Celebrating the life and scholarship of Baber Johansen, Professor of Islamic Studies Emeritus at HDS, who passed away in late January.
His work challenged static readings of Islamic law, emphasizing instead its interpretive flexibility and historical complexity.
Read more: https://bit.ly/47FtpbF
Congratulations to Mehdi Berriah and Arjan Post for a fascinating collection of new studies on Ibn Taymiyya and his legacy. Available in hardcopy or open access (next post) lup.be/book/ibn-tay...
"A new study out of Cornell Universit found workers most excited and impressed by corporate speak may be the least equipped to make effective, practical business decisions, and it can leave companies with dysfunctional leaders."
A fun interview with Muhammad Hasan Khalil and me about universal salvation in Islam: al-Ghazali, Ibn al-'Arabi, Ibn Taymiyya, Ibn al-Qayyim and more. www.youtube.com/watch?v=bXEN...
Here now are all ten of my "rules" for writing about the history of philosophy combined as a single blog post. Hope they will be useful to students and teachers, even if only to prompt disagreement!
www.historyofphilosophy.net/rules-writin...
#philsky #philosophy #writing #history
Also new today, my fourth piece of advice on writing about history of philosophy: about focusing on the primary text instead of secondary literature (and how to use secondary literature when you do use it).
www.historyofphilosophy.net/rules-writin...
#philosophy #philsky #writingtips
Lectureship in Liberal Arts and Religion/Philosophy (Teaching and Research) at the University of Leeds with scope for focus on the Islamic world www.jobs.ac.uk/job/DPY440/l...
Truly was an excellent series that produced both original research and great resources for teaching. I hope @nyupress.bsky.social can revive it with new funding from somewhere. A sad reflection of current priorities that the funding dried up.
"Taking 13 years to complete, this dictionary is considered one of the most important reference works for the #Arabic language, containing approximately 300,000 lexical entries....The key driving force behind this gargantuan undertaking was Professor Ramzi Baalbaki."
That sounds like a dodgy journal.
@emilygathergood.bsky.social Already ordered!
www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ukyb...
My most recent article: "The Early Aramaic Toledot Yeshu and the End of Jesus’s Earthly Mission in the Qur’an," Studies in Late Antiquity 9.2 (Summer 2025)
doi.org/10.1525/sla....
But our two joint honours programmes in 'Philosophy and Theology' and 'Religion, Philosophy and Ethics' are still recruiting!
Student-initiated petition to save the BA in Theology and Religion at the University of Nottingham. Please do sign.
www.change.org/p/stop-the-r...
Delighted that our Theology & Religion courses are ranked in the top ten of @thetimes.com UK University Rankings 2026 League Table!
More: tinyurl.com/55ddyx84.
#colleagues #happy #success #trs #theology #religion
I am delighted to announce that my co-authored article on Mamluk maqamas on #BlackDeath has just been published in a lovely special issue of JAIS. journals.uio.no/JAIS/article...
#plague #MedievalSky #GlobalMiddleAges #EnvironmentalHistory #histmed 1/2
Smiling me holding a copy of my freshly published book "Co-texts and contexts in the book of Jonah"
Look what's finally out in the world!
This is much more comprehensive than my own list, and reassuringly familiar from my experience of marking. I’ll be sharing the list with my students, both to think about writing for different audiences (encyclopaedia articles) and being aware of the weakness of LLM generated text.
I collected some materials on critical AI from my perspective; hope it's useful: olivia.science/ai
"CAIL is as an umbrella for all the prerequisite knowledge required to have an expert-level critical perspective, such as to tell apart nonsense hype from true theoretical computer scientific claims"
Abstract: Under the banner of progress, products have been uncritically adopted or even imposed on users — in past centuries with tobacco and combustion engines, and in the 21st with social media. For these collective blunders, we now regret our involvement or apathy as scientists, and society struggles to put the genie back in the bottle. Currently, we are similarly entangled with artificial intelligence (AI) technology. For example, software updates are rolled out seamlessly and non-consensually, Microsoft Office is bundled with chatbots, and we, our students, and our employers have had no say, as it is not considered a valid position to reject AI technologies in our teaching and research. This is why in June 2025, we co-authored an Open Letter calling on our employers to reverse and rethink their stance on uncritically adopting AI technologies. In this position piece, we expound on why universities must take their role seriously toa) counter the technology industry’s marketing, hype, and harm; and to b) safeguard higher education, critical thinking, expertise, academic freedom, and scientific integrity. We include pointers to relevant work to further inform our colleagues.
Figure 1. A cartoon set theoretic view on various terms (see Table 1) used when discussing the superset AI (black outline, hatched background): LLMs are in orange; ANNs are in magenta; generative models are in blue; and finally, chatbots are in green. Where these intersect, the colours reflect that, e.g. generative adversarial network (GAN) and Boltzmann machine (BM) models are in the purple subset because they are both generative and ANNs. In the case of proprietary closed source models, e.g. OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Apple’s Siri, we cannot verify their implementation and so academics can only make educated guesses (cf. Dingemanse 2025). Undefined terms used above: BERT (Devlin et al. 2019); AlexNet (Krizhevsky et al. 2017); A.L.I.C.E. (Wallace 2009); ELIZA (Weizenbaum 1966); Jabberwacky (Twist 2003); linear discriminant analysis (LDA); quadratic discriminant analysis (QDA).
Table 1. Below some of the typical terminological disarray is untangled. Importantly, none of these terms are orthogonal nor do they exclusively pick out the types of products we may wish to critique or proscribe.
Protecting the Ecosystem of Human Knowledge: Five Principles
Finally! 🤩 Our position piece: Against the Uncritical Adoption of 'AI' Technologies in Academia:
doi.org/10.5281/zeno...
We unpick the tech industry’s marketing, hype, & harm; and we argue for safeguarding higher education, critical
thinking, expertise, academic freedom, & scientific integrity.
1/n
Starting a new thread to collect critical perspectives on AI, as they are articulated dozens of times every day and appear repeatedly on my timeline. I can't read everything right away, but if, like me, you want to stay up to date, then this might help a bit:
Pdf download: www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/ju2du...
Catarina Belo and I published an obituary for Yayha Michot in the 'Journal of the International Qur’anic Studies Association'. Pdf download link in the first comment. doi.org/10.1515/jiqs...
Just received proofs of my forthcoming entry on T.W. Arnold. Yay! It includes a review of Arnold's life, works, and legacy followed by a substantive review of his best known work, The Preaching of Islam, and its legacy.
My new book chapter open access: 'God as an Empirical Entity: The Expanded Scope of Sense Perception in Sunnī Traditionalist Spatialism'. www.jstor.org/stable/10.33... In a great volume edited by @ramonharvey.bsky.social and Safaruk Chowdhury.
"Consider the implications if ChatGPT started saying “I don’t know” to even 30% of queries ... Users accustomed to receiving confident answers to virtually any question would likely abandon such systems rapidly."
This is a desperately ignorant position from UUK that endangers research that benefits grassroots communities and ignores the fact that much knowledge-building is incremental and begins with small investigations that provide proofs of concept and space to develop ideas: