Conference Readout - International Society for Islamic Legal Studies, Germany, May 2025
A key gathering for researchers interested in the world of Islamic law, past and present.
After traveling for part of May and June, I’m catching up on posting my notes from those experiences. One trip of mine was to Münster, Germany to attend the conference of the International Society for Islamic Legal Studies (ISILS). The Society’s roots go back to the 1990s, and their triennial meeting has become an important venue for sharing Western academic research on Islamic law. (Interestingly, the conference was initially named after the Orientalist Joseph Schacht, about whom I may do a post here fairly soon - that moniker has, appropriately in my view, been dropped for a more neutral name.) This was my first time attending the ISILS conference - I was presenting a paper I mentioned here a while back, on Morocco’s Shaykh Sa’id al-Kamali and his approach to the Maliki school of Islamic law.
The conference was, for me, a snapshot of the thriving field of Islamic legal studies. You can view the full program here. I was excited to hear presentations from people whose work I have read and assigned, such as Profs. Asma Afsaruddin of Indiana University, Marion Katz of New York University, Robert Gleave of the University of Exeter, and Samy Ayoub of the University of Texas. It was also fascinating to see how new methodologies are being incorporated into the study of Islamic law, including vast quantitative projects of cataloguing the Islamic legal canon and tracking the use of specific vocabulary. The poster presentations at the conference were just as thought-provoking as the papers - the TRASIS (Trajectories of Slavery in Islamicate Societies) project was particularly interesting to me. And hearing about work in progress was the best part; Dr. Omar Anchassi’s book in progress about changing Islamic views on cosmology promises to be an incredible piece of scholarship, for example, and for me, as someone deeply interested in the Maliki school, papers by Mohamed Ali and Abdur-Rahman Muhammad were particularly gripping.
The conference also provided a venue for some candid conversations about the positionality of Muslims and non-Muslims in the field of Islamic legal studies. The opening roundtable touched on that issue at length. I can’t find a recording/video of that session, but some of the same issues come up in the Society’s podcast episode with Asifa Quraishi-Landes in case you are curious to hear more. Intellectually, the conference certainly felt to me like a welcoming environment for practicing Muslims; logistically, the same subtle challenges were present as at almost any academic event (very few conference schedules are designed to take into account prayer times, for example, and it’s not always clear whether food is halal or not), but again, there is nothing unusual in that.
One final observation is that the center of gravity in Islamic legal studies, in terms of historical focus, is very much the classical period through the early modern period. There’s not much content, at a conference such as this or in relevant journals, on the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries. It makes sense, obviously, that most researchers in the field would be drawn to the landmark figures and texts of early Islam, and/or to various complex legal debates stretching across centuries. It would be too bad, in fact, if a search for relevance or an overreaction to current-day political debates about shari’a led to an over-emphasis on the present. At the same time, there is less attention to contemporary issues, figures, and debates than I would have expected as still a relative newcomer to the field. That doesn’t mean such attention was absent. In many ways, the person at ISILS whose work was closest to my own in terms of time period and thematic emphasis was Dr. Dominik Krell, who gave an excellent presentation about changing Islamic legal norms in the Gambia (see also his amazing - and open access! - book Islamic Law in Saudi Arabia). I would wish not for less attention to the classical and postclassical periods, but for more attention to the contemporary period; not a pie sliced differently, in other words, just a bigger pie. In any case one thing I am experimenting with in my own scholarship is how to draw on the massive academic literature on the classical and the postclassical to inform understandings of the contemporary. In short, ISILS was a wonderful opportunity for someone like me to gain a deeper acquaintance with a remarkable field of study.