Archive for September, 2015

NAHJUL BALAGHA CONFERENCE 2015

Islamic Thought has the privilege of organising its third Nahjul Balagha Conference. This conference aims to explore in depth the wide-ranging themes within the sermons, letters and sayings of Imam Ali contained within the book.

The conference will feature the following speakers:

Sheikh Khalil Jaffer

Professor Robert Gleave

Dr. Sheikh Muhammad Ali Shomali

Revd Dr. Ian G. Williams

Sheikh Shahnawaz Mahdavi

Dr. Ejaz Hussain

Sayed Mohamed al Musawi

Maulana Abdul Hameed

Poetry on Nahjul Balagha by: Nouri Sardar, Taher Adel

Venue: Marriott Hotel, Peterborough, Cambridgeshire, PE2 6GB
Date: Sunday, 11th October 2015
Time: 10:30am-5:00pm
Conference Fee: £15
Three-Course Lunch and refreshments will be provided
Ladies & Gents Welcome. Book exhibitions will also be held.

There are very limited places available, so register online before 1st October 2015 as soon as possible to avoid disappointment. Places will be allocated on a first come, first serve basis.

For further details contact: maulana@islamicthought.co.uk

Tel: Maulana Maqbool Hussain Alavi: 07983 992 746

CLICK HERE FOR ONLINE REGISTRATION

RELOCATING THE CENTERS OF SHĪʿĪ ISLAM:
RELIGIOUS AUTHORITY, SECTARIANISM, AND THE LIMITS OF THE TRANSNATIONAL IN COLONIAL INDIA AND PAKISTAN

Simon Wolfgang Fuchs
Princeton University PhD, September, 2015

Abstract:
This dissertation rethinks the common center-periphery perspective which frames the Middle East as the seat of authoritative religious reasoning vis-à-vis a marginal South Asian Islam. Drawing on 15 months of archival research and interviews conducted in Pakistan, India, Iran, Iraq, and the United Kingdom, I demonstrate how Shīʿī and Sunnī religious scholars (ʿulamā) in colonial India and Pakistan negotiate a complex web of closeness and distance that connects them to eminent Muslim jurists residing in the Arab lands and Iran. The project attempts to move beyond scholarly paradigms that investigate the transnational travel of ideas in terms of either resistance and rejection, on the one hand, or wholesale adoption, on the other. Rather, I show how local South Asian scholars occupy a creative and at times disruptive role as brokers, translators, and self-confident pioneers of modern and contemporary Islamic thought.

Relying on unexplored sources in Urdu, Arabic, and Persian, the dissertation examines these dynamics through the lenses of sectarianism, reform, and religious authority. It demonstrates how Indian Shīʿīs in the 1940s were haunted by the specter of Pakistan as a potentially exclusively Sunnī state. These substantial cleavages resurfaced in the wake of the Iranian Revolution of 1979. Khomeini’s model of the Rule of the Jurisprudent led sectarian Deobandīs to frame Shīʿīs as detrimental to their vision of creating a model Sunnī Islamic polity which was supposed to fulfil the promise of Pakistan. In the context of internal Shīʿī debates, I pay close attention to modernist challenges to Lucknow’s Shīʿī clerical establishment in the late colonial period. Building on this conflict, I discuss how both reformist ʿulamā and their traditionalist, esoteric critics sought to appropriate the authority of leading Iranian and Iraqi Ayatollahs in order to emphasize their faithfulness to the Shīʿī mainstream. Both groups advanced their own, diverging vision of how to achieve a rapprochement with the Sunnī majority. The question of religious authority also plays a central role during the succession struggle after the death of a major “Source of Emulation” (marjaʿ al-taqlīd). I highlight the ability of Pakistani scholars to acquire religious clout during such periods of uncertainty. Similar agency is reflected in the unique ways in which Pakistan’s Shīʿīs gradually made sense of the Iranian Revolution and how they filtered its transnational implications through the prism of their local religious needs.

This study in its transnational scope speaks to historians of South Asia, the Middle East, and Islam, as well as to scholars working in the fields of Islamic thought, transnational history, Shīʿī studies, and religion more broadly.

Who is Ali Mohammed al-Nimr and why is Saudi Arabia planning to behead and crucify him?

