsource


 

In Summary: SHARIAsource Workshop Talk with Osama Siddique The Other Pakistan: Special Laws, Diminished Citizenship, and the Gathering Storm Osama Siddique, the Henry J. Steiner Visiting Professor in Human Rights at Harvard Law School, led a discussion on Friday, September 30th at the International and Comparative Law Workshop on the link between failures in legal institutions and the rise of the Taliban in the Swat region in Pakistan. The discussion was based on research Siddique conducted in the region. Instead of focusing on prescriptive models for solutions, the discussion examined problematic tensions between the region's various interests. Among the conflicting parties were the mainstream Pakistani courts and the traditions of dispute resolution within FATA (Federally Administered Tribal Areas) and PATA (Provincially Administered Tribal Areas), two distinct legal entities in Pakistan. Led by Professor Intisar Rabb and Professor William Alford, the workshop pulled at threads of history, sociology, and economics.  Through the discussion, participants drew parallels between other regions' challenges and considered how different types of research methods can produce more applied findings. Image Credit: SHARIAsource

 

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Oct 2016, no. 3
Oct 2016, no. 3

Iran’s New Islamic Penal Code: Have International Criticisms Been Effective for Children and Juvenile Offenders? Professor Intisar Rabb and Iran editor Marzieh Tofighi Darian analyze changes made to statutes defining juvenile crimes and punishment under Iran's new Islamic Penal Code, passed in 2013. The  Code follows a traditional dichotomy between ḥudūd fixed crimes and qiṣāṣ retaliatory scheme (which are directly incorporated from classical Islamic law interpretations of criminal law into the modern Code) and taʿzīr discretionary (which are acts left to the government to regulate). But the reform has not been balanced to address modern needs and developments in the link between maturity and accountability. The authors see the different means of assessing children's maturity as problematic for reform, especially under the hudūd-qiṣāṣ section of the Code. Because crimes in this category are derived from classical Islamic law interpretations, Iranian officials find little room to legally redefine them or their associated punishments. Through a side-by-side comparison of the hudūd-qiṣāṣ and ta’zir sections of the Code, the authors suggest areas for which new attempts at reform may focus. Read more. Image credit: Tofighi Darian/Rabb

 

NEW LEGISLATION: Iranian Islamic Penal Code of 2013 An example of one of the many contemporary primary sources that will be available when the SHARIAsource portal launches publicly later this year, the new Islamic Penal Code of Iran was adopted in May 2013 and entered into force the same year in the Islamic Consultative Assembly. It consists of four books: General Provisions, Ḥudūd (Crimes), Qiṣāṣ (Penalties), and Diyāt (Monetary Compensation for Homicide and Personal Injury). The reforms outlined in this version were the results of five years of debate both in and outside of parliament, in view of the international community's criticisms of their previous penal code. Read more. (Must have SHARIAsource access)  Image credit: Iranian Penal Code 

 

CASES TO WATCH (UPDATE): Can a Judge Determine Acceptable Religious Attire in a Quebec, Canada Courtroom? Guest contributor Jennifer Selby answered this two weeks ago in her earlier post on the Ranial El-Alloul case in Quebec. There, she concluded that, "for the time being, yes, a Quebecois provincial judge can dictate religious attire in her courtroom. However, we must wait to see how El-Alloul’s case for clarification unfolds to see whether judges will continue to set these parameters or not." In a new development, we get a glimpse into how Quebec Superior Court Justice Wilbrod Décarie's October 3rd ruling may impact future cases. Décarie's ruling had avoided declaring any bright-line rule as to whether religious attire is allowed in the courtroom. Selby's updated post now explores the implications of that ruling. She forecasts that an appeal may result in a "more decisive (and perhaps divisive)" clarification. Read more. Image credit: THE CANADIAN PRESS/Ryan Remiorz 

 

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Oct 2016, no. 4
Oct 2016, no. 4

Islamic Law and Policy: Privacy in Islamic Legal History Utrecht University's Chair of Arabic and Islamic Studies Christian Lange takes a historical view on the question of privacy in Islamic law. On his review of the medieval discussions of privacy, he notes that they arise mainly in the domain of the private sphere of the family and sometimes have trickle-down effects into the criminal law arena. "Norms, attitudes, and concepts implying an "ethos of anti-exhibitionism," including the "inviolability (ḥurma) and dignity (karāma) of the human body," are relaxed for family members. Within criminal law, high standards of evidence protect familial privacy by deterring baseless accusations of criminal misconduct, in part, by excluding evidence obtained from outsiders' prying eyes. [Consider this an early form of the U.S. exclusionary rule, which some Justices believe to be unique to American law!] Nevertheless, Lange concludes that the traditional notion of privacy in Islamic law is a concept that "lack[s] conceptual autonomy." Codified absolutes are uncommon. As a result, "[g]eneralizations are to be avoided, but communal interests seem to play a more important role in Islamic legal regulations of privacy than the protection of the rights of the individual." Read more. Image Credit: SHARIAsource

