Fukahâ · A guide to the sources of Islamic law and its scholarship

8th International Symposium on Māturīdī Theological Studies, Konya, 25–26 December

2026-09-28T00:00:00+03:00

The 8th International Symposium on Māturīdī Theological Studies (VIII. Uluslararası Mâtürîdî İlahiyat Araştırmaları Sempozyumu), organised by the Faculty of Theology at Selçuk University, takes place in Konya on 25–26 December 2026. Its theme this year is the culture of coexistence in the Māturīdī heritage.

The symposium looks at how different beliefs, schools, readings, schools of thought and communities lived side by side, as seen from within the Hanafi-Māturīdī tradition. The two days hold six sessions and some thirty papers, each of fifteen minutes, with fifteen minutes of discussion at the end of every session.

The thirteen themes of the call include the early Hanafi tradition, the thought of al-Māturīdī, relations within the school, the law concerning non-Muslims, historical experiences of coexistence and the ethics of disagreement, as well as Qurʾanic recitation, Sufism, philosophy and comparative studies.

The calendar:

abstracts due: 6 November 2026
notification of the referees’ decision: 16 November 2026
presentation texts and author details: 11 December 2026
final programme: 18 December 2026
revised full papers for publication: 15 January 2027

The refereed papers will be published in printed or digital proceedings. Submission rules are on the symposium website, and questions can be sent to maturidi@selcuk.edu.tr.

The seventh Hijri century in the Islamic sciences: a symposium in Istanbul

2026-09-25T00:00:00+03:00

Istanbul University’s Faculty of Theology devotes each meeting of its series The Islamic Sciences Century by Century to a single century. The next one, the International Symposium on the Place of the Seventh Hijri Century in the Development of the Islamic Sciences, is held in Istanbul on 22–24 October 2026.

The symposium looks at the scholarship of the century as a whole: the conditions that made the sciences flourish or decline, and the century’s influence on those that followed. For Ḥanafī law it was a turning point. Jurists who left Transoxiana for Syria and Egypt after the Mongol invasions laid the ground for the great commentaries and fatwa collections.

The jurists who died in this century can be listed in Fukahâ with the century filter. The deadline for full papers is 30 November 2026.

The fourth Religion and Geography Symposium turns to the Islamic sciences

2026-09-25T00:00:00+03:00

The fourth meeting of the Religion and Geography series, organised by Hitit University’s Faculty of Theology and its Centre for Islamic Studies (HİSAM), takes place in Çorum on 8–9 October 2026 under the title Geography and the Islamic Sciences.

The sessions are: Fiqh and Geography, Hadith and Geography, History of Islamic Schools and Geography, Tafsir and Geography, Qirāʾāt and Geography, Kalām and Geography, Sufism and Geography, and Arabic Language and Rhetoric and Geography.

The biographical dictionaries themselves tie jurists to their towns and regions. The places where the jurists of al-Laknawī’s al-Fawāʾid al-bahiyya lived can be seen on the map.

The meeting is hybrid. Full papers are due on 30 September 2026.

A map of the jurists and a network of their teachers

2026-09-25T00:00:00+03:00

Two new sections have been added to Fukahâ.

The Map shows the 117 places where al-Laknawī’s jurists were born, studied, taught, served as judges and died. The coordinates come from the al-Ṯurayyā project of Leipzig University, and the coloured regions follow Georgette Cornu’s atlas of the classical Islamic world. Click a city to list its jurists; filter by century or by the kind of tie, or type a jurist’s name to follow his journeys.

The Network draws the ties between teachers and students along the centuries, one column for every twenty-five years. Point at a name and his teachers light up in red, his students in green. The people al-Laknawī names briefly, such as “Abū Yūsuf”, “the author of the Hidāya” or “his father Ḥammād”, have been matched one by one to the jurists who have entries, which raised the number of ties between two jurists in the collection from 218 to 509.

Every jurist’s page now carries a small map of his places in the side column and his own chain of learning, two generations up and down, at the bottom.

Every jurist now has a page of his own

2026-09-25T00:00:00+03:00

Each of the 525 jurists in Fukahâ now has a page of his own. Click a jurist’s name in the Jurists table or in the Classical Works table and his page opens.

A jurist’s page shows:

his name in Arabic and in transliteration, his school, his dates of birth and death and the city where he died;
the works al-Laknawī lists for him, under their Arabic titles;
his teachers and students, linked where they have a page on the site;
the theses about him in the YÖK National Thesis Centre, newest first;
the Arabic text of his entry in al-Fawāʾid al-bahiyya, with page and entry number;
the jurists who died in the same period, and the previous and next jurist in chronological order;
a ready-made reference for citing the page.

A good place to start is al-Jaṣṣāṣ’s page. With 53 theses about him, he is the jurist most studied on the site.

The home page has two new sections as well. Jurist of the day introduces a different jurist every day, and in The jurists across the centuries a click on a column lists the jurists who died in that century. The Jurists and Classical Works tables now also have a century filter.

Workshop on Islamic Law in Ottoman Europe, Skopje, 23–25 October

2026-09-25T00:00:00+03:00

The workshop Islamic Law in Ottoman Europe (Osmanlı Avrupası’nda Fıkıh), organised by the Balkan Studies Foundation and ISAR, takes place in Skopje on 23–25 October 2026. It is devoted to jurists who were born, trained or wrote in the Balkans between 1400 and 1918, and to the part that Sarajevo, Skopje, Sofia, Shkodër and other centres of learning played in Ottoman legal scholarship.

