Date: Thursday, March 27
Time: 1:00 PM - 2:00 PM
Location: International Affairs Building (SIPA), 404

As Syria remains a focal point of geopolitical tension and humanitarian concerns, diplomacy plays a crucial role in shaping its future. This moderated discussion will explore the current state of diplomacy in Syria, examining which global and regional powers are engaging with the country, their interests, and the broader implications for the Middle East.
The speakers will discuss the evolving relationships between Syria and key international players—including the U.S., Russia, China, Turkey, Iran, and Arab states—as well as the impact of shifting alliances and normalization efforts in the region. This conversation will also consider the humanitarian situation, reconstruction challenges, and Syria’s place in broader regional security dynamics.

The event will feature Marcelle Shehwaro, a Syrian activist and writer, and Mariam Jalabi a political activist with The Syrian Women’s Political Movement and Representative of the National Coalition to the UN.

The sponsors for this event are the CRC, The Human Rights and Humanitarian Policy (HRHP) Concentration, Middle East Institute (MEI), and the Policy and Security Working Group (PSWG). The partners for this event are International Security Policy (ISP) Concentration, International Conflict Resolution (ICR) Specialization, and the Gender and Public Policy (GPPS) Specialization.

Date: Wednesday, March 12
Time: 6:30 PM - 8:00 PM
Location: The Katharina Otto-Bernstein Screening Room

Please join us for a special event celebrating Where Is Abbas Kiarostami?, the latest book by renowned scholar Hamid Dabashi, exploring the legacy of one of cinema’s greatest visionaries.

Featuring:

Hamid Dabashi, Author and Hagop Kevorkian Professor of Iranian Studies and Comparative Literature
Jane Gaines, Professor, Film and Media Studies, Columbia University; Professor Emerita of English & Literature, Duke University
Hisham Matar, Pulitzer Prize-Winning Author and Professor of Professional Practice in Comparative Literature and Translation at Barnard College
Moderated by Ramin Bahrani, Oscar-nominated filmmaker and Associate Professor of Professional Practice, Film

Sponsored by:

Columbia University School of the Arts
Film Program
Film and Media Studies Program
Center for Comparative Media
Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies (MESAAS)

Date: Friday, March 7 
Time: 12:00 PM - 2:00 PM 
Location: The Heyman Center, Second Floor Common Room

Habibe Jafarian and the translator of her work, Salar Abdoh, will discuss the advent of the contemporary personal essay form in Iran, its relation to the larger direction of her work as an editor and biographer, and the politics of its translation. This hybrid event will be conducted in conversation with Professor Mana Kia and focus on how Jafarian’s work articulates the experiences and perspectives of a professional woman in Iran that are often in contrast to usual representations in English.

This event is part of the Against the Grain: Gender and the Fraught Politics of Translation in Persophone World series. These spring events are themed, “In Their Own Words: Iranian Lives and the Personal Essay.” Learn more about the series here.

Speakers

Considered one of Iran’s preeminent essayists, Habibe Jafarian’s latest collection is Rescue From an Artificial Death. She has worked as senior editor and consultant at such journals as Hamshahri Javan, Mostanad, Dastan, 24, and Nadastan Magazine. Her seminal biographical works on such luminaries as the fabled Shia cleric, Imam Musa Sadr, the late renowned war photographer, Kaveh Golestan, and one of the legendary commanders of the Iran-Iraq war, Mostafa Chamran, are winners of numerous prizes. Her work has also been published widely in various journals globally, including at The Millions, Guernica Magazine, Adi, and Words Without Borders, and her essay, “How to be a Woman in Tehran,” translated into English, was named as one of the best 100 essays of 2015. Currently she is contributing writer and consultant to Andishe Pooya, a magazine of politics, art and culture. Born in Mashhad, she lives and works in Tehran.

Salar Abdoh was born in Iran and splits his time between Tehran and New York City. He is the editor of Tehran Noir and author of the several novels, most recently Out of Mesopotamia, which was a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice and one of Publishers Weekly’s best books of 2020, and A Nearby Country Called Love, just released in paperback by Penguin and called “a complex portrait of interpersonal relationships in contemporary Iran” by the New York Times and “brutally poignant” by the Washington Post. A prolific essayist and translator as well, Abdoh teaches in the MFA program at the City College of New York.

