Ebrahim Afsah, Visiting Fellow, ILSP: SHARIAsource, Harvard Law School, will discuss his current research on a structured comparison between waqf and the Western institution of landed trust and the implications for Islamic administrative and public law. Mediterranean lunch will be served.
Rodrigo Adem, ILSP: SHARIAsource Visiting Fellow, Harvard Law School; College Fellow, Harvard University Department of History
Sharon Tai, SHARIAsource Deputy Editor and Ali Hashmi, former MIT Media Lab Fellow, use natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning techniques to build a taxonomy of entities for SHARIAsource’s collection of cases of Islamic law in U.S. Courts, including cases of family law and religious accommodation. From there, comparison of state courts with overall …
Speaker: Mariam Sheibani, PhD Candidate, University of Chicago The emergence and functions of legal maxims in Islamic law remains an understudied field in Islamic legal history. Scholars have noted early interest in maxims in the tenth and eleventh centuries, followed by a period of dormancy prior to the eruption of maxim treatises in the fourteenth …
Speaker: Mariam Sheibani, PhD Candidate, University of Chicago Mariam Sheibani surveys the terminological and conceptual evolution of maxims in Shāfiʿī legal literature from the founding of the school in the ninth century to the emergence of maxim treatises in the fourteenth century. Examining this evolution not only provides a history of maxims without gaps, but it …
Seval Yildirim, Visiting Researcher, ILSP: SHARIAsource, Harvard Law School Professor Yildirim will discuss her work-in-progress exploring the legal construction of Muslim identity through a study of U.S. court cases dating back to the 19th century. The paper identifies three distinct typologies of how courts have defined Muslim identity and the broader political and normative implications …
Ahmed El Shamsy, Visiting Fellow, ILSP: SHARIAsource, Harvard Law School The publication of al-Shāfiʿī’s (d. 204/820) multivolume magnum opus, al-Umm, in 1903-7 opened a window into early Islamic legal thought and provided the basis for all subsequent historiography of Islamic law. However, the work's publication was anything but inevitable: though it is today considered a …
Dawood Ahmed, SJD Candidate, University of Chicago Dawood Ahmed will discuss his work on comparative Islamic constitutionalism.
Mubasher Hussain, Visiting Fellow, ILSP: SHARIAsource, Harvard Law School Mubasher Hussain will discuss scholar-jurists’ views on the options for marriage dissolution available to Muslim women in Pakistan. This talk will explore the arguments in favor of women-initiated divorce, as articulated in several recent leading advisory opinions (fatwās) from certain textualist jurists in Pakistan.
