Date: Tuesday, November 19

Time: 6:10 PM - 8:00 PM

Location: 612 Schermerhorn

From an early date, Islamic writers connected the Qur’anic Thamud with Hegra, an abandoned Nabatean- Roman site in the Northern Hijaz now known, by reason of that association, as Mada’in Salih. The site itself thus forms a kind of bridge across the historical rupture separating Islam from Jahiliyya. What exactly happens to such a site when it becomes “Islamic?” This talk explores how the idea of constructing Islam works as a monumentalizing lens that changes the way we look at pre-Islamic architecture by blurring some features even as it makes others stand out in sharp relief. At Hegra, it will be argued, the effect of this reinterpretation produces rupture where it might have been possible to see continuity in a way that turns Nabatean ruins into an infrastructure for producing Islam.

Date: Friday, November 8

Time: 11:00 AM - 2:00 PM

Location: Knox Hall, Room 208

Join Amitis Motevalli for a wishmaking and gratitude offering, in honor of the ancestor/martyr Hind Rajab. A secular sofreh to recognize the efforts of those at Columbia supporting Palestinians, to give thanks and make wishes for futures.

Although they date back to ancient Persia, Sofreh’ Nazri are generally Shia ritual gatherings for women. It’s often prompted when someone is making a prayer for a particular outcome and bringing together her community to bring collective energy.

Date: Monday, October 28

Time: 5:30 PM - 7:00 PM

Location: Knox Hall, Room 509

Join us for a discussion with novelist and translator Salar Abdoh on how English-language works and translations shape our understanding of Persophone cultures, particularly in Iran and Afghanistan. Abdoh will explore the complexities of representing gendered life worlds and the politics of translation, as well as emerging literary genres from West and Central Asia.

Date: Friday, October 25
Time: 9:00 AM - 6:15 PM
Location: Online 

Since the early inception of postcolonial inquiry in the late 1970s, with its focus on another way of interrogating colonial history, its rhetoric of empire, and its harrowing practices, many new theoretical explorations have been unfolding in response to a rise in aggressive forms of colonialism. The relative departure from Cold War polarization, and new strategies of proxy wars, along with the devastating impact on societies (environment, lands and people), have recently been impelling scholars to revisit the postcolonial, its early underpinnings, and engagements. This Symposium participates in a rigorous interrogation of specific omissions so as to generate a revised perspective on postcolonialism. The growing role of social media, the presence of photography, televised war reports, and the surge in narratives, canticles, and poetry, provide a set of realities that was not as visible in the late 1970s and 1980s. These realities pose a challenge to the monopoly of corporate media and to the unitary discourse that is the trademark of the rhetoric of war machines.

Date: Thursday, October 24

Time: 6:10 PM - 8:00 PM

Location: Knox Hall, Room 208

Join Nathaniel Mathews, Associate Professor of Africana Studies at SUNY-Binghamton, for a discussion on his first book Zanzibar Was a Country. The book explores Zanzibar's fight for independence, the experiences of its postcolonial diasporas, and the intertwined histories of Zanzibar and Oman.

Date: Wednesday, October 23

Time: 12:00 PM - 1:30 PM

Location: Zoom Webinar (register below)

Join the Middle East Institute and the Center for Palestine Studies at Columbia University and the Center for Middle East Studies at Brown University for an online conversation examining the social and spatial impacts of the regional war in Palestine and Lebanon. The panelists, Lara Deeb, Elias Muhanna, and Ali H. Musleh will examine how the current violence intensifies the existing challenges that communities were already facing, as a result of past wars, conflict and systemic corruption. They will focus particularly on how communities and neighborhoods, across religious, ethnic, gender and class lines, are affected by the escalation of violence and displacement. What is the role of diasporic and global networks in advocating and supporting local communities? What role does the academy have in responding to the effects of violence in these impacted societies?

Date: Saturday, October 19
Time: 2:30 PM - 6:00 PM
Location: Faculty House, 64 Morningside Drive, 2nd Floor. Please enter at 411 w. 116th street (Wien Gate).

This event will bring together scholars from Palestine, Israel, South Africa, Rwanda, and Ireland to engage with two key questions: what kind of political future can best end the extreme violence that has so far marked Palestine/Israel? What can we learn from the experiences of South Africa, Rwanda, and Ireland, lands that in the recent past were plagued by extreme violence, including genocide? 