Mana Kia was born in Iran and is Associate Professor in the Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies at Columbia University. She is an interdisciplinary scholar of the connected histories of early modern Persianate Asia with a focus on the circulation of people, texts, practices, and ideas just before the dominance of modern European colonial power. She is the author of Persianate Selves: Memories of Place and Origin before Nationalism (Stanford, 2020), which was translated into Persian last year. She is a 2024-2025 Heyman Center Fellow.

Please email disability@columbia.edu to request disability accommodations. Advance notice is necessary to arrange for some accessibility needs. This event will be recorded. By being present, you consent to the SOF/Heyman using such video for promotional purposes.

Join us for the next installment of Readings in the Khalidiyya with Ahmed El Shamsy and Torsten Wollina on 28 September 2021 at 1pm New York / 8pm Jerusalem.

The Damascene manuscript aficionado Tahir al-Jaza'iri (1852-1920) not only catalogued the Khalidiyya library; he also used the manuscript fragments he found in the library's scrap paper cache to reconstruct its oldest texts. His activities illustrate the change in attitudes toward manuscripts and their value during his lifetime.

Ahmed El Shamsy is Associate Professor at the University of Chicago. He studies the intellectual history of Islam, focusing on the evolution of the classical Islamic disciplines and scholarly culture within their broader historical context. His research addresses themes such as orality and literacy, the history of the book, and the theory and practice of Islamic law.

El Shamsy’s first book, The Canonization of Islamic Law: A Social and Intellectual History, traces the transformation of Islamic law from a primarily oral tradition to a systematic written discipline in the eighth and ninth centuries. In his second book, Rediscovering the Islamic Classics: How Editors and Print Culture Transformed an Intellectual Tradition, he shows how Arab editors and intellectuals  in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries used the newly adopted medium of printing to rescue classical Arabic texts from oblivion and to popularize them as the classics of Islamic thought. Other recent research projects investigate the interplay of Islam with other religious and philosophical traditions, for example by exploring the influence of the Greek sage Galen on Islamic thought and the construction of a distinct self-identity among early Muslims. More Info

Torsten Wollina is Research Associate at Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin - Preußischer Kulturbesitz. He received his Ph.D. from Freie University in Berlin and his MA degree from the University of Jena. He has worked at the Orient-Institut Beirut, Hamburg University and has received a Marie Curie Cofund fellowship from Trinity College, University of Dublin (cohort 2019-20). He is currently working in the DFG funded project "Orient-Digital" at the Staatsbibliothek in Berlin. Torsten’s research focuses on questions of provenance, especially the translocations of Damascene manuscripts in the 19th and 20th centuries. Another research interest is in how intellectual and social history affect each other in textual production, e.g. in the writing of contemporary history. Some of his research can be followed at his blog Damascus Anecdotes.

This panel explores fruitful connections between Persianate studies, largely a land-based endeavor, with scholarship on relevant port cities. The question of to what extent Persianate studies relates to the domain and lens of Indian Ocean studies (and vice versa) was opened decades ago, yet remains underdeveloped today. Pathbreaking scholarship has brought merchants, shipowners, and various types of people circulating through South Asian port cities from Iranian lands and also Persian speakers from the broader Persianate West, Central, and South Asia lands into view. More recent scholarship on Indian Ocean circulation through port cities has emphasized the plural nature of these spaces, against the longue durée understanding of transformations of the Indian Ocean from a Muslim Sea to a British Lake from medieval to early modern to modern times. This panel’s focus is on early modern port cities, connected to West and South Asian empires, at both the height of Persianate culture’s spread and the Indian Ocean’s increasingly globalized connections. How do port cities such as Surat and Hormuz diverge or reflect the social and cultural constitutions of the Persianate empires of Timurid Hindustan or Safavid Iran? Is there such a thing as a littoral or maritime Persianate? What can we learn from viewing prevalent understandings of early modern Persianate cultures and societies from ports (rather than courts)?

Organized by the Association for the Study of Persianate Societies (ASPS)

Co-sponsored by the Center for the Study of Muslim Societies; the Middle East Institute; and the South Asia Institute

A Woman is No Man

Diana Abu-Jaber in conversation with author, Etaf Rum

Wednesday, June 2

7:00 – 8:00 pm Amman

12:00 – 1:00 pm New York

Palestine, 1990. Seventeen-year-old Isra prefers reading books to entertaining the suitors her father has chosen for her. Over the course of a week, the naïve and dreamy girl finds herself quickly betrothed and married, and is soon living in Brooklyn. There Isra struggles to adapt to the expectations of her oppressive mother-in-law Fareeda and strange new husband Adam, a pressure that intensifies as she begins to have children—four daughters instead of the sons Fareeda tells Isra she must bear.

