The USPPIP workshop “Governance and Violence in Islamic law” was held on Friday 24th November 2017 at the University of Exeter. This workshop combined the two research foci “governance” and “violence” in Islamic law and was organised by the Exeter and Bergen team respectively, namely Professor Robert Gleave and Dr. Omar Anchassi in Exeter and Professor Knut Vikør and Dr. Eirik Hovden from Bergen. After an open call for papers, the programme was filled with both senior and junior scholars with a diversity of geographic background.
The invited speakers were Nesrine Badawi from the American University of Cairo; Usaama al‐Azami from Markfield Institute of Higher Education; Gunnar J. Weimann from Leiden University; Adnan Zulfiqar from Rutgers University; Tukur Mukhtar from Usmanu Danfodiyo University; Naveen Kanalu Ramamurthy from UCLA and Zubair Abbasi from Lahore University of Management Sciences. Present were also several local UK and Exeter scholars of Islamic law.
While the invited speakers presented cases of individual research, common themes of discussion were how governance and violence are related in Islamic legal thought and how Islamic law has been used to justify a wide range of practices by typical state actors as well as non-state actors and vigilante groups.