Archive for 2016

Understanding urban Alevism through its socio-spatial manifestations: cemevis in İzmir

Imam Ali Chair for Shi‘i Studies and Dialogue among Islamic Legal Schools — Hartford Seminary

Hartford Seminary announces an opening for a Shi‘i scholar with a distinguished record that includes an academic doctorate, religious training and lived religious commitments to occupy the newly endowed Imam Ali Chair for Shi‘i Studies.

The successful candidate will demonstrate expertise in Shi‘i Islam and its relation to other traditions of Islam and Christianity and may be grounded in one of a number of academic disciplines. The candidate must be able to teach courses at both introductory and advanced levels and have the intellectual depth required to direct Ph.D. students. The appointment begins in fall 2017.

The appointment is to the core faculty of the seminary and will be a member of the Macdonald Center for the Study of Islam and Christian-Muslim Relations. It carries the full-time teaching load of four courses per year, a student advising load expected of all faculty, and regular faculty committee and administrative responsibilities to be determined in relation to the candidate’s gifts and the seminary’s needs. Scholarly research and productivity are priorities in light of the school’s history as a place of advanced learning and publication. Hartford Seminary is a religiously diverse community and expects its faculty to appreciate and respectfully engage views and traditions that are different from one’s own.

Rank is open; Ph.D. or its equivalent is required. Review of applications will begin on 15 September 2016 and will continue until the position is filled. A complete application should be submitted electronically to Ms. Lorraine Browne at lbrowne@hartsem.edu and includes a letter of application, a current curriculum vitae, and three letters of reference submitted directly by the recommenders. For further information, please contact Dr. Scott Thumma, Chair of the Imam Ali Chair Search Committee, at sthumma@hartsem.edu.

ADHRB Weekly: ADHRB Cautiously Welcomes Release of Zainab al-Khawaja

“Vernacularization of a Persian Ismâ`îlî text in Sindhi: the case of Pandiyât-i Jawânmardî”

Zahir Bhalloo
(CEIAS/EHESS)

This paper examines the Persian text known as Pandiyât-i Jawânmardî attributed to the thirty fourth Nizârî Ismâʻîlî Qâsim Shâhî imâm, Mustanṣir biʼllâh II (d.904/1498). Based on a comparison of the oral tradition and the textual evidence, I argue that Pandiyât-i Jawânmardî, like the text Kalâm-i Pîr among the Ismâʻîlîs of Badakshan was initially a sacred object, and in the Sindhi context, a living pîr, that served as an instrument of conversion and islamization. Only later did it serve to legitimize the relationship between the Ḥasanî sayyid lineage of the pîr-s accepted by the Khojas of South Asia and the Ḥusaynî sayyid lineage of their Ismâʻîlî imâm-s, the âghâ khân-s.

01.06.2016, CEIAS/EHESS, 190 avenue de France 75013 Paris, Room 638-640 (6th floor)

Workshop ‘The Vernacularization of Muslim and Hindu Traditions: The Case of Sindhiyyat’

organized by CEIAS research groups “New Muslim Elite and the Vernacular” and “Gujarati and Sindhi Studies”

Bahrain ramps up opposition chief Ali Salman’s sentence

Twelve Infallible Men

Yemeni Officials: Airstrike Kills 11 From Same Family

Saudi Arabia: Surge in executions continues as death toll approaches 100

Rituals of Commemoration, Rituals of Self-Invention: Safavid Religious Colleges and the Collective Memory of the Shi’a

1. A Conference: The Middle East: World Crisis?- June 4, 2016—June 5, 2016

Deutsche Gesellschaft für Auswärtige Politik Rauchstraße 17, Berlin, Germany

Organized by

The German Council on Foreign Relations (DGAP)

The New York Review of Books Foundation

Supported by

The Dan David Prize, Tel Aviv

The Fritt Ord Foundation, Oslo

ZEIT-Stiftung Ebelin und Gerd Bucerius, Hamburg

http://www.nybooks.com/event/middle-east-world-crisis/

The Middle East is now subject to a conjoncture of political instability, economic dysfunction, growing religious extremism and seemingly endless war which is bringing misery and hardship to tens of millions of its citizens, and with a capacity to increase already shocking levels of violence in a zone stretching from the Afghan-Pakistan border to the southern shores of the Mediterranean.

In the late summer of 2015 the crisis took on a new and frightening dimension. A year of escalating violence in Syria and Iraq, driven by the Islamic fanaticism of ISIS, has unleashed a huge wave of refugees fleeing for their lives and seeking sanctuary mostly in the member states of the European Union.

With the added violence of the terrorist attacks in Paris and now Brussels, this has become for Europe perhaps the gravest crisis of its kind since the Second World War and engages the continent in the day to day affairs of the Middle East in ways that are unprecedented. Our conference, taking place at the heart of the EU in Berlin, will we hope contribute towards an understanding of the region’s multiple crises, and explore paths to their solution.

