“Theologies of Divine Speech and the Human Exigencies of Law: A Conundrum for Classical and Contemporary Islamic Legal Hermeneutics.” In Dynamics of Tradition: Islamic Theology and Law in Relation, ed. Idris Nassery and Muna Tatari, 35–61. Studies in Islamic Law and Society, ed. A. Kevin Reinhart and Nadjma Yassari, no. 57. Leiden: Brill, 2026.
I was honored to be asked to review Walter Young’s monumental work The Dialectical Forge for Der Islam.
Review of Walter Edward Young, The Dialectical Forge: Juridical Disputation and the Evolution of Islamic Law (Cham, Switzerland: Springer, 2017). Der Islam 102, no. 1 (2025): 326–331.
The Al-Mahdi Institute’s 2024 annual summer workshop on Islamic law was a spectacular demonstration of scholarship on classical and current Shi`i legal theory, focused on highly technical questions of language and meaning. My contribution was:
“Clarity, Ambiguity, and Interpretive Flexibility in Islamic Legal Theory from al-Shāfiʿī to Hassan Hanafi.” The 12th Annual AMI Contemporary Fiqhī Issues Workshop “Language and Meaning in Islamic Legal Theory,” Al-Mahdi Institute, Birmingham, UK, July 4, 2024.
The papers will be published by the Al-Mahdi Institute Press in 2025, in a volume edited by myself and Professor Mohsen Kadivar.
I was honored with an invitation to present this paper, “Four Contested Choices in the Invention of a Revealed, Systematic, and Comprehensive Islamic Law,” for the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies and Pembroke College, Oxford, on March 13, 2023. It is an improved version of a paper presented in Bad Homburg in July 2022.
Many thanks to Serdar Kurnaz and his collaborators for inviting me to join the stunning lineup of speakers at the conference celebrating the conclusion of the first phase of their Linked Open Tafsīr project. It was a rich feast, thanks to the wonderful hospitality of our hosts and the full schedule of updates about a wide range of innovative research projects. My paper was:
“Four Contested Steps in the Emergence of a Revealed, Systematic, and Comprehensive Islamic Law.” Linked Open Tafsīr Conference 2022: Reconstructing the Dynamics of the Emergence of Islam — Possibilities and Limits, Bad Homburg, Germany, July 20, 2022.