 

Islamic Law and Policy: Privacy in Islamic Law in the Modern State Guest contributors Vidusha Mardi and Bhaira Acharya examine issues of privacy and the state in Islamic law with the baseline argument that privacy is the default rule in Islamic law and that the public sphere, into which the state may intrude, is the exception to this rule. As they put it, Islamic law recognizes that "every society [must] impose certain requirements on individuals by the law and by societal norms," but anything not explicitly located within the worldly public sphere is assumed to reside within the domain of the private sphere. While the individual's relationship with the divine demands that she always "ordain good and forbid evil," state intrusion could be considered a trespass on a relationship meant to remain between the individual and the divine. Such invasion is, in the opinion of many modern jurists, "'exactly what Islam has called as the root cause of mischief in politics.'" Their views come from a longer report on privacy in Islamic law written for the Centre for Internet & Society in Bengaluru, India: Identifying Aspects of Privacy in Islamic Law.  Read more. Image Credit: Rueters

 

IN SUMMARY:: MLTalks Series at MIT: Intisar Rabb and Manal Omar in conversation with Ethan Zuckerman Ethan Zuckerman framed the conversation with HLS Professor and SHARIAsource Editor-in-Chief Intisar Rabband USIP VP for the Middle East Manal Omar as a discussion within a larger approach of the Media Lab’s aim to engage in solution-making dialogue from a techno-social perspective. Last week’s discussion tackled pressing questions of Islamic law as it intersects with American society and politics, civil rights, and US-based foreign policy for Muslim-majority countries. Omar provided insights on how humanitarian aid and development activities benefit from implementing strategies that incorporate religious literacy and the moral authority of religious leaders who appeal to sharīʿa as a working knowledge set. Rabb discussed the link between sharīʿa and civil rights in the American context, as the legacy of Muhammad Ali most powerfully demonstrates. Waves of African-Americans became Muslim out of impetus to fight for civil rights, seeing Islam as an equalizing force and sharīʿa as a call to fight for justice. For her, that legacy represented just one instance of a larger trend within a decidedly American experience of sharīʿa, one that she referred to in shorthand as "civil rights sharīʿa." When asked about the role of sharīʿa in educational and policy contexts, Rabb provided a framework for approaching discussions of Islamic law both online and offline -- in ways that track the major inspiration and mission of SHARIAsource in its design to provide content and context on Islamic law. Namely, she stressed the need to consider a large number of source materials, cultural contexts, and political realities when approaching any analysis of the meaning and application of Islamic law. Image credit: Paul Beran

 

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Oct 2016, no. 5
Oct 2016, no. 5

CASE COMMENTARY: Shamim Ara and the Divorce Politics of a Secular and Modern India There is a lot of talk about a controversial type of divorce – some see it as valid in Islamic law, but  others rail against it as anti-Islamic law – that may challenge the integrity and institution of marriage in secular societies, and has the Indian Supreme Court set for possibly banning the practice. What practice is that? It is the so-called triple-ṭalāq maneuver whereby Muslim men utter three “magic words” – ṭalāq, ṭalāq, ṭalāq (divorce, divorce, divorce) – to dissolve a marriage outside of the judicial system. Against that backdrop, it is worth revisiting the origins of the practice. South Asia editor Jeff Redding takes us back to a 2002 case to highlight ways in which a major factor that influences the Indian Supreme Court’s ṭalāq decisions is often overlooked: the "state vs. non-state character of ṭalāq." In the landmark case Shamim Ara v. State of U.P. (2002), the Court decided in favor of Shamim Ara, who sued her husband for maintenance fees, only to be told he had divorced her in a civil suit years prior using the private ṭalāq maneuver without her knowledge.The Court concluded that declaration of ṭalāq without her knowledge was illegitimate and ordered him to pay maintenance fees until the divorce had been effected with both parties' knowledge. Since, the decision has had a positive effect on Muslim women's welfare in India. But women’s welfare may not have been the driving concern of the Court. Instead, the case may have revealed the extent of the Indian government’s concerns with being seen as a secular and modern state on par with its peers. These concerns reveal themselves in several related cases: the Supreme Court's historical preference for arbitration and reconciliation over divorce; its historical reluctance to intervene in questions of Islamic family law, which usually involves divorce, and which therefore typically result in illiberal outcomes regarding women; and its reluctance to codify Islamic family law to set clear standards. Redding concludes that, in the 2002 case, the Indian Supreme Court's decision sought to preserve existing mores and project liberal aspirations by "allow[ing] divorce, while simultaneously attempting to distance itself—both figuratively and literally—from the practiced reality of it." The current row over triple ṭalāq currently before the Supreme Court will no doubt test these claims and may well explain the original outcome. Read more. Image credit: India New England News

