News

On Tuesday, March 10, 2026, at 12:30-1:30PM US EST via Zoom, Professor Ihsan Yilmaz (Alfred Deakin Institute for Citizenship and Globalization, Deakin University) will discuss his monograph Sharia as Informal Law: Lived Experiences of Young Muslims in Western Societies (Routledge, 2024). The book takes a comprehensive approach to investigate how sharīʿa manifests in and influences the everyday lives of young Muslims, aiming to unravel the meaning and relevance of sharīʿa-driven laws and practices in English-speaking Western societies. The study recognizes the diverse nature of the Muslim community, comprising both migrants and local converts who form integral parts of multicultural societies. Drawing on in-depth interviews with 122 young Muslims from Australia, the United States, and the United Kingdom, the research explores a diversity of opinions, interpretations, and practices. Moving beyond theoretical debates, it offers concrete insights into the practical implications of sharīʿa in Western contexts. The book also sheds light on how digital technologies shape information and knowledge acquisition, examining how young Muslims seek religious knowledge in the twenty-first century. It will be of interest to academics, researchers, and policy-makers in Law, Political Science, Minority Studies, Religious Studies, and Islamic Studies. Registration is required. 

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.”  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.