Free and open to all; registration required. To submit a request for registration, please use this form. Space is extremely limited. Submission of a request for registration does not guarantee entry.

Form at: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1dte6C0KnyY_l9ZnoJPHx6Z_QcjBZkqHmKKBpM6tsGrg/viewform?c=0&w=1

2. The Global Humanities Translation Prize

 Funded by the Global Humanities Initiative

Northwestern University

Deadline for submissions: August 1, 2016

Northwestern University’s Global Humanities Initiative is pleased to announce the establishment of a new Global Humanities Translation Prize.  The goal of the prize is to encourage new translations of important literary, scholarly, and other humanistic works from around the world, particularly in non-Western languages, and thereby help bring greater international attention to such works and a renewed measure of academic prestige to the craft of translation itself.

The Prize will be awarded annually to a previously unpublished translation that strikes the delicate balance beween scholarly rigor, aesthetic grace, and general readability, as judged by a rotating committee of distinguished international scholars and literati.

For further details, please visit the Global Humanities Initiative website: http://buffett.northwestern.edu/programs/global-humanities/index.html

And http://buffett.northwestern.edu/programs/global-humanities/2016-translation-prize.html

All other queries should be directed to the Initiative’s co-directors, Rajeev Kinra (r-kinra@northwestern.edu) or Laura Brueck (laura.brueck@northwestern.edu), while complete dossiers should be submitted by August 1 to the Global Humanities Initiative: ghi@northwestern.edu

3. Call for film review

The Journal of the Anthropology of the Contemporary Middle East and Central Eurasia (ACME) welcomes film reviews for his journal. Should you like to review a particular documentary or send us one to review please email the film review editor:

Dr Michael Abecassis directly to: michael.abecassis@modern-langs.ox.ac.uk

For general enquiries and Instructions for Authors, please visit:

acmejournal.org

4. Call for submissions (Winter 2017): The Journal of the Anthropology of the Contemporary Middle East and Central Eurasia (ACME) is a peer-reviewed journal devoted to the anthropological studies of all societies and cultures in the Middle East and Central Eurasia. http://www.easaonline.org/networks/amce/index.shtml  Its scope is to publish original research by social scientists not only in the area of anthropology but also in sociology, folklore, religion, material culture and related social sciences. It includes all areas of modern and contemporary Middle East and Central Eurasia (Russia, the Caucasus, Central Asia, China) including topics on minority groups and religious themes. The journal also will review monographic studies, reference works, results of conferences, and international workshops. ACME also publishes review essays, reviews of books and multimedia products (including music, films, and web sites) relevant to the main aims of the journal. All submissions for articles are peer-reviewed. ACME is published with the financial support and collaboration of Iranian and Persian Gulf Studies (IPGS) program at the Oklahoma State University. Founder&Chief Editor-Pedram Khosronejad- Oklahoma State University, USA; Assistant Editor- Leonardo Schiocchet, Institute for Social Anthropology (ISA) Austrian Academy of Sciences, Vienna, Austria; Book Review Editor- Brian Callan- Goldsmiths College, University of London, UK.; Film Review Editor-Michael Abecassis, University of Oxford, UK. For general enquiries and Instructions for Authors, please visit: http://www.seankingston.co.uk/publishing.html

5. Conference – The Ottomans and Entertainment (Cambridge, UK, 29 June-2 July 2016)

Organised by Kate Fleet and Ebru Boyar, this conference will be held at the Skilliter Centre for Ottomans Studies at Newnham College, Cambridge, from 29 June to 2 July 2016. Papers will consider Ottoman entertainment in the widest possible sense, from specific areas of entertainment (including performing arts, religious festivities, excursions, consumption, travel, night life, violence as entertainment and entertainment for troops in war) to Ottoman concepts of leisure and pleasure, the division between acceptable and unacceptable entertainment and the social, political and economic impact of entertainment.

The panels are entitled:
– Entertainment in the City
– Sociability and Wordplay
– Entertainment and the Court
– Entertainment and Identity
– Visual Entertainment
– Entertainment Seen from Outside
– Entertainment and Healing
– Prostitution
– Entertainment and Modernity

The conference is free and open to all.

For the full programme, see https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B8al61dpPhPhZjA1ZTZ0WjRKUk0/view?usp=sharing

For further details, please contact Kate Fleet (khf11@cam.ac.uk) or Ebru Boyar (boyar@metu.edu.tr).

6. ‘Bodies of Text: Learning to be Muslim in West Africa’.

International conference on 30 June-1 July at the Department for African Studies and Anthropology, University of Birmingham.