 

CASE DOCUMENT: Shamim Ara v. State of U.P. (Indian Supreme Court, 2002) In this older case on ṭalāq (divorce) before the Supreme Court in India, an issue now before that Court again, the justices decided that a husband's filing for divorce without his wife's knowledge cannot be considered a valid declaration of ṭalāq. For the first time, the state formally decided what is or is not considered proper procedure for ṭalāq. Often considered a landmark case for Muslim women's welfare in India, the Shamim Ara case will no doubt shed light on the question currently before the Indian Supreme Court on the constitutionalism of triple ṭalāq. Image credit: The Indian Talks

 

IN SUMMARY:: Workshop: Digital Islamic Humanities & Early Arabic Printed Books Friday, October 21, 2016 | Brown University, Joukowsky Forum, Watson Institute | Led by Elias Muhanna. As part of a series on digital Islamic humanities, this program showcased a growing network of institutions and organizations using technology to enhance the study of Islam in all its facets, including Islamic law. Dr. Kathryn Schwartz of Harvard University outlined a major shift in the understanding of why Europe and the Middle East embraced printing at different speeds. She indicated that differences in technology are replacing lack of human agency as the most widely accepted reason. This approach embraces more squarely the extensive history of manuscripts in the Middle East region. Read more. Image credit: Paul Beran

 

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Nov 2016, no. 1
Nov 2016, no. 1

ELECTION DAY 2016 ISSUE Civil Rights Sharīʿa and the Elections as a part of the American Political Process On election day 2016, Professor Intisar Rabb, SHARIAsource founding editor-in-chief, reflects on the notion of “civil rights sharīʿa”: the role that Islamic law has historically played in honoring and pressing for shared commitments to justice and equality under the law. Modern American history already exemplifies this notion in the legacy of boxing legend Muhammad Ali, who died as a civil rights champion. In addition to advocating for the disadvantaged throughout his life, he once took his case against joining the U.S. military to fight in Vietnam all the way to the Supreme Court, and winning. All this he did on the basis his Islamic faith, that is, his understanding of sharīʿa that drove him to see that conflict as an unjust war against innocent civilians that did nothing to serve the cause of justice given the problems of racial inequality at home. In Ali's own words, “Why should they ask me to put on a uniform and go 10,000 miles from home and drop bombs and bullets on brown people in Vietnam while so-called Negro people in Louisville are treated like dogs and denied simple human rights? … Man, I ain't got no quarrel with them Viet Cong. No Viet Cong ever called me n****r." Rabb draws a parallel between this historical example of what she calls "civil rights sharīʿa" and the more recent example of Khizr Khan's speech at the Democratic National Convention this past July, where he exhibited forceful support for the U.S. Constitution as a Gold Star father of a U.S. fallen soldier, who – in contrast to Ali – died fighting in the U.S. military. One a Kentucky native, the other an immigrant, these two Muslims undeniably expressed a morality that differed strikingly from one another but was equally born of their American values and Muslim faith. Their stories powerfully correct a common misconception – highlighted in the sometimes vitriolic contests over the presidency this election term – that sharīʿa is fundamentally at odds with American values of liberal, constitutional democracy. Moreover, prior Islamic history demonstrates that Ali and Khan’s sense of justice and equality is not derived from a uniquely American belief. The historical record of Islamic law shows a precedent of support for the notion of fighting for justice on the basis of shared moral principles in mixed Muslim and non-Muslim settings. Demonstrating this claim is SHARIAsource senior scholar Sherman Jackson's recent article on “Islamic Law, Muslims, and American Politics.” There, Jackson examines the "intelligent moral principles" exemplified by the Prophet Muhammad's Treaty of Hudaybiyya, in which he prioritized peace over "everyone agreeing to the same theological or legal morality." These moral principles do not mutate or dissipate, but as Ali and Khan's actions demonstrate, they often adapt to the realities of the political climate and the demands of justice in any given time and place. Rabb emphasizes that, of course, "whether Muslim or non-Muslim, one should never assume that sharīʿa covers both substantive and administrative procedural laws, or both public law ... and private transactions." In short, under both modern and medieval definitions of sharīʿa, the laws of the state are customary norms that each citizen must follow. In this context, the commitment to upholding the values and spirit of that state are often aspirations rooted both in the U.S. constitution and the moral principles of sharīʿa. Read more.  Image credit: The Ringer, Harvard Law Today