Brooklyn, 2008. Eighteen-year-old Deya, Isra’s oldest daughter, must meet with potential husbands at her grandmother Fareeda’s insistence, though her only desire is to go to college. Deya can’t help but wonder if her options would have been different had her parents survived the car crash that killed them when Deya was only eight. But her grandmother is firm on the matter: the only way to secure a worthy future for Deya is through marriage to the right man.

But fate has a will of its own, and soon Deya will find herself on an unexpected path that leads her to shocking truths about her family—knowledge that will force her to question everything she thought she knew about her parents, the past, and her own future.

The Arab Revolutions that began in 2011 reignited interest in the question of theory and practice, imbuing it with a burning political urgency. In Revolution and Disenchantment, Fadi A. Bardawil redescribes for our present how an earlier generation of revolutionaries, the 1960s Arab New Left, addressed this question. Bardawil excavates the long-lost archive of the Marxist organization Socialist Lebanon and its main theorist, Waddah Charara, who articulated answers in their political practice to fundamental issues confronting revolutionaries worldwide: intellectuals as vectors of revolutionary theory; political organizations as mediators of theory and praxis; and nonemancipatory attachments as impediments to revolutionary practice. Drawing on historical and ethnographic methods and moving beyond familiar reception narratives of Marxist thought in the postcolony, Bardawil engages in "fieldwork in theory" that analyzes how theory seduces intellectuals, cultivates sensibilities, and authorizes political practice. Throughout, Bardawil underscores the resonances and tensions between Arab intellectual traditions and Western critical theory and postcolonial theory, deftly placing intellectuals from those traditions into a much-needed conversation.

A century before the publication of Edward Said’s Orientalism, a passionate discourse emerged in the Ottoman Empire, rebutting politicized Western representations of the East. Until the 1930s, Ottoman and early Turkish Republican intellectuals, well acquainted with the European political and cultural scene and charged with their own ideological agendas, deconstructed tired clichés about “the Orient.” In this book, Zeynep Çelik unearths an important episode in modern Middle Eastern intellectual history and curates a selection of primary texts illustrating the debates.

Sufism is typically thought of as the mystical side of Islam. In recent years, it has been held up as a supposedly peaceful alternative to the spread of forms of Islam associated with violence, an embodiment of democratic ideals of tolerance and pluralism. Are Sufis in fact as otherworldy and apolitical as this stereotype suggests?

Modern Sufis and the State brings together a range of scholars, including anthropologists, historians, and religious-studies specialists, to challenge common assumptions that are made about Sufism today. Focusing on India and Pakistan within a broader global context, this book provides locally grounded accounts of how Sufis in South Asia have engaged in politics from the colonial period to the present. Contributors foreground the effects and unintended consequences of efforts to link Sufism with the spread of democracy and consider what roles scholars and governments have played in the making of twenty-first-century Sufism. They critique the belief that Salafism and Sufism are antithetical, offering nuanced analyses of the diversity, multivalence, and local embeddedness of Sufi political engagements and self-representations in Pakistan and India. Essays question the portrayal of Sufi shrines as sites of toleration, peace, and harmony, exploring cases of tension and conflict. A wide-ranging interdisciplinary collection, Modern Sufis and the State is a timely call to think critically about the role of public discourse in shaping perceptions of Sufism.

This event has been postponed due to the graduate strike an will be rescheduled at a later time. Please check back for more information .

You are cordially invited to join a Columbia University webinar organized by the CSMS, the MEI, and the Department of Art History and Archaeology. This event is part of the series Re-Approaching Architecture of the Lands of Islam.

Please find the information below, as well as web registration.

From the early nineteenth century onwards, the depiction and analysis of mosque architecture by Europeans, central to the Western discovery of the lands of Islam, has been heavily shaped by Orientalist visual constructs. From the exoticized but scenographic environments depicted by Orientalist painters to the later “scientific” and technical drawings produced by archaeologists and historian, the representation of mosque architecture has had deep impact on disciplinary understandings of these buildings. To trace this effect, this paper will analyze the evolution and reproduction of the plans of five historical mosques through their publication in several of the canonical survey texts of Islamic architecture produced by Western scholars in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Through this study of the shifts in each building’s representation, the paper will argue for a relationship between the purification and isolation of the drawing and the translation of the mosque into an idealized and timeless monument. Articulating this connection highlights the gaps of knowledge reproduced with these canonical texts and their impacts on the discipline of architecture.