The programme explores the practices, disciplines and debates through which West Africans learn to be Muslims. Focusing on the elaborate and complex systems of Islamic learning that have emerged in the region, we ask how knowledge about being Muslim is passed on and acquired through the circulation of ideas and texts, and through physical, emotional and social forms of discipline. In the often multi-religious and multi-ethnic societies of West Africa, how does one learn to be Muslim and differentiate oneself from non-Muslim others? And how does one develop a particular Islamic identity amongst many ways of being Muslim?

For more information, see:

http://www.birmingham.ac.uk/schools/historycultures/departments/dasa/events/cadbury/index.aspx

www.knowingeachother.com

or contact D.Kerr@bham.ac.uk

7. The Maqāma and its Readers: A Workshop on Arabic and Hebrew Literatures

Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, NJ, Friday, May 27th 2016

Location: White Levy Room

9:30 am Coffee & mini muffins – Foyer White‐Levy Room

9:45‐10:00 Opening Remarks and Welcome

Sabine Schmidtke (Institute for Advanced Study) & Maurice A. Pomerantz (NYU Abu
Dhabi/Institute for Advanced Study)

10:00‐10:45 Bilal Orfali (American University of Beirut)
“Two Picaresque Tales and a Yellow Cow: Black Humor and Qurʾānic References in
Hamadhānī’s al‐Maqama al‐Mawṣiliyya”

10:45‐11:30 Maurice A. Pomerantz (NYU Abu Dhabi)
“Hamadhānī’s Maqāmāt and its Readers: The Examples of Ibn Nāqiyā and al‐Ḥarīrī”

11:30‐12:15 Matthew Keegan (New York University)
“The Ethical Dimension of al‐Ḥarīrī’s Maqāmāt: The View from Al‐Panjdīhī’s
Commentary”

12:15‐1:30 Lunch – Simons Hall

1:30‐2:15 Devin Stewart (Emory University)
“The Anti‐Shiism of al‐Hamadhānī and the Maqāmāt”

2:15‐2:30 Response by Hassan Ansari (Institute for Advanced Study)

2:30‐3:00 Coffee Break –Foyer White‐Levy Room

3:00‐3:45 Jonathan Decter (Brandeis University)
“Judah al‐Ḥarīzī as a Bilingual Author”

3:45‐4:30 Raymond P. Scheindlin (Jewish Theological Seminary)
“Religious Themes in the Tahkemoni by Judah al‐Harizi”

4:30‐5:15 Orit Bashkin (University of Chicago)
“Monks in Love, Greedy Priests and Muslim Tricksters: On the image of the Other in
Post‐Andalusī Hebrew Maqāmāt”

5:15‐5:30 Closing Remarks (Sabine Schmidtke & Maurice A. Pomerantz)

maurice.pomerantz@nyu.edu

8. Now Accepting Proposals: The Modern Muslim World

Gorgias Press is delighted to announce the launch of its new inter-disciplinary book series: The Modern Muslim World. The series will provide a platform for scholarly research on Islamic and Muslim thought, emerging from any geographic area and dated to any period from the 17th century until the present day. Academics dealing with any aspect of the Muslim world, irrespective of their specialisations (history, theology, philosophy, anthropology, science, art, economics, etc.), are invited to contribute to the series.

The series will accept proposals for original monographs, translations and edited volumes related to these broad areas of research. The series is open to established and early career academics, as well as to postgraduate researchers intending to publish revised doctoral theses. All accepted submissions will be peer-reviewed by two specialists and the series is overseen by two editorial boards comprising some of the leading scholars in the field.

To submit a proposal, please send the following information to Gorgias’ Islamic Studies Acquisitions Editor: adam@gorgiaspress.com:

• A cover letter or e-mail.
• An abstract of the book.
• A table of contents.
• Sample chapters (or all chapters).
• A copy of your C.V. with two referees.

Series Editorial Board:

• Professor Hina Azam, The University of Texas at Austin
• Professor Marcia Hermansen (Chair), Loyola University Chicago
• Professor Ussama Makdisi, Rice University
• Professor Martin Nguyen, Fairfield University
• Professor Joas Wagemakers, Utrecht University

Advisory Editorial Board:

• Professor Talal Asad, City University of New York
• Professor Khaled Abou El Fadl, University of California, Los Angeles
• Amira Bennison, University of Cambridge
• Professor Islam Dayeh, Freie Universität Berlin
• Professor Marwa Elshakry, Columbia University
• Rana Hisham Issa, University of Oslo
• Professor Tijana Krstic, Central European University
• Professor Ebrahim Moosa, University of Notre Dame
• Professor Adam Sabra, University of California, Santa Barbara
• Professor Armando Salvatore, McGill University
• Professor Adam Talib, American University of Cairo