From Harvard Law Today: A Citizen's Constitution
Earlier this year, Harvard Law Today interviewed alumnus Khizr Khan, HLS LL.M. '86, for its September 6th issue. Khan discussed how the course of his career from Pakistan to the United States shaped his dedication to American constitutional values, even after the death of his son Captain Humayun Khan in Iraq. A Muslim and published author on Islamic law, he says to those who fear sharīʿa and Islam as encroaching upon American values: “They need to read the Constitution. It has safeguards.... I’m an ordinary Muslim, and I ... am a protector of the United States … Islam has taught me to be caring, to be kind. My religion is to live peacefully with all other religions and all other peoples. Read more. Image credit: Mike Segar/Reuters

 

CASE: Islamic Family Law in U.S. Courts U.S. Editor Abed Awad has been collecting cases of family law related to Islamic law that get litigated as matters of contract in U.S. courts. For each case available in the SHARIAsource portal, Awad summarizes the facts, the issue, and the ruling of each case. From his case summaries, readers can quickly glean and compare how American courts decide family law cases in which prenuptial or/and related contracts contain terms drawn from varied aspects of Islamic law. The courts apply U.S. law to these private contracts, and the outcomes are far from uniform. For example, two cases decided in Virginia,  Afghani v. Ghafoorian  and Farah v. Farah, demonstrate how American courts can differ in resolving disputes at such intersections of law. (SHARIAsource beta access required). Image Credit: Wikipedia

 

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Nov 2016, no. 2
Nov 2016, no. 2

SHARIAsource TOOL:: Using Corpus Analysis to Study Media Discourse First there was Media Cloud -- an open source platform for studying media ecosystems developed by Ethan Zuckerman (an adviser to SHARIAsource) and his team at the MIT Media Lab. That tool allows researchers to track the way ideas spread through media, and shows that different corners of the media ecosystem report on stories differently. Building on Media Cloud is a tool that SHARIAsource Editor and MIT Media Lab research affiliate Ali Hashmi has been developing to analyze discourse on Islamic law (sharīʿa) in the media. On November 7, he and Research Editor Sharon Tai presented their preliminary findings with the first iteration of this tool in a talk on “Using Corpus Analysis to Study Media Discourse: Comparing Discussions of Islamic Marriage Reform in India and Pakistan.” The two applied machine learning to research media discourse on Islamic law and uncovered ways in which distinct nuances become conflated in varied media ecosystems. The tool analyzes large sets of text-based data by conducting what they call “critical sentiment analysis,” that is, by separating key terms into positive and negative ideas. As a case study, they applied their work to Pakistani and Indian newspapers to examine how conversations on Islamic law manifest in ongoing discussions of divorce and marriage reform. Osama Siddique, Henry J. Steiner Visiting Professor in Human Rights at Harvard Law School responded to the presentation with his commentary on the tool’s broader applications to research. When fully developed, this tool may well inform or analyze conversations about media and politics in discussions of Islamic law in the United States and around the world. Image credit: Paul Beran

REVIEW: Judges on Cushions and Under Trees: Thoughts on “Qāḍī Justice” and Hyperpolemics Guest contributor Haider Hamoudi reviews Professor Intisar Rabb's, SHARIAsource founding editor-in-chief, new article in the Suffolk Law Review entitled  Against Kadijustiz: On the Negative Citation of Foreign Law. Rabb focuses on how American courts have utilized inaccurate portrayals of "qāḍī justice" as antitheses to American court procedures. Hamoudi notes that this point is all the more important when one considers that using inaccurate and reductive caricatures to advance polemical arguments is a technique used as well in the history of Islamic law, to the detriment of the arguments. Read more. Image credit: Chester Beatty Library, Dublin

 

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Nov 2016, no. 3
Nov 2016, no. 3

DEVELOPMENTS IN DIGITAL ISLAMIC LAW :: New Tools that Range from Machine Learning to Mapping Islamic Legal Texts Preceding the annual Middle East Studies Association (MESA) conference in Boston, SHARIAsource hosted several events on emerging digital research tools featuring new research tools developed by Maxim Romanov (Universität Leipzig) and his team. The events covered digital mapping tools that can – among other historical questions – show the regions in which different approaches to Islamic law developed and spread, enable scholars to collaborate on creating a corpus of Arabic texts compatible with digital humanities tools, and allow comparisons between texts to show when and how much one scholar borrowed ideas from another. The major finding is this: after years of chasing a chimeric tool made up of the ability to manipulate Arabic PDFs (many of which are scans that remain static, like a physical book) and easy compatibility with machine learning and other digital humanities work (a tool long resolved for Latin characters), Romanov’s team has managed to capture the once mythical beast. For the first time in the field, the Islamicate Texts Initiative (ITI) has produced a high-accuracy optical character recognition (OCR) tool – with accuracy rates in the high-nineties – that will change the possibilities for digital Islamic law and digital Islamic humanities both. (The chart above illustrates the success rate for recognition when used on a number of different texts and scan qualities.) The ITI team, in addition to Romanov, includes Matthew Thomas Miller (Roshan Institute for Persian Studies, University of Maryland, College Park), Sarah Bowen Savant (Agha Khan University), and Benjamin Kiessling (Universität Leipzig). The events were sponsored or co-sponsored by the Islamic Legal Studies Program: SHARIAsource, the Center for Geographic Analysis at Harvard, and the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations (NELC).  Read more. Image credit: ITI/Important New Developments in Arabographic Optical Character Recognition (OCR)

