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The Alwaleed Bin Talal Islamic Studies Program at Harvard University will hold a workshop titled “Library Resources for Scholars of Islamic Studies” on November 8, 2024, from 2:30 to 4:30 PM. The event will feature a distinguished panel of librarians and researchers, including our Managing Editor, Dr. Cem Tecimer, and Harvard librarians including Emily Coolidge-Toker, Kristine Greive, Matthew Smith, Joanne Bloom, and Amanda Steinberg. Attendees will explore a range of specialized library resources, digital research tools, and archival materials available at Harvard, valuable for scholars and researchers in the field of Islamic Studies.

The Research Methods in Islamic Studies Workshop is a bi-annual workshop that engages graduate students and faculty active in the field of Islamic Studies around current methodological questions. Where Islamic Studies is informed by, intervenes in, and adds to cognate disciplines such as Anthropology, Area Studies, History, Art History, Near Eastern Studies, and Religion Studies, this is an especially productive undertaking. The workshop showcases novel and established methods and draws special attention to the burgeoning potential of the Digital Humanities. Besides offering intellectual and logistical support, the workshop connects researchers to the various libraries, research institutes and other services at Harvard (and beyond) with the aim of fostering research opportunities and collaboration.

On Tuesday, April 8, 2025, at 12:30-1:30PM US EST via Zoom, Professor Sarah Savant (Aga Khan University) will present “A Cultural History of the Arabic Book: Digital Explorations of Writerly Practices and Text Reuse.” This talk explores how one could reconstruct how major authors in the Arabic language from the eighth to sixteenth centuries wrote their books– the sources they used, what they copied out, and the scholars they knew. For most of these authors, reusing earlier works was the starting point for creating new ones. They abbreviated long works to make short ones, commented on short ones to make long ones, and mined general histories to compose works on specific themes. In these and many other ways, authors produced an enormously intertextual tradition, shaping how later individuals and communities would remember their pasts and conceive of their affiliations to groups bound by locality, profession, religion, tribe, ethnicity and other shared traits. To make the reconstruction of these relations possible on a large scale, the KITAB (Knowledge, Information Technology, & the Arabic Book) project built a digital corpus of thousands of these early Arabic books comprising more than two billion words. The talk addresses topics ranging from religion, philosophy and language to history, geography, medicine and astronomy, that were written over the first ten centuries of Islam in a region spanning from modern Spain to Central and South Asia. The team then utilized a text reuse detection algorithm to create an original data set that documents word-for-word relationships among all these books. This talk will visualize and investigate the broad patterns of text reuse using the KITAB data set and forensically analyze individual works to observe the tradition both from a satellite perspective and through a microscope, as it were. Registration is required. 

On Tuesday, March 11, 2025, at 12:30-1:30PM US EST via Zoom, Professor Mohsen Kadivar (Duke University) will present “The Genealogy of the Death Penalty for Apostasy and Blasphemy in Islam.” This talk examines a few ḥadith that are attributed to the Prophet that support a penalty for apostasy, especially execution, that have been the foundation of this ruling of criminal law in conservative Islam. They are not only conjectural isolated ḥadith that directly contradict the Qurʾān but were also fabricated and forged under the influence of Jewish literature during the Umayyad and Abbasid dynasties. The so-called prophetic ḥadith of “Kill the one who changes his religion” was the product of the eighth and ninth centuries. The ruling of killing apostates entered Shīʿī law from the Sunni legal schools. From the tenth century onwards, narrations on the penalty for apostasy as well as blasphemy of the Prophet (and even the Imams), in the most restrictive sense, have been attributed to the Shīʿī Imams, although most of them are considered weak, having no chain of transmitters, or contain unknown individuals in the chain. Registration is required.

On Tuesday, February 11, 2025, at 12:30-1:30PM US EST via Zoom, Professor Malika Zeghal (Harvard University) will present The Making of the Modern Muslim State: Islam and Governance in the Middle East and North Africa (Princeton University Press, 2024). This book reframes the role of Islam in modern Middle East governance. Challenging other accounts that claim that Middle Eastern states turned secular in modern times, Professor Zeghal shows instead the continuity of the state’s custodianship of Islam as the preferred religion. Drawing on intellectual, political, and economic history, she traces this custodianship from early forms of constitutional governance in the nineteenth century through post–Arab Spring experiments in democracy. She argues that the intense debates around the implementation and meaning of state support for Islam led to a political cleavage between conservatives and their opponents that long predated the polarization of the twentieth century that accompanied the emergence of mass politics and Islamist movements. Examining constitutional projects, public spending, school enrollments, and curricula, Professor Zeghal shows that although modern Muslim-majority polities have imported Western techniques of governance, the state has continued to protect and support the religion, community, and institutions of Islam. She finds that even as Middle Eastern states have expanded their nonreligious undertakings, they have dramatically increased their per capita supply of public religious provisions, especially Islamic education—further feeding the political schism between Islamists and their adversaries. Registration is required. 

