Hermeneutics in the Age of Big Data, Yusuf Celik

On October 19th at 3:00pm EST, PIL Data Science Fellow, Dr. Yusuf Celik, will be presenting Hermeneutics in the Age of Big Data at Harvard University’s Digital Scholarship Group. Data collection and interpretation are necessary parts of any kind of scholarly research. The extent and character of the data collected by a researcher has always been dependent on the types of tools and corpora known to the researcher. With the advent of technological advancements in the fields of data science, humanities scholars now have the means to gather and discover data at a scope and rate that was unthinkable before the advent of computers. However, while humanities scholars are slowly learning and integrating these new tools in their research, they must also confront the question of how to interpret the large amount of data that they gained sudden access to. In this Discovery talk, Dr. Celik will address this question in relation to a variety of case studies within the digital study of Islamic history and law.

On Friday, September 30th, PIL Research Fellow, Dr. Dilyara Agisheva, will present “The Making of Colonial Space in Crimea in the Late 18th and 19th Centuries” at the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association’s 22nd “W’OTSAp in Ottoman and Turkish Studies” meeting. Registration is required. 

On Tuesday September 27, 2022 at 12:00-1:00PM US EST at Lewis 214, Sarah Bowen Savant, will lead a seminar on research in progress that uses the OpenITI corpus, which corpus contains more than 10,000 works and now exceeds 2 billion words in size, to examine the question: prior to the arrival of the printing press or electricity, how were authors working in Arabic so prolific? She uses the specific case of The History of Damascus (Taʾrīkh Madīnat Dimashq) [TMD], written by ʿAlī Ibn al-ʿAsākir (d. 571/1176 ) to address the question. The TMD is the largest work in the corpus prior to 1500. Ibn ʿAsākir relied heavily on earlier scholars, whom he cites extensively. Savant explores what we can learn about his working methods by using new digital methods. While focusing on the work of Ibn ʿAsākir, the seminar seeks also to explore the possibilities and limitations of digital methods for scholars today. This event has limited registration for in-person attendance, and open registration for Zoom. It is open to Harvard affiliates. Register by September 23rd. Register here. 

On Tuesday, February 8, 2022 at 12:00-1:00PM US EST via Zoom, Dr. Hedayat Heikal will speak about inheritance and personal status laws in Syria, Egypt, and Tunisia in a presentation titled “Inheritance versus Personal Status: Shifting National Strategies in Syria, Egypt, and Tunisia”. Heikal will argue that demands for equality in inheritance among similarly situated male and female heirs have taken a confessionalist turn.  Whether by legislation in Syria or through court battles in Egypt, non-Muslim citizens of both countries have begun to achieve equality in inheritance among male and female heirs by yanking inheritance away from the jurisdiction of Islamic default rules and defining it as a matter of personal status that ought to be distinct for their communities.  This talk explores how and why this turn is happening and contrasts it to recent developments in Tunisia where equality of inheritance for all citizens is the subject of more open contestation.

Registration required. 

We are excited to announce our upcoming Roundtable on Islamic Legal Genres, happening on Wednesday, December 1, 2021 9:00am-12:30pm EST / 3:00pm-6:30pm Germany / 5:00pm-8:30pm Turkey via Zoom. This Roundtable will conclude our Monthly Lectures on Islamic Legal Genres, convened by Professors Hakki Arslan, Necmettin Kizilkaya, and Intisar Rabb, in which a group of scholars of Islamic law and history have been giving monthly lectures that explore the form and function of popular genres  in Islamic law. These monthly lectures will now culminate in an online discussion on how the development of different genres accompanied diverse functions and content to match the evolving needs of Islamic law and society.

This Roundtable features two panel discussions that interrogate genre as a tool for understanding Islamic law and relationships between theory and practice. The first panel, titled “Genre as a Tool for Understanding Islamic Law: Theoretical and Practical Approaches,” will be held at 9:00am-10:45am US EST / 3:00pm-4:45pm Germany / 5:00pm-6:45pm Turkey, followed by the second panel, titled “Genre as a Tool for Understanding Relationships between Theory and Practice (uṣūl and furūʿ): Internal Perspectives,” at 11:00am-12:30pm US EST / 5:00pm-6:30pm Germany / 7:00pm-8:30pm Turkey. Professors Bilal Aybakan, Issam Eido, Omar Farahat, Robert Gleave,  Evgenia Kermeli, Serdar Kurnaz, Norbert Oberauer, Elias Saba, and Delfina Serrano will serve as panelists. The panels will then be opened up to a larger group of scholars who will join the panelists for a dynamic discussion on the topics.

You can watch previous lectures here and read their summaries on our blog. Registration is required. 

On Saturday, October 30, 2021, Professor Intisar Rabb will participate in a one-day virtual symposium titled “Lift Every Voice: The Life and Legacy of Professor Lani Guinier ’74.” The symposium will highlight the extraordinary life and work of Harvard Law (Emerita) Professor Lani Guinier, the special intersectional barriers she faced and shattered, and the paths of those shaped by the trail she blazed. The symposium will provide the law school community, former students, collaborators, and colleagues of Professor Guinier, the opportunity to engage with her scholarly work and set a forward-looking agenda for scholarship, practice, and pedagogy. A goal of the symposium is to provide a dynamic platform and ongoing opportunities to build on and innovate Professor Guinier’s foundational ideas.

Registration is required.

On Tuesday, November 9, 2021 12:00-1:00PM US EST via Zoom, Dr. Katharina Ivanyi (University of Vienna)will speak on her new book, Virtue, Piety and the Law: A Study of Birgivī Meḥmed Efendī’s (d. 981/1573) al-Ṭarīqa al-muḥammadiyya (Brill, 2020). In this book, Ivanyi examines a major work of pietist exhortation and advice composed by the sixteenth-century Ottoman jurist, Ḥadīth scholar, and grammarian, who articulates a style of religiosity that had considerable reformist appeal into modern times. It outlines how Birgivī played a significant role in the negotiation and articulation of early modern Ottoman Ḥanafī piety by linking he cultivation of individual virtue to questions of wider political, social, and economic concern. Professor Yavuz Aykan (Université Paris- Panthéon-Sorbonne) will comment on the talk. This event will be moderated by PIL Research Fellow, Dr. Hedayat Heikal.

Registration is required.