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Ahmed Qerni

Ahmed Qerni

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

576 Islamic manuscripts just became a public commons

576 Islamic manuscripts just became a public commons

A consortium led by the Free Library of Philadelphia, working with the University of Pennsylvania and Columbia and backed by a Mellon-funded grant, has digitised 576 Islamic manuscripts and 827 paintings spanning roughly 1000 to 1900 and released them for free public access. The scholarly value is obvious; the institutional

UNESCO is teaching universities to build AI capacity, not buy it

UNESCO is teaching universities to build AI capacity, not buy it

UNESCO has launched a year-long programme, anchored at Saint Joseph University of Beirut, to help higher-education institutions build their own capacity to teach and govern artificial intelligence rather than simply procure it ready-made. The design is the point. Instead of treating AI as a product to be bought from a

The IsDB opens 2026 with a $1bn sukuk — and central banks bought half of it

The IsDB opens 2026 with a $1bn sukuk — and central banks bought half of it

The Islamic Development Bank opened its 2026 funding year with a one-billion-dollar benchmark sukuk, its first issuance of the year. What matters is less the headline figure than who bought it: central banks and official institutions took close to half the order book. That is the signal of a market

Oxford Accelerator Fellowship Programme 2026/27 in Ethical AI — applications open

Oxford Accelerator Fellowship Programme 2026/27 in Ethical AI — applications open

The University of Oxford's Institute for Ethics in AI opened applications for its 2026/27 Accelerator Fellowship Programme, a small and competitive scheme — three to four fellows — aimed at professionals and academics whose work is already moving ethical, responsible AI from theory toward real-world impact. The emphasis is

Fitch projects growth in Nigeria's non-interest finance and sukuk through 2026

Fitch projects growth in Nigeria's non-interest finance and sukuk through 2026

Fitch Ratings expects Nigeria's non-interest finance sector to keep expanding through 2026, and the reason it gives is institutional rather than cyclical: a wave of regulatory reform and new liquidity tools from the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) designed specifically for non-interest financial institutions. The growth, in other

Islamic finance 2.0: when sukuk became plumbing

Islamic finance 2.0: when sukuk became plumbing

A White & Case analysis notes that foreign-currency sukuk issuance has passed $100bn and that tokenisation is moving from pilot to practice. What was a novelty instrument in 2005 is now institutional plumbing, and the interesting questions have shifted accordingly — away from bare permissibility and toward market structure, settlement, and,

From using AI to owning it: the Global South's shift

From using AI to owning it: the Global South's shift

A World Economic Forum survey traces how initiatives across the Global South are moving from a consumer posture to a builder posture: local models, local data governance, and local talent pipelines. The framing matters. The question is no longer whether these societies will use AI — they already do — but whether

AI in higher education: build the institution, not the gadget

AI in higher education: build the institution, not the gadget

UNESCO's new programme with Saint Joseph University of Beirut treats artificial intelligence in universities as an institutional problem rather than a procurement one. Instead of buying the tool of the month, it builds governance frameworks, trains staff, and integrates AI around human judgement. The wager is that absorption

Self-Reliance: Islamic Finance

Are the Muslims Right about Debt?

The Quran denounces riba in the most categorical terms. The term riba is synonymous with the traditional concept of usury, and in modern terms, generally means interest, i.e. exploitative interest on debt, especially to the poor. Generally, it excludes commercial discounting on current trade — which is not usury or

Self-Reliance: Economics

Guess who is Progressive on Women? Vatican or Al-Azhar?

From the archive (2013): Al-Azhar versus the Vatican on women’s rights — checking institutions against their reputations, empirically.

Institutions: Governance

Lying Culture Disgraces US Empire

From the archive (2011): credibility and solvency decay together — and the remedy is boring: accounts, audits, accountability.