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.

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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.

Adapting to Reach Children in Crisis, Conflict & Pandemic Realities: Sesame Workshop & IRC

Join EPD, MENA Forum, and MEI in conversation with Rene Celaya, Vice President for Humanitarian Programs at Sesame Workshop and Heidi Rosbe, Senior Project Specialist, Ahlan Simsim at IRC, to talk about Sesame Workshop and ICR's experience in making education work for children in conflict during a global pandemic. Ahlan Simsim—“Welcome Sesame” in Arabic—offers a warm and joyful welcome to early learning to young children across the Middle East, especially those affected by displacement.