On Tuesday, December 10, 2024, at 12:30-1:30PM US EST, Dr. Bahman Khodadadi (Harvard Law School) will present On Theocratic Criminal Law: The Rule of Religion and Punishment in Iran (Oxford University Press, 2024). This talk explores the roots and structures of the criminal law system of the world’s most prominent constitutional theocracy, the Shīʿī theocracy. While discussing the processes of de-westernization which occurred in the wake of the Islamic Revolution, this work examines how the Islamic conception of civil order and polity has been established within the legal and theological framework of the Iranian Constitution. The presentation offers a ‘rational reconstruction’ of the theocratic criminal law and offers a critical analysis of the way criminal law functions as the centerpiece of this mode of theocratic domination. It illuminates how this revelation-based, punitive ideology functions, how the current Islamic Penal Code mirrors prevailing Shīʿī jurisprudence. It also explores the jurisprudential principles and dynamic power of Shīʿī Islam not only as a driving force behind political and social change but as a force that has been capable of forging a whole theocratic legal system. Registration is required. 

On Tuesday, November 12, 2024, at 12:30-1:30PM US EST, Professor Ali Rod Khadem (Suffolk University) will present “Islamic Apocalyptic Jurisprudence: End-Times Law in Sunnī and Shīʿī Discourses” (Islamic Law and Society 31 (3), 2024). This talk explores theories of the final legal system that will govern humanity in the End Times, as envisioned in the apocalyptic discourses of several Sunnī and Shīʿī case studies. Key themes include the sources of law, the role of jurists, conflicts between Islamic, Jewish, Christian, and international legal systems, changes to classical Islamic legal theory, and the introduction of new laws and policies in the apocalyptic era. The presentation will highlight how the lens of apocalypticism enables movements and thinkers to advocate for radical changes to the foundations and particulars of Islamic law, while still claiming to operate within the boundaries of Islamic orthodoxy. Registration is required. 

On Tuesday, October 8, 2024, at 12:30-1:30PM US EST via Zoom, Professor Recep Senturk (Hamad Bin Khalifa University) will present Ādamiyyah: I am Therefore I have Rights (Usul Academy Press, 2025). This book explores the concept of Ādamiyya and Huqūq al-Ādamiyyīn in Islamic law and its implications in practice from the time of Prophet Muhammad, His Predecessors, the Umayyad and Abbasid periods, Andalusia and the Islamic rule in India. Special attention is paid to how the concept of Ādamiyya was used in relation to non-Ahl al-Kitāb people such as Buddhists, Hindus, and Zoroastrians under Islamic rule. The book argues that the universalistic view of Islamic law based on the concept of Ādamiyya went into eclipse with the rise of nation states in the Muslim and it needs to be revived again. Registration is required.

On Tuesday, May 14, 2024 at 12:30-1:30PM US EST via Zoom, Philip Wood (Aga Khan University) will give a book talk on The Imam of the Christians: The World of Dionysius of Tel-Mahre, c. 750–850 (Princeton University Press, 2021) as part of our Islamic Law Speaker Series. This book examines how Christian leaders adopted and adapted the political practices and ideas of their Muslim rulers between 750 and 850 in the Abbasid caliphate in the Jazira (modern eastern Turkey and northern Syria). Focusing on the writings of Dionysius of Tel-Mahre, the patriarch of the Jacobite church, Wood describes how this encounter produced an Islamicate Christianity that differed from the Christianities of Byzantium and western Europe in far more than just theology. In doing so, Wood opens a new window on the world of early Islam and Muslims’ interactions with other religious communities. Register today!

On Saturday April 13, 2024 at 10:00AM-4:00PM US EST at the Program in Islamic Law’s office in Austin Hall, our SHARIAsource Lab will lead a Hackathon: Arabic OCR Community Scribes event (registration required). Join us for a chance to help write the next chapter in the history of the Arabic script! We’ve teamed up with partners all over the world, bringing our efforts together to finally develop a dependable program that will allow texts using Arabic script to be machine readable. Come for a day-long event of transcription, and meet folks from all over campus and broader community who are also interested. No knowledge of coding or programming needed– we just need you to be able to recognize Arabic letters, and help teach the machine-learning program! Your work in checking and reviewing documents will allow scholars (including yourself!) to access, search, and explore historical and contemporary documents like never before. Lunch will be provided for those who RSVP. A limited number of seats are available for people who are interested in joining the hackathon virtually. Drop by for however long you can, to meet, chat, and transcribe! Registration is required.