2025 Year in Review

As we begin the new year, we offer a curated snapshot of last year’s research and scholarship at the Program in Islamic Law and in the SHARIAsource Lab. Follow us on social media and sign up for email updates to see what we have in store for next year.

SHARIAsource Lab

In 2025 sessions of the SHARIAsource Lab, we made great headway on the Islamic Courts and Canons (CnC) project: We significantly expanded the growing database of over 6,000 Islamic legal canons (qawāʿid fiqhiyya) by “mining” canons from medieval and modern sources. And using our custom CnC Annotation Suite of tools, we enriched the data by adding digital annotation that informs data-driven research today and will support future AI-assisted research.

Specifically, we added subject-matter tags that are relevant to fields of classical and modern legal categories and identified similarities between “matching” legal principles across all 6,000 canons. We also added translations, transliterations, and other tags that identify a canon’s legal and institutional functions. By year’s end, lab members had annotated 100 percent of the canons extracted from the sources so far!

What did we find? We will perform deeper analysis in the lab and plan to publish results through the Islamic Law Blog, peer-reviewed articles, and books. But here are some preliminary observations: Approximately 40 percent of the canons appear to be non-unique–that is, variants of other canons. This fact reveals both expected patterns and previously hidden relationships that play out across legal categories, functions, and historical contexts. In addition, some 3 percent of canons that some sources label as canons appear not to be canons at all. Instead, some phrases are canons that pose but do not offer principles for legal questions; other phrases simply mark disagreement about the authoritativeness of a canon that is acceptable to some jurists but not others; and still others reference the origins of a legal canon. All of this prompts us to look more closely at just how the literature (and the Lab) defines legal canons, both in terms of historical-legal use and modern data-driven analysis.

Led by Professor Intisar Rabbthe Lab brings together legal scholars, data scientists, and student researchers from Harvard and Princeton to focus on questions of interpretation in Islamic law, centering on the mapping and many uses of legal canons. In 2026, we will continue to expand our collection and analysis of legal canons, while enriching our primary source corpus (from which we mine canons) with new biographical, geographical, contextual, and citational metadata.

Publications

The Spring 2025 issue, Volume 6, of the Journal of Islamic Law featured six articles and two forum essays exploring the theme of “Moratoriums on Islamic Criminal Punishments: Legal Debates and Current Practices.”

We added 50 new resources to our Field Guide to Islamic Law Onlinesuch as manuscript collections, research databases, and digital humanities tools.

The Islamic Law Blog boasted 130,000 views across 170 posts, including expert commentary such as Intisar Rabb’s “Legislation and Regulation of Islamic Law in Malaysia,” our pioneering Roundtable on The Book and AI: How Artificial Intelligence is and is not Changing Islamic Lawand essays from guest blog editors Bahman Khodadadi, Edmund Hayes, Paolo Sartori, Mahmood Koria, Eirik Hovden, Mohamed Aidarus Noor, Katherine Lemonsand Jonathan Brockopp. Throughout the year, our weekly roundups kept readers up to date on the latest Islamic law news and scholarship from around the world.

Explore the top 25 posts of 2025 here.

Events

The Islamic Law Speaker Series hosted six scholars this year.

• • Bahman Khodadadi presented On Theocratic Criminal Law: The Rule of Religion and Punishment in Iran (Oxford University Press, 2024). This talk explored the roots and structures of the criminal law system of the world’s most prominent constitutional theocracy. While discussing processes of de-westernization that occurred in the wake of the Islamic Revolution, this work examines how the Islamic conception of civil order and polity was established within the legal and theological framework of the Iranian Constitution.

• • Malika Zeghal presented 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 accounts that claim that Middle Eastern states became 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.

• • Mohsen Kadivar presented “The Genealogy of the Death Penalty for Apostasy and Blasphemy in Islam.” This talk examined the historical invention and spread of reports attributed to the Prophet (ḥadīth) that supported punishments for apostasy. Such reports have served as the foundation for conservative textualist interpretations of Islamic criminal law. Tracing the historical process of text-fabrication, Kadivar suggests that these texts entered the Islamic ḥadīth collections with reference to other Near Eastern traditions during Islam’s first two dynasties—the Umayyads and Abbasids—between 40/661 and 656/1258.

• • Sarah Savant presented “A Cultural History of the Arabic Book: Digital Explorations of Writerly Practices and Text Reuse.” The talk explored 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. 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 early Arabic books, then utilized a text reuse detection algorithm to create an original data set that documents word-for-word relationships among all these books.

• • Rami Koujah presented “The Invention of Islamic Legal Personhood: From Artifact to Ontology,” a chapter from his forthcoming book, Islamic Legal Personhood: A Genealogy of Rights and Responsibilities (Harvard University Press, forthcoming). This talk explored the conceptual history and significance of “baseline personhood” in Islamic law, focusing on the changed meaning and usage of the term purpose across the tribal setting of pre-Islamic Arabia, the legal discourses that developed to accommodate the burgeoning market economy of the early Muslim Empire, and the subsequent theorizations of an Islamic jurisprudence infused with a covenantal theology.

• • Youssef Belal presented “Thinking the World with Islamic Knowledges” from his book The Life of Shari’a: A Comparative Anthropology of Law (University of California Press, 2025). The book considers two intertwined lineages: how Islamic scholars have formulated sharīʿa knowledge from the classical period to today and how Westerners have understood the law and its origins. By melding these two traditions, Belal formulates a new genealogy of modern law from the perspective of sharīʿa. [No video recording available.]

People

This year we said goodbye to PIL-LC Research Fellow Bahman KhodadadiResearch Editor Mariam Sheibani, and Managing Editor Cem Tecimer. We welcomed the 2025-2026 PIL Research Fellow Rami Koujah and our new Managing Editor, Maggie Sager.