Archive for May 8th, 2021

‘An explosion near a school in a Shia district of west Kabul has killed at least 25 people, many of them young students, and wounded dozens more, Afghanistan’s interior ministry said.

Ambulances were rushing to evacuate the wounded from the scene of the blast on Saturday near Syed Al-Shahda school, in the Shia majority neighbourhood of Dasht-e-Barchi, Interior Ministry spokesman Tariq Arian said.’

See: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/5/8/blasts-kill-dozens-near-school-in-afghan-capital-kabul

See also BBC.
See also The New York Times.
See also The Wall Street Journal.
See also Vice News.

1.Muslim Sources of the Crusader Period: An Anthology (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 2021).

https://www.hackettpublishing.com/muslim-sources-of-the-crusader-period-4415

2. Call for Chapters: The Historicity of Democracy in the Arab and Muslim worlds

In the framework of the HISDEMAB research project on the historicity of democracy in the Arab and Muslim worlds, funded by the Leibniz-Association, original chapters are welcome for a collective book edited by Nora Lafi (Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient, Berlin). The volume will integrate work from historians of political systems, historians of ideas, historians focusing on social and cultural history, urban historians or specialists of the historical anthropology and anthropology of decision-making processes. The main objective of the volume is to deliver an up-to-date interpretation of the phenomena of negotiation, deliberation, representation, debate, consensus-building, election, designation, expression of ideas and opinions or construction of forms of public spheres in the Arab and Muslim worlds from the Middle-Ages to contemporary times. Within the historiographical context of studies having critically challenged the inertia of forms of orientalism and new-orientalism in debates on democracy in the region, the volume, in spite of only discussing the ability or not of societies to accomodate democratic institutions and practices, will deliberately focus on the study of such societies for themselves and of political forms that were inherent to them. The aim is to track, explore and interpret, on the basis of original sources (archives, manuscripts) practices that existed in the broader region without reducing them to only echoes or imports. Paradigms of circulation of ideas are of course important in this posture too but what will also be under study in this volume is the diversity of local societies and the complex solutions of governance they historically developed.

Chapters may cover the following themes. Alternative ideas are also welcome.

1. Deliberation, representation, power and legitimacy in Medieval Islam (both theory and practice, with an attention to the inertia and transformation of previous practices)
2. Systems of election, designation, negotiation and decision in the Medieval Islamic world as well as in the Ottoman Empire at the scale of confessional communities (Jewish, Christian and others), professional organisations, urban institutions, rural communities, nomadic or semi-nomadic communities
3. Forms of female civic participation
4. Expressions of civic life (debate, opinion, participation, opposition…) and practices of consensus-building
5. Ottoman experiences of institutional reform of representation and of elective systems at both the local and imperial levels
6. Representation, deliberation, decision-making and elections under colonial occupation
7. The notion of democracy in the relationship with its various layers of historicity at the times of struggles for independence and during phases of national-building.
8. Interpreting democratic oppositions and recent experiments, as well as their repression, in the framework of debates on the historicity of democracy in the region
9. The question of the access to archival resources in relation to debates on and practices of democracy

The authors will be invited to present their chapter in a workshop in Berlin in March 2022 (travel and accommodation costs covered).

Nora Lafi is the editor or co-editor of 6 collective books: Municipalités méditerranéennes, K. Schwarz, 2005; The City in the Ottoman Empire, Routledge, 2011; Urban Governance under the Ottomans, Routledge, 2014; Silvestre de Sacy: le projet européen d’une science orientaliste, Le Cerf, 2015; Urban Violence in the Middle East, Berghahn, 2015; Understanding the City through its Margins, Routledge, 2018. She also guest edited several thematic issues of peer-reviewed journals and published extensively on the subject of the civic dimension of governance in the Ottoman empire. She presently serves as Senior Research Fellow with Leibniz-ZMO in Berlin and is HISDEMAB project-leader.

Abstract deadline: July 9, 2021. Notification of acceptance: July 16, 2021. Paper deadline: January 15, 2022. Workshop in Berlin: March 2022. Revised Paper Deadline: June 30, 2022.

Please note that due to the present pandemic and to the limited duration of the funding, deadlines must be respected.

Please email your submission to: Nora.Lafi@zmo.de

3. Arab Law Quarterly, Special Issue:

‘Islamic Finance and Contemporary Challenges’,

edited by M. Kabir Hassan

Volume 35 (2021): Issue 1-2 (Nov 2020)

https://brill.com/view/journals/alq/35/1-2/alq.35.issue-1-2.xml

4. 14 May 2021 Event: Interrupted and Restricted: Digital Humanities and Ethics in a Time of Crisis – Zoom

Aga Khan Library

This panel seeks to address not only the forward facing aspects of digital humanities (DH), ensuring access to researchers, students, and scholars, but also takes a step back to question the ethics and implications of what is disseminated via the virtual vis-à-vis human rights.

Register: https://aku-edu.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJ0qduispjkjGNYwvUw1p97r9pWi4hr-Gvc-

5. Indian Ocean Studies Conference 12-13 November 2021
At the Western Australian Maritime Museum and Sheridan Institute of
Higher Education, Perth, Western Australia

Call for Presenters
Sheridan Institute, in partnership with the Western Australian Maritime
Museum and the Australian Association for Maritime History (AAMH),
wishes to announce its biennial Indian Ocean Studies Conference. The
theme of this year’s conference is Change and Continuity in an Age of
Uncertainty.

We welcome individual presentations as well as panels from researchers,
scholars, policy-makers, and students on the following sub-themes:

Maritime history and trade
Education and communities
Faith and culture
Disease and disease control
Environmental studies
Defence and strategic studies

The deadline for abstract/panel submissions is 28 May 2021. Please send
your abstract to jesler@sheridan.edu.au, or via the conference website
page: https://sheridanicon.weebly.com/abstract-submission.html .

For further details, please see the conference website:
https://sheridanicon.weebly.com/

Contact Info:

Dr Joshua Esler, Sheridan Institute of Higher Education, Perth, Western
Australia
Email: jesler@sheridan.edu.au
URL: https://sheridanicon.weebly.com/