Maria Frederika Malmström’s new book deals with both the backstage and the frontstage of politics in Egypt, especially since the takeover by the military, through connecting two bodies of theory—affect and materiality. She has tried to bring “large-scale events such as war, public demonstrations, state-sponsored violence and armed repression into the scale of the everyday, the bodily, the sensory and the local” as well as to bring the “backstage and the frontstage of politics into a deep dialogue.” Affect theory shows how sonic vibrations – important stimuli within everyday experience, with a unique power to induce strong affective states – mediate consciousness, including heightened states of attention and anxiety. Sound, or the lack thereof, stimulates, disorients, transforms, and controls. As an object, sound has a particular status. Sound is measurable, which means it is material, if invisible. It permeates our bodies and the environments in which we live. We cannot keep our ears closed or sounds out. Sound also creates environments: revolution takes place largely with the energy generated in chants and songs; church bells and the Islamic call-to-prayer sacralised space. In this talk, Malmström focuses on sound and affective transformative politics in Egypt.

From the early nineteenth century onwards, the depiction and analysis of mosque architecture by Europeans, central to the Western discovery of the lands of Islam, has been heavily shaped by Orientalist visual constructs. From the exoticized but scenographic environments depicted by Orientalist painters to the later “scientific” and technical drawings produced by archaeologists and historian, the representation of mosque architecture has had deep impact on disciplinary understandings of these buildings. To trace this effect, this paper will analyze the evolution and reproduction of the plans of five historical mosques through their publication in several of the canonical survey texts of Islamic architecture produced by Western scholars in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Through this study of the shifts in each building’s representation, the paper will argue for a relationship between the purification and isolation of the drawing and the translation of the mosque into an idealized and timeless monument. Articulating this connection highlights the gaps of knowledge reproduced with these canonical texts and their impacts on the discipline of architecture.

This event will be rescheduled in light of the GSSA strike.

Upcoming Events at the MEI

View this email in your browser

MEI Events & Opportunities

Book Talk: Revolution & Disenchantment: Arab Marxism and the Binds of Emancipation with Fadi Bardawil

Date: Tuesday, March 30
Time: 12 PM-1:30 PM

The Arab Revolutions that began in 2011 reignited interest in the question of theory and practice, imbuing it with a burning political urgency. In Revolution and Disenchantment, Fadi A. Bardawil redescribes for our present how an earlier generation of revolutionaries, the 1960s Arab New Left, addressed this question. Bardawil excavates the long-lost archive of the Marxist organization Socialist Lebanon and its main theorist, Waddah Charara, who articulated answers in their political practice to fundamental issues confronting revolutionaries worldwide: intellectuals as vectors of revolutionary theory; political organizations as mediators of theory and praxis; and nonemancipatory attachments as impediments to revolutionary practice. Drawing on historical and ethnographic methods and moving beyond familiar reception narratives of Marxist thought in the postcolony, Bardawil engages in "fieldwork in theory" that analyzes how theory seduces intellectuals, cultivates sensibilities, and authorizes political practice. Throughout, Bardawil underscores the resonances and tensions between Arab intellectual traditions and Western critical theory and postcolonial theory, deftly placing intellectuals from those traditions into a much-needed conversation.

This event was postponed due to the GSSA strike. Check back to our website for rescheduling.

With this book, Rosie Bsheer explores the increasing secularization of the postwar Saudi state and how it manifested in assembling a national archive and reordering urban space in Riyadh and Mecca. The elites' project was rife with ironies: in Riyadh, they employed world-renowned experts to fashion an imagined history, while at the same time in Mecca they were overseeing the obliteration of a thousand-year-old topography and its replacement with commercial megaprojects. Archive Wars shows how the Saudi state's response to the challenges of the Gulf War served to historicize a national space, territorialize a national history, and ultimately refract both through new modes of capital accumulation.

With Author:
Rosie Bsheer, Harvard University

Discussants:
Sherene Seikaly, University of California at Santa Barbara
Fadi Bardawil, Duke University


Moderated by:
Hiba Bou Akar, Columbia University

This event was postponed due to the GSSA strike. Check back to our website for rescheduling.