In Arabic, see also al-Akhbar, Lebanon’s story http://www.al-akhbar.com/node/242246

[Despite the ‘poster’ below, this is tomorrow, Friday, 18 September-ed]#Bahrain Uprising Twitter Event

COLUMN: Meet Bibi Ashraf

Project MUSE – Journal of Shi’a Islamic Studies-Volume 8, Number 2, Spring 2015

Newsletter #120 | Americans for Democracy & Human Rights in Bahrain

Islamic Stories of the Prophets: Semantics, Discourse, and Genre

Napoli, Università degli Studi di Napoli L’Orientale, Palazzo Dumesnil, via Chiatamone, 61

14–15 October 2015

 

Wednesday 14 October

OPENING LECTURE

Tilman Nagel (Georg-August-Universität Göttingen)

“How to achieve an Islamic interpretation of the qiṣaṣ al-anbiyāʾ”

 

PANEL 1: What is ‘Islamic’ about qiṣaṣ al-anbiyāʾ?

Carol Bakhos (UCLA)

“The case of al-Kisāʾī”

Gottfried Hagen (University of Michigan)

“Between Yūsuf and Karbalāʾ: suffering and salvation history in Fuẓūlī’s Garden of the Felicitous”

Brannon Wheeler (United States Naval Academy)

“In the footprints of the Buddha: comparing the qiṣaṣ al-anbiyāʾ to the Jatakas”

PANEL 2: Defining the Genre and Corpus of qiṣaṣ al-anbiyāʾ

Roberto Tottoli (Università di Napoli L’Orientale)

“Qiṣaṣ al-anbiyāʾ texts and editions: bibliographical questions regarding al-Thaʿlabī’s ʿArāʾis al-majālis”

 

Marianna Klar (SOAS, University of London)

“Textual stability in al-Kisāʾī’s Shuʿayb narrative”

Jens Scheiner (Georg-August-Universität Göttingen)

“Did the quṣṣāṣ narrate qiṣaṣ al-anbiyāʾ?”

 

PANEL 3: Qiṣaṣ Materials of the Mamlūk Period as Case Study

Camilla Adang (Tel Aviv University)

“Tales of the prophets in al-Maqrīzī’s al-Khabar ʿan al-bashar: from Saul to Solomon”

Joseph Sadan (Tel Aviv University)

“The prophet Job (Ayyūb) and his wife Raḥma: a post-qurʾanic dramatic composition”

Walid Saleh (University of Toronto)

“On a Mamlūk treatise on al-Khiḍr: Ibn Imām al-Kāmiliyya (d. 874/1470) and India Office Islamic 1529”

Thursday 15 October

PANEL 4: The Political Implications of qiṣaṣ Materials: Shīʿī Examples

Michael Pregill (Boston University)

“When is a qiṣaṣ not a qiṣaṣ? Taʾwīl, propaganda, and political prophetology”

 

George Warner (SOAS, University of London)

“Qiṣaṣ al-aʾimma? The true, the miraculous, and the interesting in Imāmī Shīʿī stories of the prophets and imāms”

 

Omid Ghaemmaghami (SUNY Binghamton)

“And there befell the Israelites a period of concealment: notes on Moses and the Shīʿī messiah in early Twelver apologetic literature”

PANEL 5: Qiṣaṣ Outside the Bounds of qiṣaṣ al-anbiyāʾ

Helen Blatherwick (SOAS, University of London)

“Solomon legends in Sīrat Sayf Ibn Dhī Yazan”

 

Ayşe Polat (University of Chicago)

“The human Jesus: a 1922 Ottoman periodical debate”

 

Shari L. Lowin (Stonehill College)

“Qiṣaṣ al-anbiyāʾ in an Andalusian poem of desire”

 

PANEL 6: Qiṣaṣ at the Edges of Islam

Herbert Berg (University of North Carolina Wilmington)

“Elijah Muhammad’s prophets: the white Adam, the black Jesus, and the black Christ”

Reuven Firestone (HUC-JIR/Los Angeles)

“The Story of the Ten Sages: an Israelite story of the Prophet, or a Jewish qiṣṣa of counter-history”

Meira Polliack (Tel-Aviv University)

“The term qiṣṣa/qiṣaṣ in medieval Judeo-Arabic biblical exegesis and its wider implications”

CONCLUDING LECTURE

Concepción Castillo (University of Granada)

“Forty years in qiṣaṣ al-anbiyāʾ: a retrospective”

 This conference is co-organized by Roberto Tottoli, Marianna Klar, and Michael Pregill. The conference is co-sponsored by Università degli Studi di Napoli L’Orientale and ILEX Foundation. Those seeking more information or to attend the conference should contact us at qisasconference@gmail.com.

Seven to die over Kuwait mosque attack – BBC News

1.American Councils for International Education (American Councils) is seeking Foreign Language Specialists in 10 critical languages (Arabic, Chinese, Hindi, Korean, Persian, Portuguese, Russian, Swahili, Turkish, and Urdu) to assist in the development of online proficiency-based reading and listening comprehension tests in the ten target languages, across a variety of levels. We are currently looking for Passage Selectors and target language Reviewers for the project.