 

DOCUMENT: Sharifian Decree of 1957 - The Mudawwana: Law of Personal Status Uploaded by Morocco editor Ari Schriber, "This section of al-Jarīda al-Rasmiyya officially promulgates the first two books of the Moroccan Personal Status Code, the Mudawwana (1957). The first book presents stipulations concerning marriage, including issues such as the contract, dowry, and inhibitors (like number of wives). The second book deals with the dissolution of marriage, thus addressing conditions of repudiation, women’s repudiation, and the ʿidda (the woman’s waiting period until she may remarry)." Read more. Image credit: SHARIAsource

 

SHARIAsource Welcomes New Program Coordinator Darrick Northington joined the SHARIAsource team last week as Program Coordinator. He brings amazing talents and experiences to the SHARIAsource's team. Darrick is a graduate of Indiana University (BA) and Harvard University (MTS), where he studied religion and US society, American pragmatism, and the history of political philosophy. He spent the last several years closely assisting friend and mentor,  Charles J. Ogletree Jr., Jesse Climenko Professor of Law at Harvard Law School. Most recently Darrick served as the House Administrator for The John Winthrop House. He brings many years of Harvard administrative experience to SHARIAsource, as well as a passion for academic study and racial and community justice. Image credit: Harvard

 

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Nov 2016, no. 4
Nov 2016, no. 4

Developments in Islamic Law: The Comparative Costs and Benefits of Models of Islamic Finance Regulation Islamic finance is under increased scrutiny. Just last week, the Accounting and Auditing Organization for Islamic Finance Institutions (AAOIFI) announced plans to more aggressively develop centralized standards to regulate the boards responsible for assessing sharīʿa-compliance among banks and financial institutions doing business in GCC countries. UAE editor Paul Lee provides some context. From a series of interviews he conducted last year with Islamic finance practitioners in the Dubai International Financial Centre (DIFC), he gleaned a number of insights and opinions in the industry useful for assessing the costs and efficacy of different models of  Islamic finance. Because Islamic law prohibits charging interest, sharīʿa-compliant banks must look to financial instruments that do not rely on interest. The industry has developed to offer three choices that coordinate among those instruments: a systems-based model, a centralized model, and a model of competitive equality. Each model relies on Sharīʿa Supervisory Boards (SSBs), but to varying degrees and with varying results. While the systems-based and centralized models save transactions costs by creating standards for best practices among financial agents, the systems-based model may allow agents to "shop" for sharīʿa advisors most amenable to their requests ( as would the competitive model), and the cost of standardization for the centralized model may result in overregulation that creates disincentives for investors. The Islamic finance jury is still out. The AAOIFI’s recent move may make available more empirical evidence to more decisively assess the efficacy of the centralized model, but more is required to assess the other theories.  Read more.  Image Credit: SHARIAsource

LEGISLATION: UAE Federal Law No. 8 of 2004 Regarding Financial Free Zones (2004) This federal legislation of the United Arab Emirates establishes and regulates Financial Free Zones in the sharīʿa-compliant UAE. In addition to defining how a Free Zone is established and operated, the statue also outlines how financial brokers and businesses may establish themselves within the Free Zones.  Read more. Image Credit: SHARIAsource

 

Professor Intisar Rabb Joins Emerson College's Engagement Lab Intisar Rabb, Professor of Harvard Law School and SHARIAsource founding editor-in-chief, has joined the Advisory Board of Emerson College'sEngagement Lab. Described as "an applied research lab for reimagining civic engagement in a digital culture," this unique organization's vision shares many commonalities with that of SHARIAsource. With twenty-six national partners and over a dozen projects incubating, the Lab focuses on using new media and data to increase media literacy and community engagement. Image Credit: SHARIAsource

 

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Dec 2016, no. 1
Dec 2016, no. 1

Debt and Bankruptcy in Classical Islamic Law Student editor Esther Agbaje (Harvard Law School) explores classical Islamic law's basic conceptions of debt and bankruptcy. While the main Islamic texts, the Qur’ān and Sunna (records of the Prophet Muhammad's teachings), provide principles for fiscal  matters, these principles are not enough to establish systems as complex as those in modern finance with a guarantee of soundness in terms of Islamic law. As financial systems increase in complexity and number of actors, for better or worse, so too does the necessity of a clear set of sharīʿa-compliant  standards. Agbaje suggests starting with classical Islamic law, which explicitly summarizes the principles of finance into “four distinct areas: prohibition on earning interest (riba), the prohibition on speculation (maysir), the prohibition on illegal activities (haram), and the obligation of banks to give back to the community (zakat).” These principles naturally make for a financial model “based on partnership” that emphasizes both debt repayment and tolerance. “This tension between the obligation of a debtor to repay and the obligation of a creditor to forgive (or at least allow more time for repayment)” manifests as equal treatment for personal and commercial bankruptcy. How bankruptcy is practically dealt with, however, differs among schools of jurisprudence, as they diverge on how a creditor may humanely demand repayment. Read more. Image credit: Blog: Brave Organization Never Dies

 

LEGISLATION: Laws of Malaysia, Act 276: Islamic Banking Act 1983 When Malaysian officials established a centralized Islamic financial system with its 1983 Islamic Banking Act, they avoided issues of bankruptcy and debt. Instead, Malaysia handles bankruptcy according to banking principles familiar to its foreign investors, as evidenced in its Bankruptcy Act of 1967. U.S. editor Abed Awad explains that such moves occur because bankruptcy in classical Islamic law is “strongly analogous to the traditional civil and common law treatment of bankrupts prior to the enactment of Chapter 11,” when debt repayment was the goal, not preserving a business enterprise. Read more. Image credit: Channel News Asia

 

COMMENTARY: Is Sharīʿa Incompatible with the Modern Administrative State? Anver Emon (Professor of Law at the University of Toronto Faculty of Law and SHARIAsource senior scholar) has a new paper on “Codification and Islamic Law” that challenges the now popular argument that Islamic law is near-impossible to formalize as state law. Treating Islamic law as “law” fails, he argues, when folks reduce definitions of sharīʿa and the state to fit a narrow idea of the state: the modern administrative state. Fitting Islamic law into a centralized bureaucratic institution loses the spirit of what is “law” and explains the assumed incompatibility. Read more. Image credit: The Library of Liberty and Law

 

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Dec 2016, no. 2
Dec 2016, no. 2

The Long Shadow of England’s Privy Council Cast on the Islamic Law of Trusts in British India Student editor Esther Agbaje (Harvard Law School) explores classical Islamic law's basic conceptions of debt and bankruptcy. While the main Islamic texts, the Qur’ān and Sunna (records of the Prophet Muhammad's teachings), provide principles for fiscal  matters, these principles are not enough to establish systems as complex as those in modern finance with a guarantee of soundness in terms of Islamic law. As financial systems increase in complexity and number of actors, for better or worse, so too does the necessity of a clear set of sharīʿa-compliant  standards. Agbaje suggests starting with classical Islamic law, which explicitly summarizes the principles of finance into “four distinct areas: prohibition on earning interest (riba), the prohibition on speculation (maysir), the prohibition on illegal activities (haram), and the obligation of banks to give back to the community (zakat).” These principles naturally make for a financial model “based on partnership” that emphasizes both debt repayment and tolerance. “This tension between the obligation of a debtor to repay and the obligation of a creditor to forgive (or at least allow more time for repayment)” manifests as equal treatment for personal and commercial bankruptcy. How bankruptcy is practically dealt with, however, differs among schools of jurisprudence, as they diverge on how a creditor may humanely demand repayment. Read more. Image credit: Western Civilization II Guides

 

CASE: Abul Fata Mahomed Ishak v Russomoy Dhur Chowdury (1894) This case exemplifies the complex influence of the British Privy Council on Islamic law (called “Muhammadan law”) in India during colonial rule. While the British rulers instituted their legal system in India, family and inheritance law often remained under the purview of the exponents of Islamic law. This case demonstrates the political and legal complexities of such a system. The court here held that a family endowment could not be formed under Islamic law. The principles underlying this decision, however, bore an uncanny similarity to English inheritance laws. Read more. Image credit: The British Library

 

CASE: Indonesian Supreme Court Jurisprudence 111K/AG: Familial Beneficiaries (1998) One of the Supreme Court of Indonesia's judgments on inheritance, the judgment in this case is that the law does not recognize a simultaneous ownership and inheritance dispute when the petitioners or potential beneficiaries (ahli waris in Bahasa, ahl al-wārith in Arabic). Although Indonesia is not an Islamic constitutional country, its legislation is increasingly guided by Islamic law principles. Read more. Image Credit Wikipedia

 

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Dec 2016, no. 3
Dec 2016, no. 3

