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Islamic Law Research

Articles, books, dissertations, and primary law sources useful for research on Islamic law

Nonlegal Articles

The UW Libraries subscribes to many databases through which you can find articles published in sources from around the world. This section identifies the most useful databases.

More exhaustive lists are found in the UW Libraries research guides, particularly the Near East: Find Articles page. The UW Libraries research guides include free Internet sources as well as commercial subscription databases.

Once you identify an article or other source, you will need to locate it. Fortunately, these databases often provide links to PDF copies of cited articles. If you don't see a link for an electronic version of the article, try the E-Journals list (search by the title of the journal, not the title of the specific article). You may also submit an Interlibrary Loan request for a copy of an article.

Legal Articles

You can find articles on Islamic law topics published in law reviews and other legal periodicals. Search one or more of the following sources:

World Constitutions Illustrated

Dissertations

SSRN

SSRN logoThe Social Science Research Network (SSRN) includes abstracts and working papers organized by field - including the Legal Scholarship Network (LSN), which "distributes quality research related to law, economics, and business in 61 different subject areas." Legal issues may also be addressed in papers in the Entrepreneurship Research & Policy Network, the Negotiations Research Network, the Political Science Network, or the Sustainablity Research & Policy Network.

Search or browse the collection of more than 625,000 abstracts (over half a million available in full text) for free. Most documents are also freely available to download. Users may also subscribe.

See SSRN guide.

Institutional Repositories

Within Digital Commons Network, see Islamic Studies (part of Arts and Humanities: Religion), Comparative and Foreign Law (within Law), Religion Law (within Law), or other subjects.

Other Sites for Sharing Research

Academia.edu and ResearchGate invite scholars to share their papers (just as people share photos on Instagram or Facebook). Both require users to set up accounts in order to search or to view others' papers.

For a discussion, see University of California Office of Scholarly Communication, A Social Networking Site Is Not an Open Access Repository. You might find a wealth of papers in your area of interest, but be aware that the companies want to harvest your contacts. Read the terms of service carefully.