 

Foreign language specialist qualifications include:

1. Advanced High / ILR level 2+ or a native speaker of one of the following target languages: Arabic, Chinese, Hindi, Korean, Persian, Portuguese, Russian, Swahili, Turkish, and Urdu;
2. Good knowledge of English;
3. Familiarity with either ACTFL or ILR proficiency scales;
4. Experience in language proficiency testing or teaching;
5. Knowledge of proficiency considerations in teaching or research (desirable but not obligatory);
6. Demonstrates strong attention to details and thorough reviews;
7. Ability to complete assignments on time.

 

Please note that in order to participate in this project, language specialists will need to have authorization to work in the U.S. The work is part-time, contractual, and can be completed from your home computer.

 

Interested candidates should send an email message with a current resume or CV to Camelot Marshall, Ph.D. (itemwriting@americancouncils.org). All submissions will receive further information about the project, possible assignments, compensation and schedules.

 

Thank you in advance for your attention.

 

Holly Gerrity

Program Assistant, Assessment and Curriculum Development

American Councils for International Education

1828 L Street N.W., Suite 1200

Washington, D.C. 20036

T 202 833 7522

F 202 833 7523

www.americancouncils.org

 

2. The French website http://www.menestrel.froffers free academic on-line resources for the study of the Middle-Age. The section on Medieval Islam (http://www.menestrel.fr/spip.php?rubrique960&lang=fr) will soon host a page on the history of medieval Sufism and hagiographic literature. I am actually collecting all the academic (or-semi-academic) on-line projects related to Medieval Sufism. A first  first draft of my contribution can be consulted here: https://www.academia.edu/s/77d16e452d. All your feedbacks are welcome, I am especially interested in project in non-european languages.

 

Dr. Francesco Chiabotti

• University of Tübingen – Zentrum für islamische Theologie

Research Assistant

• University of Aix-Marseille – IREMAM

Associate Researcher

https://univ-amu.academia.edu/FrancescoChiabotti

francesco.chiabotti@gmail.com

 

3. 22nd International Congress of German Middle East Studies Association (DAVO) combined with the 1st Section Conference of the Islamic Studies Section of the German Oriental Society (DMG), Ruhr University, Bochum, 24-26 September 2015

The conference will provide a forum for methodological exchange between the different disciplines of the humanities and the social sciences in their research on the historical and contemporary Middle East and the Islamic World. The PhD Conference offers PhD students the possibility to present and discuss their specific PhD projects with a regionally open and interdisciplinary audience.

Information: http://davo-iswidmg2015.de/en. Registration is still possible until 26 September 2015.

 

4. Conference: “Arabic Pasts: Histories and Historiography 2015”, ISMC, Aga Khan University/SOAS, University of London, 25-26 September 2015

Information on the programme: www.academia.edu/15509430/Arabic_Pasts_Histories_and_Historiography_2015_programme

5. Conference: “Islam on the Prairies”, University of Saskatchewan and St. Thomas More College, Saskatoon, 13-14 May 2016

The conference aims to explore the growing presence of Islam on the prairies and in other Canadian provinces, implications of this process, and to provide a dynamic space for the presentations and discussions on issues related to Muslims in Canada.

Deadline for abstracts: 30 October 2015. Information: islam.prairies@usask.ca

6. Tenure-track Assistant Professor in Islamic Studies, Department of Religious Studies, University of North Carolina, Charlotte

The position is to begin August 2016. Applicants are required to have a Ph.D. in Religious Studies or a related field at the time of appointment, show evidence of a strong potential for professional development as a scholar and teacher, and demonstrate a commitment to promoting diversity as a value in the department and college.

Deadline for applications: 1 October 2015. Information: https://jobs.uncc.edu/postings/5111

 

 

 

Tenure-track Assistant Professor in Arabic Language and Literature, Department of Asian and Middle Eastern Languages and Literatures, Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH

The appointment will become effective July 1, 2016, with teaching duties beginning in September 2016. Candidates should have native or near-native proficiency in Modern Standard Arabic and English as well as a Ph.D in hand by the time of appointment. Area of specialty is open.

Review of applications will begin on 15 October 2015. Information: http://apply.interfolio.com/31166
 

Tenure-stream Position in Ottoman and Turkish Studies, Institute of Islamic Studies, McGill University, Canada

Applications are welcome from scholars in all disciplines, who work on any aspect of the Ottoman Empire, modern Turkey, or Turkic Central Asia. Applicants whose research focuses on women, gender, and sexuality are especially encouraged to apply. Starting date: 1 August 2016.