The Dissolution of Sharīʿa in the 1965 Moroccan Court Unification Law During a time when there are global questions about stable Muslim-majority states that have combined Islamic law with state law, SHARIAsource editor Ari Schriber (Harvard University) convincingly demonstrates that Morocco's 1965 Court Unification Law deserves more attention, though not for the reasons one may initially suppose. In asserting independence then, Moroccan leaders paved the way for a stable regime that featured Islamic law as a part of national identity, independence, and statehood under a constitutional monarchy now. Before independence, Morocco's state were established by Frenchcolonial powers and assumed French judicial traditions. Religious courts remained independent under qādīs (judges), who continued to provide rulings based in Islamic law. After independence, however, "the [Moroccan] government sought to complete a series of legal codes reasserting Moroccan national sovereignty ... subsum[ing] religious courts into the national system." Although the Moroccan Constitution declared Islam the religion of the state, the way the King went about integrating Islamic law into that new administrative state "reduc[ed] sharīʿa to statutory legislation" and promoted Moroccan independence and nationalism. The nationalist bent was evident in the Court Unification Law itself. It allowed only Moroccans to be eligible for judgeships  and promoted an increasingly "Arabicized" system. In speeches accompanying the passage of the Laws, King Hassan II asserted an Islamic law basis for these changes, arguing that such provisions were consistent with the preservation of Islamic legal principles. But upon closer inspection, says Schriber, "the ensuing series of legislation clearly paved the way for a bold assertion of secular Moroccan state institutions." Read more. Image Credit: Wikipedia

 

LEGISLATION: Moroccan Court Unification Law (1965) This legislation unified Morocco's religious courts with its state courts. Though the vision proclaimed in the Moroccan Constitution of 1962 was one of a "state of Islam," this piece of legislation does not mention Islam as a guiding principle. Instead, it supports the vision of a Moroccan administrative state, rooting the newly sovereign nation in nationalist rather than religious foundations. Read more. Image credit: Public Domain/Flickr

 

IN SUMMARY:: Policy Roundtable: Understanding Sharīʿa: Implications for Policy and Conflict Resolution, 13 Dec, USIP, Washington, DC A policy roundtable on Islamic law, co-sponsored by the Islamic Legal Studies Program: SHARIAsource and the United States Institute of Peace, and held on December 13 at USIP, was a first-of its-kind program that brought together a broad cross-section of individuals working in federal government, academic, and non-governmental organizations on policy issues related to Islamic law. The program focused on exploring the major features, structures, and processes of law-making in Islamic law historically and in the present. Read more. Image Credit: Wikipedia

 

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Previous Newsletters (ILSP) 🛈

Aug 2010

Aug 2010

Islamic Law in the Law of National States in the Middle East and Southeast Asia Under this title I organized, on March 26 and 29, 2010, a workshop that discussed the place of Islamic law in the national codes of states with predominantly Muslim populations in the Middle East and Southeast Asia. What place do their codes assign to Islamic law? As none of the states concerned—with the exception of Turkey—declares itself to be a secular state, they can all claim that the law they enact is the law of an Islamic state and therefore Islamic law, even if the dependence of the codes on Western models often is obvious. The question is how the states’ claim to create new “Islamic law” affects the interpretation of the content of their codes that seem to be entirely “Western” and distinct from classical Islamic fiqh. Read more

 

Parting Words from the Acting Director On July 1, 2010, I ended my tenure as Acting Director of the Islamic Legal Studies Program at Harvard Law School and took over the directorship of the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard University. As of July 1, Dr. Nazim Ali will be the Acting Executive Director of ILSP.

These changes in the directorship will not diminish the important potential that ILSP has as a center for research on Islamic legal history, as a forum in which members of the legal profession of Muslim countries (the judiciary, legal practitioners, and law professors) can meet and discuss questions of common interest with members of the American legal profession. ILSP will continue to be a common ground for visiting research fellows from countries with different cultural and religious backgrounds who come to Harvard to provide, through their research, a better understanding of the development of Islamic law past and present. ILSP and its Islamic Finance Program have established a solid reputation as one of the meeting points of scholars and practitioners in this field.

 

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Jun 2011

Jun 2011

From the Acting Executive Director Greetings! First and foremost, I would like to welcome you all, this being the first newsletter since I assume the acting executive directorship of ILSP. I would also like to thank my predecessors­-the Founding Director of ILSP, Frank E. Vogel, former Acting Director Baber Johansen, and former Associate Director, Peri Bearman-who, through their efforts and dedication, have built a strong foundation for ILSP. I am also grateful to them for always being available to assist me whenever I need any advice. Read more

 

Abd Al-Razzaq Al-Sanhuri Lecture Series On April 18, 2011, the Islamic Legal Studies Program hosted the sixth lecture of the Abd al-Razzaq al-Sanhuri Lecture Series on Legal Interpretation in the Muslim World. Named after the prominent 20th-century Islamic jurist, educator and reformer the Sanhuri Lecture Series seeks to bring a variety of renowned guest speakers from around the world to discuss both historical and modern issues in Islamic legal theory and practice. Delivering this lecture was Ibrahim Najjar the former Justice Minister of Lebanon and Professor of Law at St. Joseph University in Beirut. Read more

 

 

IFP Roundtable on the Impact of Islamic Finance on Economic Development The Islamic Finance Project and Islamic Legal Studies Program organized a panel discussion that took place on October 12, 2010, entitled “The Impact of Islamic Finance on Economic Development”. A distinguished panel of practitioners form the Islamic Development Bank (IDB) and a academic from Tufts University provided their insights on the topic. Read more.

