On November 1, 2022, via Zoom, we convened a live Roundtable on the History of Islamic International Law. Organized by Intisar Rabb (Harvard Law School) and Umut Özsu (Carleton University), who are editing a volume on the subject for the Cambridge History on International Law, this Roundtable brought together the contributing authors to that volume – all historians […]
On Wednesday, October 26th, Professor Mairaj Syed (UC Davis) presented “Experiments in Searching for Islam’s Universal Canons on the CnC-Qayyim Platform” as part of our Courts and Canons (CnC) Working Group. Professor Syed recently pursued the question of “What role do qawāʿid works play in delineating the spread of legal maxims?” by utilizing Qayyim’s ability […]
On Tuesday September 27, 2022 at 12:00-1:00PM US EST, Sarah Bowen Savant (Aga Khan University), led 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 […]
On Friday, September 30th, PIL Research Fellow, Dilyara Agisheva, presented “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. Also on the panel were Nihat Çelik (San Diego State University) and Oleksandr Halenko (İstanbul Üniversitesi), […]
On June 30, 2021, PIL Faculty Director, Professor Intisar Rabb presented a lecture on Islamic criminal law in medieval and modern times. Her lecture is a comparative review of the history of crime and punishment in Islamic societies. In most studies of the penal code or Islamic law, the principles, practices and justifications of punishment tend […]
On April 13, 2022 at 3:50- 5:00 pm (EST), PIL Faculty Director, Professor Intisar Rabb presented the Irving Tragen Lecture on Comparative Law at UC Berkeley Law titled “Metacanons: Comparative Textualism at SCOTUS and in Islamic Law.”This talk took a comparative law look at shared methods of interpretation for textualists in two very different legal systems: […]
On Tuesday, April 12, 2022 12:00-1:00PM US EST via Zoom, Professor Irene Schneider (Göttingen University) spoke about her new book, “Debating the Law, Creating Gender: Sharia and Lawmaking in Palestine” (Brill, 2021). She examined how family law in Palestine, despite being a controversial topic publicly debated by representatives of the state, Sharia establishment, and civil society, does […]
On Tuesday, March 8, 2022, Professor Issam Eido (Vanderbilt University) presented “Pre-Canonical Islamic Legal Canons: An Analysis of Early Hanafi Literature” as part of our Islamic Law Speaker Series. Eido traced the legal canons that were used in early Hanafi sources, beginning with Muḥammad ibn al-Ḥasan al-Shaybānī’s (d. 189/805) works and ending with Abū Zayd […]
On Tuesday, February 8, 2022 at 12:00-1:00PM US EST via Zoom, Dr. Hedayat Heikal presented “Inheritance versus Personal Status: Shifting National Strategies in Syria, Egypt, and Tunisia.” Heikal argued 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 […]
On December 1, 2021, we hosted a Roundtable on Islamic Legal Genres as a culmination of the monthly lecture series where a group of scholars of Islamic law and history met monthly to explore the form and function of genres popular in Islamic law. This event was convened by Hakki Arslan, Necmettin Kizilkaya, and, PIL Faculty Director, Intisar Rabb. Contributing scholars include Hakki Arslan, Ahmad […]