The organising committee is chaired by Prof. Murteza Bedir.

Among the themes:

understudied jurists born or educated in the Balkans
the themes of Ottoman fiqh in the Balkans
scholarly exchange in Ottoman Europe
legal institutions of the region and its legal history

The deadlines for abstracts and full papers have passed. The programme and book of abstracts will be announced on 10 October. After peer review the papers will appear as an edited volume and as a special issue of a refereed journal, planned for April 2027.

Islam and Interpretation X: Religion and Addiction

2026-09-25T00:00:00+03:00

The tenth Islam and Interpretation symposium of İnönü University’s Faculty of Theology is held on 14–17 October 2026 on the theme Religion and Addiction.

Besides substance addiction, it covers the newer forms that grow around digital media and consumption, and discusses them from the standpoint of fiqh, kalām, ethics, Sufism, religious education and the psychology of religion. For fiqh, the questions of will, legal capacity (taklīf) and responsibility come to the fore.

The deadlines for proposals and full papers have passed.

Workshop on Ḥanafī legal texts held in Amasya

2026-09-25T00:00:00+03:00

The Workshop on Ḥanafī Legal Texts. Islamic Legal Corpora: Authority, Reasoning, and Authorship met in Amasya on 24–26 June 2026, organised by Amasya University, the University of Texas at Austin, the Berlin Institute for Islamic Studies and the Center for Islamic Studies (ISAM).

It was devoted to expert readings and translations of texts from the Ḥanafī tradition, including understudied texts and genres, and asked how legal authority, authorship and textual transmission are constituted. The possibilities and limits of digital humanities tools for tracing patterns in the fiqh tradition were also discussed.

The classical works table of Fukahâ offers a starting list for such work.

Fukahâ is live

2026-09-25T00:00:00+03:00

The first version of Fukahâ is online. The site is available in Turkish, Arabic and English; the language switch at the top takes you to the same page in another language.

The first release contains:

Jurists: 525 Ḥanafī jurists from al-Laknawī’s al-Fawāʾid al-bahiyya, with school, dates of birth and death, place of death and a short summary.
Classical Works: the 720 works named in these biographies, with author and date of death.
Theses: 8,812 master’s and doctoral theses from the YÖK National Thesis Centre, with supervisor, university, department and full-text links.

The Books and Articles collections are in preparation. Their tables are ready, and records will appear as they are added.

In every table you can sort by clicking a column heading, narrow the list with the search box and filters, and open the details of a record by clicking its row. Results can also be downloaded as CSV.

Symposium on “The Companions and the Law of Brotherhood” held in Adıyaman

2026-09-25T00:00:00+03:00

The International Symposium on the Companions and Ṣafwān b. al-Muʿaṭṭal, organised by Adıyaman University’s Faculty of Theology, was held in Adıyaman on 7–9 May 2026 under the theme The Companions and the Law of Brotherhood.

Taking the Companion Ṣafwān b. al-Muʿaṭṭal, whose name is linked with Adıyaman, as its occasion, it discussed the Islamic law of brotherhood, the legacy of the Companions’ generation and the ethics of living together. The meeting was hybrid.

How the Theses collection is compiled

2026-09-24T00:00:00+03:00

Academic work on Islamic law is scattered across languages and catalogues. A doctoral thesis in Turkey, a critical edition from the Maghrib and an article in English often treat the same question without knowing of one another. The Theses collection gathers the Turkish part of this literature.

Which theses are included?

Master’s and doctoral theses in fiqh, Islamic law, legal theory, legal history, comparative law and Islamic economics. Theses are first selected by department and field, then by terms in their titles, keywords and abstracts. Uncertain cases are checked by hand.

What does the table show?

Each row gives the title, author, supervisor, type, university, year and language. Clicking a row opens the translated title, department, city, subjects and, where known, the jurist the thesis is about. The YÖK link goes to the thesis record and PDF to the full text where the author has made it available.

How to search

The search box looks in all columns at once and ignores diacritics, case and Arabic vowel signs. With several words, only theses containing all of them are listed: “sarakhsi doktora” brings up the doctoral theses on al-Sarakhsī.

How we transcribe biographies from the sources

2026-09-22T00:00:00+03:00

Every biography on Fukahâ rests on an entry in the classical ṭabaqāt and tarājim literature. We follow three rules when transcribing.

1. The text comes from the source

Dates of birth and death, teachers, students and works are taken only from the text of the source book. Nothing missing from the source is filled in from memory. Where sources disagree, the disagreement is not smoothed over; each report is shown with its own source.

2. Main text and footnotes are kept apart

In critical editions, the notes at the foot of the page belong to the editor, not the author. Information taken from a footnote is therefore never presented as the author’s words; it is marked as the editor’s note.

3. Every statement has a volume and page

Citations give the title, author, volume and page. In digital copies the page number sometimes follows the digital library’s automatic numbering rather than the printed edition. Where that is the case, the citation says so, so that no reader goes looking for it in the wrong place in print.

These rules slow the work down, but they make every entry verifiable.