 

Student Travel Grants During the previous academic year, ILSP was pleased to award travel grants to four Harvard Law School students. During the winter term, third-year J.D. students Mina Khalil, Taylor Landis and Chelsea Sharon traveled to the Middle East to undertake research in Lebanon and Egypt. Read more.

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Jul 2012

Jul 2012

From the Acting Executive Director Greetings! This past year marked the 20th anniversary of the Islamic Legal Studies Program at Harvard Law School, and it is my pleasure to share its highlights with you. As usual, a variety of academic activities, including ILSP fellows’ lectures, seminars, forums, and panel discussions, took place during the year, as well as efforts to engage with various departments across Harvard and with colleagues and organizations outside of the University. Read more

 

Abd Al-Razzaq Al-Sanhuri Lecture Series On Modern Muslim societies are now facing the challenge of applying Shari‘a to contexts that have changed markedly from those that existed during the early decades of Islam. The current Islamic legal system has gone through periodic changes of growth and renewal that have not kept up with the rapid developments of the legal system in the world today. Despite reform and revitalization efforts to adapt Islamic law to contemporary issues, various Islamization and harmonization theories remain insufficient, and new challenges are continually forming. Much of the contemporary research in this field focuses primarily on the harmonization of legal systems. However, the effort should go beyond harmonization, through unified efforts from all Islamic agencies. In her lecture for the Abd alRazzaq al-Sanhuri Lecture Series on Legal Interpretation in the Muslim World, “Islamic Legal System and the Quest for Transformation in the 21st Century,” Professor Zaleha Kamaruddin, Rector of the International Islamic University Malaysia, argued that efforts to reform Islamic law should go beyond the harmonization of legal systems, harnessing unified efforts from all Islamic agencies. Read more

 

Islamic Finance Project  The Tenth Harvard University Forum on Islamic Finance was held at Harvard Law School on March 24 and 25, 2012. This forum is a biennial event organized by IFP to engage practitioners, scholars, and students of Islamic finance in a critical discussion of the latest developments in the field. This year’s forum, entitled “Islamic Finance and Development,” included three plenary sessions on global economic development, the development of small and medium enterprises (SMEs), and faith-based investment and social responsibility. It also included two distinguished banquet speeches and four parallel sessions discussing various contemporary issues on Islamic finance and development. Read more

 

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Aug 2013

Aug 2013

From the Acting Executive Director This year, ILSP was fortunate to relocate from Mount Auburn Street back to the Harvard Law School campus, after a hiatus of seven years. Our new headquarters in historic Austin Hall have brought us closer to HLS students, faculty, and other resources. The Islamic Finance Project (IFP), a subsidiary of ILSP, also moved into Austin Hall from its previous location in Holyoke Center. Our move, which took place in March, was hectic, but having the IFP and ILSP under one roof has allowed us more control, smoother communications, and valuable integration. Read more

 

Shari‘a and the Law in Bangladesh: Understanding the Critical Conjunctions and Disjunctions Bangladesh, a Muslim-dense democratic state in South Asia, represents a curious dichotomy between the belief system of the Muslim majority (shari‘a) and the existing legal system of the country. However, underneath this apparent dichotomy, there exist certain crucial interlinkages between shari‘a and the law. This dichotomy and the linkages merit a careful scrutiny, though they have never been subjected to any systematic academic analysis. This paper therefore seeks to examine the conjunctions and disjunctions between shari‘a and the law in Bangladesh and point out the key challenges of integration of shari‘a and its mainstreaming in the legal system of Bangladesh. Read more

 

United Nations and Islamic Law: Strategies to Achieve Universal Development Goals and Human Rights in the Muslim World?  A common dilemma confronting post-conflict interventions in Muslim societies is whether, or to what extent, to engage with Islamic normative systems and perforce Islamic political dynamics. Will entertaining Islamic arguments add another layer of volatility, frustrate reform, and embolden radicals? Will canvassing medieval Islamic doctrines, like other customary norms, unravel the hard-won development consensus and jeopardize human rights? Widespread anxieties such as these may reflect the false premises and dichotomies—universal versus Islamic, secular versus faith-oriented, modern versus traditional—that sometimes permeate development discourses. UN agencies seeking to harness authentic Islamic ideas do not advocate for exclusive or automatic Islamic solutions where Muslims live. Instead the quest is for Islamic components that can be fitted into overall universal strategies. Read more

 

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