As a part of its mission of promoting research and providing resources to advance the academic study of Islamic law, the Program in Islamic Law supports projects that provide both content and context in the field in ways that are accessible and useful. Our focus is on traditional scholarship as well as on AI and new data science tools that will expand access to knowledge and facilitate new research and analysis in the field.
The SHARIAsource Portal provides a window into the digital world of Islamic legal studies, with a growing set of texts and AI/data science tools that will enable researches to better explore and access the sources in this field. It allows researchers to contribute primary sources on Islamic law and history, covering new developments in the field (from modern courts and legislatures to historical papers or archival records), to curate entire collections, and to utilize the sources and collections freely available in a well-curated and high-quality environment of sources for texts (now) and tools (to come) on Islamic law and history.
Courts&Canons (CnC) is a suite of data science tools that facilitates research and insights into Islamic law and the motivating values behind it, across space and time. Our CnC-Canons Annotator and CnC-Canons Matcher enable and simplify the process of collecting and annotating primary source-data about people, laws, places and more through AI and the use of structured relational databases that enable specific citations (RAG). We also build research informed data visualizations using both supervised and unsupervised learning models designed to extract core data from Arabic texts. This project fits within an initiative that develops structured datasets of Islamic legal and historical texts in Arabic, Farsi, and other Middle Eastern languages, with focus on judicial materials and the interpretive legal canons used by textualist judges, and with methods that enable computational analysis of legal reasoning across Islamic history.
SEARCHstrata is a project that is currently underway and will offer a more robust search of the Harvard Libraries’ Islamic collections—the largest academic collection of its kind in the world. As it develops, the platform will integrate a virtual browsing experience alongside guidance from a collections curator, helping users navigate the breadth and depth of the materials. The project is designed to expand access for users around the globe, enabling them to engage with materials housed at Harvard while also laying the groundwork for future collaboration. Partner institutions will be able to contribute additional sources on Islamic law—including legislation, court cases, and fatwas—and curate their own “shelves” within a shared virtual library. At the same time, data science tools currently in development and created in collaboration with scholars in the field aim to support both close and distant reading of historical and contemporary texts, opening new possibilities for research and analysis.