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Pope Leo and a Jordanian institute renew the Muslim-Christian dialogue case

Pope Leo and a Jordanian institute renew the Muslim-Christian dialogue case

In May 2026 Pope Leo received members of Jordan's Royal Institute for Inter-Faith Studies, alongside the Vatican's Dicastery for Interreligious Dialogue, for a colloquium on human compassion and empathy in modern times — and urged Christians and Muslims to 'revive humanity where it has grown cold.

Doha convenes Islamic finance's AI reckoning

Doha convenes Islamic finance's AI reckoning

The 12th Doha Islamic Finance Conference convened on 16 June 2026 under the theme 'Islamic Finance in the Age of Agentic Systems' — the industry's first major gathering devoted to what autonomous AI means for Shariah-governed money. The agenda, organised by Bait Al-Mashura with Dukhan Bank and

Bangladesh's sukuk boom hasn't built a real Islamic capital market

Bangladesh's sukuk boom hasn't built a real Islamic capital market

Bangladesh's sovereign sukuk programme has raised roughly Tk 53,000 crore since its first issue in December 2020, and a Daily Star analysis (reported by IANS on 1 July) argues it has still failed to build a real Islamic capital market. The critique is structural: nearly every issue

Islamic finance regulators sign on to formal dispute resolution

Islamic finance regulators sign on to formal dispute resolution

On 4 June 2026, at the 3rd Global Islamic Economy Summit in Istanbul, the General Council for Islamic Banks and Financial Institutions (CIBAFI) and the OIC Arbitration Centre signed a memorandum of understanding to promote alternative dispute resolution across Islamic finance. The two bodies will run joint conferences, training programmes

UK's first Islamophobia tracker finds a 377% surge in incidents

UK's first Islamophobia tracker finds a 377% surge in incidents

The Islamophobia Response Unit — a UK legal-response charity — published its first annual report on 30 January 2026, and the numbers describe a change in kind, not just degree. The IRU investigated 906 cases between 2021 and 2025 and recorded a 377% surge in incidents between 2023 and 2024; Muslims now

What a tenfold oversubscription says about Islamic banking

What a tenfold oversubscription says about Islamic banking

Bangladesh sold its first short-term sovereign sukuk on 28 June — 273 days, 9.36% — seeking Tk5,500 crore and receiving offers worth Tk56,607 crore, more than ten times the ask. One bank alone bid Tk4,400 crore and was allocated a tenth of that. The oversubscription is not a

Sukuk passes $1 trillion and becomes ordinary

Sukuk passes $1 trillion and becomes ordinary

The London Stock Exchange Group's 2025 Islamic Investment Review, published 2 July, reports that outstanding sukuk worldwide have crossed $1 trillion, with issuance up 14.5% last year and Islamic fund assets up 37% to $223 billion. Two details deserve attention beyond the headline number. First, 41% of

Seraj: an Arabic-first AI model built for institutions

Seraj: an Arabic-first AI model built for institutions

Inception42 and Microsoft launched Seraj on 2 July, an enterprise AI model built on GPT-4.1 and mid-trained on curated Arabic datasets covering linguistics, cultural knowledge and domain content. The stated target list is telling: government services, legal analysis, education, media, financial services — and Islamic studies, named explicitly as an

Western Europe gets its first Faculty of Islamic Theology

Western Europe gets its first Faculty of Islamic Theology

On 1 July 2026 the University of Munster converted its Center for Islamic Theology into a full, independent Faculty of Islamic Theology — the first at a state university in Germany and in Western Europe. Regular operations begin in the winter semester 2026/27, and the formal inauguration on 24 September

A public archive is quietly rebuilding the Arabic book record

A public archive is quietly rebuilding the Arabic book record

Arabic Collections Online, run by NYU Abu Dhabi with partner libraries, has digitized nearly 18,000 out-of-print Arabic volumes and made them free to read and download. Most of these books exist in a handful of library basements; commercially they are dead, which means without deliberate digitization they simply exit

CAIR's 2026 report tracks a narrowing of Muslim civil rights

CAIR's 2026 report tracks a narrowing of Muslim civil rights

CAIR's 2026 civil rights report logs 8,683 discrimination complaints received in 2025 — the highest in the organization's history — and argues that the 'right to be different' narrowed across employment, education, immigration, and public life for American Muslims. The number itself is only part

Istanbul becomes the seat of a new OIC arbitration authority

Istanbul becomes the seat of a new OIC arbitration authority

A Turkish presidential circular has formalized the legal status of the OIC Arbitration Centre in Istanbul, positioning the city as a dispute-resolution hub for commerce among the 57 OIC member states. Arbitration is unglamorous infrastructure, which is precisely why it matters: cross-border trade and investment follow enforceable contracts, and for

UAE opens its first retail sukuk to ordinary savers

UAE opens its first retail sukuk to ordinary savers

The UAE Ministry of Finance has opened subscriptions for its first Sovereign Retail T-Sukuk, letting individual citizens and residents buy government-backed, Shariah-compliant paper directly, with returns around 4.3% and listing on Nasdaq Dubai. Sovereign sukuk are usually an institutional market — banks and funds trading in large denominations while ordinary

New York Public Library digitizes its Islamic manuscript collection

New York Public Library digitizes its Islamic manuscript collection

The New York Public Library has received a $2.5 million grant from the Lilly Endowment to catalog, digitize, and conserve its Middle Eastern and Islamic manuscript holdings — a collection that has sat largely uncatalogued and therefore invisible to scholars and the public. The project goes beyond scanning: it funds

OSCE: anti-Muslim intolerance is now a social-cohesion problem

OSCE: anti-Muslim intolerance is now a social-cohesion problem

In a March 2026 statement issued under Switzerland's chairpersonship, marking the International Day to Combat Islamophobia, the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe framed hostility toward Muslims not only as a matter of individual rights but as a security and social-cohesion problem. The framing is the substance:

Islamic tech startups: an ecosystem in the making

Islamic tech startups: an ecosystem in the making

Surveys of the Muslim-world technology scene, including Salaam Gateway's work with DinarStandard on its Top 30 Digital Islamic Economy startups, describe an ecosystem that is still assembling its own parts. The founders are visible across fintech, travel, modest fashion, media and halal food tech; what has lagged is

IOM and OIC sign a three-year plan on migration governance

IOM and OIC sign a three-year plan on migration governance

On the margins of the 51st session of the OIC Council of Foreign Ministers in Istanbul, the International Organization for Migration and the Organization of Islamic Cooperation signed a three-year Plan of Action (2025–2027) on migration governance. The detail that matters is not the ceremony but the machinery: the

Scholars draw the line on AI in fatwa: human mufti stays in the loop

Scholars draw the line on AI in fatwa: human mufti stays in the loop

As bodies from al-Azhar and the International Islamic Fiqh Academy to the Assembly of Muslim Jurists of America build their 2026 programmes around artificial intelligence and ifta, a shared position is emerging — and it is a governance position, not a theological panic. The starting premise is that a large language

Turning a thousand years of Arabic books into something a machine can read

Turning a thousand years of Arabic books into something a machine can read

Projects such as OpenITI and KITAB are assembling the first large-scale, computationally analysable corpus of the premodern Arabic book tradition. The ambition is to turn a millennium of classical texts into a machine-readable substrate that scholars can search, compare and trace at scale — mapping how passages were quoted, reused and