Registration is mandatory due to space limitations as well as restricted campus access. Only registered guests will be admitted. 

Date: Wednesday, October 16

Time: 6:30 PM - 9:00 PM

Location: East Gallery, Maison Française, Buell Hall

Please join us for a screening of Moroccan filmmaker Farida Benylazid’s newly-restored 1989 film A Door to the Sky, the first feature film directed by a Moroccan woman. The screening will be followed by a conversation with the director led by film scholar Florence Martin and Columbia Professor Madeleine Dobie.

A Door to the Sky imagines an emigrant’s return to Morocco, where she creates, in her family home, a zaouiya – a site devoted to spiritual study and worship – specifically for women. The film explores themes of exile and return as well as questions of gender and religion, probing the intersections of feminism and Muslim faith.

Farida Benylazid is a pioneering Moroccan film producer, director, journalist and film critic whose career in cinema has spanned close to five  decades. Her body of work explores questions of gender and identity in Morocco since independence.

A specialist of Maghrebi women’s cinema, Professor Florence Martin teaches at Goucher College. Her latest book is Farida Benlyazid and Moroccan Cinema (Palggrave MacMillan, 2024).

Madeleine Dobie is Professor of French & Comparative Literature at Columbia University and a specialist of Maghrebi literature and culture.

The conversation will be in English with translation for Farida Benylazid.

This event has been postponed. Details about the rescheduled date and further information will be shared soon.

Join Professor Sevea Teran, Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Associate Professor of Islamic Studies at Harvard University, to discuss his essay Singapore’s Islamic Pasts: Alexanders in an Island Below the Winds, which explores Singapore’s first Islamic king, Iskandar Sahib, a descendant of the pre-Qur’anic prophet Iskandar Dhu al-Qarnayn. The essay traces the thirteenth-century Alexandrian-Abrahamic dynasty through Malay chronicles and oral histories, focusing on Singapore’s Islamic ‘Alexanders’ and the role of both Sufi masters and everyday community members in preserving these histories.

Date: Thursday, October 10

Time: Noon- 1:30 PM

Location: Online

This event will bring together feminist writers, artists, curators and academics who work in the context of South Kurdistan. In their conversation they will centre the question of how artists and activists in the region address issues around body politics, religious conservatism and intimacy.

Particularly since 2014 and the onslaught of ISIS (or daesh), artists have been chronicling the ways in which women’s bodies are being used as a battlefield between competing religious, political and cultural actors. Disillusioned with party politics, women’s NGOs or foreign donor agendas, a new generation of creatives are curating their own exhibitions, cinema clubs, and reading groups. These initiatives to date remain small, local, self-funded and transient, yet they mark a major shift towards a diversification of spaces for critical engagement and imagining a Kurdistan “otherwise”.

THE POETICS OF SPIRITUAL INSTRUCTION

Date: Friday, September 27

Time: 11:00 AM-12:30 PM

Location: Online

Join Austin O’Malley as he discusses his new book, The Poetics of Spiritual Instruction, a study that explores the performative role of didactic poetry through the narrative verse of Farid al-Din ʿAttar. O'Malley highlights how ʿAttar employed frame-tales, meta-poetic commentary, and allegories to engage readers and assert his instructive authority. The book sheds light on the interactive, participatory nature of Sufi didacticism, revealing how reading was understood as a spiritual exercise, imbued with ritual significance aimed at purifying the soul.

Date: Wednesday, September 18

Time: 6:00 - 7:30 PM

Location: East Gallery, Maison Française, Buell Hall

Join Susan Slyomovics to discuss her book, Monuments Decolonized: Algeria's French Colonial Heritage  

"Statuomania" overtook Algeria beginning in the nineteenth century as the French affinity for monuments placed thousands of war memorials across the French colony. But following Algeria's hard-fought independence in 1962, these monuments took on different meaning and some were "repatriated" to France, legally or clandestinely. Today, in both Algeria and France, people are moving and removing, vandalizing and preserving this contested, yet shared monumental heritage. 

In her book, Susan Slyomovics follows the afterlives of French-built war memorials in Algeria and those taken to France. Drawing on extensive fieldwork and interviews in both countries, she analyzes the colonial nostalgia, dissonant heritage, and ongoing decolonization and iconoclasm of these works of art. Her book offers a fresh aesthetic take on the increasingly global move to fell monuments that celebrate settler colonial histories.