Courts&Canons: A platform that uses digital tools to uncover the theological foundations of Islamic law, and to examine evolving Islamic values

We seek to foster an understanding of the “theological foundations of Islamic law.” Shari’a is of core relevance to the big questions about the nature of God, man, and reality from Islamic perspectives. Often translated narrowly as Islamic law, “sharīʿa” lies at the intersection of what we now call theology, philosophy (and/or mysticism), and law. Authors of its core texts were theologians, philosophers, and jurists grappling with how divine will and human agency manifest in the world. Taking a theological starting-point, Islamic legal literature is thus full of statements about the nature of God, the reality of good and evil, and ethical values meant to shape human affairs. Nowhere are these statements more resonant than in a highly significant but understudied set of principles called “legal canons”—thousands of succinct sayings, scattered across the literature, that direct human action and reflect a Muslim worldview on the purpose of religion and man. Our mission is to assemble the Islamic legal canons in one place, and combine them with related kalām (theology) sources and digital tools to enable new research on Islam’s theological bases. This data will newly enable the study of factors that have defined and influenced (and still influence) Islam’s theology-inflected values in law across geographical and temporal lines. Specifically, we will produce a dataset of all canons, identify related ethical-theological values for each, and build computational tools to assess them. We will share the work online and in research publications. We will produce a research app for data entry, a website to display the data, and blog publications for scholarly and public engagement. We expect this project to facilitate new discoveries in the study of Islam. It will provide access to legal canons online for the first time, clear avenues for connecting law to values, and take steps to using data-science tools to understand big questions in Islam in historical & comparative context.