News

On Tuesday, April 7, 2026, at 12:30-1:30PM US EST, Professor Sherman Jackson (University of Southern California) will give a talk on his publication The Islamic Secular (Oxford University Press, 2023). The basic point of the secular in the modern West is to “liberate” certain pursuits—the state, the economy, science—from the authority of religion. This is also assumed to be the goal and meaning of “secular” in Islam. Professor Jackson argues, however, that this assumption is wrong. In Islam, the “secular” was neither outside “religion” nor a rival to it. “Religion” in Islam was not identical to Islam’s “sacred law,” or “sharīʿa,” nor did classical Muslim jurists see sharīʿa as the all-encompassing, exclusive means of determining what is “Islamic.” In fact, while—as religion—Islam’s jurisdiction was unlimited, sharīʿa’s jurisdiction—as a sacred law—was limited. In other words, while everything remained within the purview of the divine gaze of the God of Islam, not everything could be determined by sharīʿa or on the basis of its revelatory sources. Various aspects of state policy, the economy, science, and the like were “differentiated” from sharīʿa and its revelatory sources without becoming non-religious or un-Islamic. Given the asymmetry between the circumference of sharīʿa and that of Islam as religion, not everything that fell outside the former fell outside the latter. In other words, an idea or action could be non-sharʿī (not dictated by sharīʿa) without being non-Islamic, let alone anti-Islam. The ideas and actions that fall into this category are what Jackson terms “the Islamic Secular.” Crucially, the Islamic Secular differs from the Western secular in that, while the whole point of the Western secular is to liberate various pursuits from religion, the Islamic Secular differentiates these disciplines not from religion but simply from sharīʿa. Similarly, while both secularization and secularism play key roles in the Western secular, both of these concepts are alien to the Islamic Secular, as the Islamic Secular seeks neither to discipline nor to displace religion, nor expand to its own jurisdiction at religion’s expense. The Islamic Secular is a complement to religion, in effect, a “religious secular.” Nowhere are the practical implications of this more impactful than in Islam’s relationship with the modern state. In his book, Jackson makes the case for the Islamic Secular on the basis of Islam’s own pre-modern juristic tradition and shows how the Islamic Secular impacts the relationship between Islam and the modern state, including the Islamic State. Registration is required

Join us next month on April 16th at 12pm EST via Zoom for the Roundtable on Knowledge in the Islamic Court which will conclude the series of essays on the ISLAMICLAWblog! The Roundtable explores questions such as: What counts as proof in an Islamic court? How does a judge rule between competing claims to truth? How does technological advancement impact notions of evidence? How our understanding of Islamic law writ large can change if we center its rules of adjudication. And what constitutes an “Islamic” court or judge in the first place? The participants of this roundtable seek to address these questions through five respective case studies and propose that attention to evidence, proof, and procedure will help us better understand both the adjudicative process and juristic intent of Islamic legal rules. Focusing primarily on the modern and contemporary world, the five contributions center varying conceptions of proof amidst rapid social and technological changes in Islamic judicial contexts.

Convened by Nurul Hoda Mohd. Razif (University of Bergen) and Ari Schriber (University of Erfurt), the Roundtable features contributions from Aya Bejermi (University of Bordeaux), Léon Buskens (Leiden University), Dominik Krell (University of Oxford), Irene Schneider (Göttingen University), and Mashal Saif (Clemson University). Register today!

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.