Archive for 2015

Newsletter #121 | Americans for Democracy & Human Rights in Bahrain

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