XI Islamic Legal Studies Conference — Münster, 22–24 May 2025

The XI Islamic Legal Studies Conference was held at the University of Münster, Germany, from 22 to 24 May 2025. It was convened by the International Society for Islamic Legal Studies (ISILS), with the University of Münster's Institute of Arabic and Islamic Studies and its Cluster of Excellence Religion and Politics serving as hosts. Its booklet can be downloaded from here https://isils.net/isils/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/Tagung-Islamic-Legal-Studies_Booklet_A5_online.pdf

ISILS is an international, non-profit and non-political scholarly society whose principal activity is organising the Islamic Legal Studies conferences every three years. The Münster meeting was therefore not an ordinary university seminar; it was the 11th major international conference in an established series.

The conference had a particularly interesting combination of:

• a high-level roundtable
• a major thematic opening panel
• six further academic panels
• a poster session
• international and interdisciplinary participation
• discussion of both historical and contemporary Islamic law
• a professionally prepared conference booklet
• a post-conference report and evaluation.

The conference returned to an old but still important question in Islamic legal studies:

What does it mean to belong to a madhhab?

The opening thematic panel was:

“Belonging to a Madhhab: Formation, Cohesion and Diversity in Islamic Schools of Law”

The organisers deliberately chose this theme because 25 years earlier, the Third International Conference on Islamic Legal Studies at Harvard Law School had also been devoted to the madhhab. The Münster conference therefore used the anniversary as an opportunity to ask how scholarship on the madhhab had developed since then.

But they did not treat madhhab simply as a doctrinal classification.

The call for papers asked questions about:

• how madhhabs were formed
• how cohesion within a school was produced
• how schools maintained their identity
• how disagreement within a madhhab was handled
• how disagreement between madhhabs was handled
• both the doctrinal and social dimensions of belonging.