On July 28, 2020, Christian Müller (CNRS – Paris) presented “Siǧillāt and the transformations of the qadis’ documents in Islamic law (10th-16th centuries).” He examined the genre of Ottoman sijills within the larger context of Islamic court records, offering a longue durée analysis of qāḍī court documents. An Ottoman sijill is a systematically archived court […]
On June 30, 2021, Maribel Fierro (CSIC- Madrid) presented “Fatawa compilations: exploring a legal genre in the Islamic West.” Fierro’s lecture examined trends of fatwā compilation in Andalusia and North Africa. Fierro argues that the Almohad period (1121-1269) produced only one fatwā compilation and that the presence of fatwā compilations is closely connected to two […]
On May 26, 2021, Samy Ayoub (University of Texas) presented “Creativity in Continuity: al-Rasa’il al-Fiqhiyya as a Genre for Legal Change.” Ayoub’s lecture expanded an ongoing conversation in the Islamic Legal Genre (ILG) lecture series about the ways in which a legal mode shapes the type of information a jurist can relay in writing. Ayoub […]
On April 28, 2021, Ahmed El Shamsy (University of Chicago) presented “What kind of thing is a gloss (hashiya)?” El Shamsy’s lecture described the history, impact, and receptions of legal ḥāshiya literature, with a particular focus on Shāfiʿī law. El Shamsy describes German Orientalist Eduard Sachau’s (d. 1930) description of Shāfiʿī ḥāshiyas and their dominance […]
On March 31, 2021, Sohail Hanif (Cambridge Muslim College) presented “Form, Function, and Historical Development of the Sharḥ Literature as a Genre.” Hanif argued that this genre is the centerpiece of Islamic legal writing which contains a plethora of Islamic legal theory. He focused on four main points: the advantages of school specific studies, the […]
On February 24, 2021, Mohammed Fadel (University of Toronto) presented “Form, Function, and Historical Development of Mukhtaṣar as a Genre.” Fadel’s lecture described the history, purpose, and nature of late medieval Mālikī mukhtaṣars. The mukhtaṣar as a genre allows jurists to tersely summarize their school’s positions, offering the Sunnī madhhab system a sense of cohesion […]
On January 27, 2021, Murteza Bedir (Istanbul University) presented “Form, Function, and Historical Development of Uṣūl al-fiqh as a Genre.” He discussed the theoretical sciences, structure, and organization of the topic, which he described as central to its understanding. He also argued that the development of terminology of the discipline and the facility are equally […]
On Monday, February 22, 2021, Reza Takhshid presented “NLP for Lawyers and Islamic Law Scholars” as part of our Islamic Law, Data Science, and AI Lab. Machine learning and natural language processing are becoming inseparable part of many studies in the fields of humanities. While most of current NLP models are trained for the purpose […]
On March 8, 2021, Zahra Moballegh (University of Tehran) presented “Beyond God the Commander: Data Analysis Uncovering the Narrator God and Reconstructing an Islamic Narrative Theology.” She explained the results of a narratological study in the Qur’anic stories. Alireza Javanmard and Zahra Moballegh examined 26 Qur’anic fragments in which a woman has a role (as a […]
On March 22, 2021, Ahmet Faruk Çelik (Marmara University) and Taha Emre presented “AI for Comparing and Understanding Ottoman Fatwa Collections.” Fatwa collections are the corpora compiled from Ottoman Shaykhal-Islāms. Today, they are considered as the main reference guide in many disciplines especially by Ottoman History and Ottoman Law. Although there has been a recent […]