Application deadline: 15 November 2015. Information: https://academicjobsonline.org/ajo/jobs/5975.

Tenure-track Position in Medieval History of the Mediterranean, Université du Québec, Montréal

Applications from Byzantinists or  Arabists  whose  research concerns the Mediterranean ambit are welcome. The position is to start on 1 June 2016.

Deadline for application: 2 October 2015. Information: http://humweb.ucsc.edu/mediterraneanseminar/news/index.php?id=507

______________

7. Summer School: “Reading Pleasure – Pleasure Reading: Medieval Approaches to Reading”, Swedish Research Institute, Istanbul, 23-28 May 2016

The aim is to engage with and develop specific approaches that will enable us to discuss medieval developments. Some possible themes include Persian, Arabic, Byzantine and Western literature; Middle Ages; reading and storytelling; translations; romance; drama; poetry; letters; chronography; court culture; book history; illuminations; gender studies. There is no cost for attending the Summer School.

Deadline for applications: 1 December 2015. Information: http://humweb.ucsc.edu/mediterraneanseminar/news/index.php?id=504
8. University of Toronto – Andrew W. Mellon postdoctoral fellowship in

the humanities

http://www.h-net.org/jobs/job_display.php?id=51298

 

 

The Meyerhoff Program and Center for Jewish Studies and the Gildenhorn
Institute for Israel Studies at the University of Maryland, College
Park, seek to appoint a tenure-track assistant professor who specializes
in the Jews of Muslim Lands/Mizrahi Jews in Israel. The position is open
to scholars trained either in History, the Social Sciences, Religious
Studies, or Cultural Studies, and it is part of a larger initiative to
strengthen Middle Eastern Studies on campus. The successful candidate
will have the opportunity to affiliate with other departments at the
University of Maryland, which values interdisciplinary research and
teaching. Position start date: August 16, 2016.

[more info:  https://ejobs.umd.edu/postings/36553 ]

 

Columbia University – Richard Bulliet Professorship of Islamic History
http://www.h-net.org/jobs/job_display.php?id=51487

 

Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature and modern Arabic Literature

The Department of Comparative Literature at Brown University seeks a scholar of Comparative Literature and modern Arabic literature at the rank of assistant professor (tenure track). The Ph.D. must be completed by the time of employment, and native or near-native fluency in Arabic and English is required. The field of specialization within the modern period is open. Candidates will outline their future research in Comparative Literature and modern Arabic literature, and they will also make suggestions for courses. Demonstrated excellence in both scholarship and teaching is esssential; an interest in translation theory and practice is also welcome. Please submit complete dossier, including cover letter, curriculum vitae, dissertation abstract, sample of scholarly writing, and three letters of recommendation, online at the link above by November 1, 2015. Please also indicate whether you will attend the MESA convention in November 2015 and/or the MLA in January 2016.

Application Instructions   http://apply.interfolio.com/30218

Please submit complete dossier, including cover letter, curriculum vitae, dissertation abstract, sample of scholarly writing, and three letters of recommendation, online at the link above by November 1, 2015.

 

Yale University – Full Professor in Near Eastern Languages and
Civilizations (NELC)
http://www.h-net.org/jobs/job_display.php?id=51493

 

Christopher Newport University – Assistant Professor of History
(Middle East and North Africa)
http://www.h-net.org/jobs/job_display.php?id=51494

9. CFP: Current Iran: Art and Culture, Harvard University (17-20 March 2016)

 

An organized seminar at the Annual Meeting of the American Comparative Literature Association (ACLA) held at Harvard University [Abstracts by Sept.

23, 2015; Conference March 17-20, 2016].

 

Scholars need to type “Iran” in http://www.acla.org/seminars http://www.acla.org/seminars

 

to find the name of the seminar: “Iran Is Not As It Is Told: Contemporary Persian Art and Culture”

 

After “register”, they can “propose a paper” for this seminar.

 

This seminar seeks to explore the complexities of Iranian contemporary art and

culture, discuss the religious, artistic, and sociopolitical dimension, and

trace the emergence of discourses, previously neglected by academia.

Advocating a comparative cultural approach, it aims to reflect the

competition between subversive and reinforcing discourses embedded in many

cultural products in a seemingly inflexible structure. The process of their

cultural formation reflects not only Iran’s central values but also the

continuously performing and revisionist qualities of those beliefs.

It will address new possibilities: the version of Iran produced by Iranians

themselves for (inter)national audience embedded in Iran’s post revolution

literature, cinema, music, fine art, popular culture, and advertising.

 

For further inquiries, contact organizers:  ghandeharioon@um.ac.ir,

clarkosh@umassd.edu,