Friday, October 25, 2019

Open Access Textbook: A Critical Introduction to Islamic Legal Theory




Title: A Critical Introduction to Islamic Legal Theory
Author: Vishanoff, David R.

"This open access textbook by David Vishanoff offers to students and scholars interested in the Islamic discipline of legal theory (uṣūl al-fiqh) a critical Arabic edition and an English translation of Imām al-Ḥaramayn al-Juwaynī’s Leaflet on the Sources of Law (Kitāb al-Waraqāt fī uṣūl al-fiqh), along with a new explanatory commentary on the text and a method for readers to add their own comments to any page, paragraph, or phrase. Unlike the many traditional commentaries that have been written on alJuwaynī’s popular medieval handbook https://waraqat.vishanoff.com, David Vishanoff’s extensive commentary explains for uninitiated modern English-speaking readers the function and significance of each legal theory principle, and critically examines the conceptions of ethics, knowledge, and scriptural interpretation that are articulated or assumed in this classic summary of Islamic legal theory."

BOOK CONTENTS

Wednesday, October 23, 2019

Administrative: One million page views on AMIR

It seems appropriate to mention during the Open Access Week (Oct. 21-Oct. 27) that earlier this month AMIR has surpassed one million page views.

 Access to Mideast and Islamic Resources (AMIR) project started in 2010 as a series of conversations between librarians about the need for a tool to assemble and distribute information on open access material relating to the Middle East and Islamic Studies. During the last nine years we have published hundreds of posts helping researchers identify freely available resources online.

Our statistics indicate that most frequently visited pages are the following:

Alphabetical list of Open Access Islamic Manuscripts Collections
Alphabetical List of Open Access Journals in Middle Eastern Studies
West African Arabic Manuscript Database
Arabic Almanac App


Using rather simple classification system we identified dozens of subjects helping users discover resources and navigate the site by country, theme or format:
Turkey  94
Manuscripts  66
Egypt  50
USA  48
Palestine  43
Germany  38
Iran  36
France  32
Israel  31
E-Books  26
Afghanistan  23


Web traffic to AMIR comes from many countries as seen below :

United States
400699
Germany
109683
Russia
101943
France
40690
Ukraine
28647
United Kingdom
24730
Turkey
20477
United Arab Emirates
7972
Egypt
7881


As always AMIR editors encourage you to browse the blog, send us your comments and recommendations of new and old open access resources to share. On the right hand side bar of AMIR is a form allowing you to receive  notifications of updates by email.
Please subscribe and if you are aware of open access scholarship on Middle East and Islamic Studies not yet listed here, please pass it along.

Friday, October 18, 2019

Open Access Archive - South Asia Open Archives


South Asia Open Archive
"The South Asia Open Archives (SAOA), a subset of the South Asia Materials Project (SAMP), creates and maintains a collection of open access materials for the study of South Asia. This major collaborative initiative is aimed at addressing the current scarcity of digital resources pertinent to South Asia studies and at making collections more widely accessible both to North American scholars and to researchers worldwide."
Nearly 350,000 page images in the collection! 
Historical research materials in English and other South Asian languages are being digitized and prepared by SAOA for online public access. This material includes, for example:

Colonial-era administrative and trade reports
Women’s periodicals
Newspapers and magazines
Census materials and gazetteers
Important literary and other monographic sources

Open Access Archive - Digital Palestinian Archive


Digital Palestinian Archive

"The Birzeit University Digital Palestinian Archive (BZUDPA) is dedicated to documenting the life of Palestinians and their institutions over the past century, from Ottoman times to the present.The project, launched in 2011, aims to preserve a large variety of documents, written and audio-visual, relating to the history of the Palestinian people over the past century, and donated by individuals, families and popular organizations. Birzeit, as a national university, is fully committed to placing its technical and academic resources at the service of this project, which continually digitizes, places online and makes available a wide variety of documents. "