Archive for February 10th, 2024
Shii News – Academic Items
1.New book: Love at a Crux
explores the emergence of the Persian romance genre (the dastan-e asheqana) in a comparative context (Arabic, Greek, Georgian, French, and German), with Vis & Ramin as its focal point.
It is available to order at the University of Toronto Press website in a variety of formats, but as it has been published Open Access, you can directly download the PDF of the book here.
Cameron Cross
Assistant Professor of Iranian Studies
University of Michigan | Middle East Studies
2. Andreas Görke and Gregor Schoeler,
THE EARLIEST WRITINGS ON THE LIFE OF MUHAMMAD
The ‘Urwa Corpus and the Non-Muslim Sources
Studies in Late Antiquity and Early Islam, volume 27
Gerlach Press, ISBN 9783959941266, 2024
HC, 328 pages, with Index
EUR 145 GBP 135 USD 167
https://gerlachpress.com/index.php?art_no=9783959941266
3. UCLA Hybrid event: Pourdavoud Lecture Series with Christian Sahner
How Zoroastrians Argued with Muslims in the Early Islamic Period
Wednesday, March 13, 2024 at 4:00pm Pacific
Royce Hall 314
Hybrid Zoom Option Available
4. Call for Paper – Deadline March 1, 2024
Beyond Binaries: Intersex in Premodern Islamic Legal, Medical, and Literary Discourses
On 26 June 2024, I am organising an international conference entitled “Beyond Binaries: Intersex in Premodern Islamic Legal, Medical, and Literary Discourses” at the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies, University of Utrecht, The Netherlands. This conference is part of the Veni Grant “Beyond Binaries: Intersex in Islamic Legal Tradition.”
While, on the one hand, numerous studies have currently focused on the history of Islamic doctrines and cultural traditions concerning gender and sexuality, such as effeminacy, transgenderism, and homosexuality, the questions regarding intersex topics in Islam and Muslim culture, despite having great visibility in terms of how they are publicly debated and invoked in polemical contexts, have hardly been tackled comprehensively by scholars of Islam.
On the other hand, presently, traditional Muslim scholars and public preachers often advocate for Islam as intolerant of trans-genderism or non-binary sex/gender divisions (see, for example, Assim al Hakeem: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pQ0DE7tI7No; Yasir Qadhi: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iCsUXGz1_6I; Amer, Jamil: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oWF-b_rXwpU). Not surprisingly, this dominant approach has reinforced orientalist narratives insisting that the male-female binary conception of humanity in Islamic teaching is a monolithic rigid code without room for discussion and historical developments. For example, Paula Sanders, in “Gendering the Ungendered Body,” argued for the following two notions: (1) premodern Islamic legal and medical texts demand sex and gender dimorphism that strictly define males and females as true opposites; (2) medieval Muslim jurists could not tolerate intersex ambiguity and imposed a gender on such (“unsexed-ungendered”) bodies to protect against social disorder and preserve male-dominated sexual hierarchy (Sanders 1991). Astonishingly, she drew such a broad conclusion primarily based on an examination of four mainly eleventh-century legal manuals, dominantly Kitāb al-mabsūṭ of the Ḥanafī jurist Muḥammad Ibn Aḥmad al-Sarakhsī (d. 1090). Despite the limitation of Sanders’s study, her thesis has been championed by various scholars of Islamic, Middle Eastern, and gender studies in the last three decades.
By contrast, Muslim discourses on sex or gender are oftentimes surprisingly dynamic. Therefore, some scholars have challenged Sanders’s position and upheld that the recognition of the intersex category as a non-binary possibility is particularly significant as classical Muslim jurists and physicians acknowledged the complex identification of such individuals, even when assigning them a specific legal sex/gender (Gesink 2018, Alipour 2017, Geissinger 2012). Moreover, contemporary grassroots-level activists and Muslim reformist scholars lobby for a more accepting attitude, referring to Islam’s inbuilt tolerance of both biological sex fluidity and non-binary conceptions of gender.
This conference thus offers a scholarly assessment of the premodern Muslim medical practice, Islamic law, and Persian and Arabic literary trajectories demarcating the space between the two poles of acceptance and rejection of the third sex and/or gender in premodern Muslim discourses. Its enquiry thus relates to the sex and/or gender identity(ies) of intersex individuals in Islamic legal, medical, and literary debates.
Paper proposals that examine – but are not limited to – the following questions are welcome:
- What are the discursive spaces on intersex topics in Islamic legal, medical, and/or literary debates?
- How did Muslim premodern medical experts perceive intersex bodies and behavioural characteristics?
- How have intersex topics shaped Muslim legal and/or medical discourses concerning binary/non-binary debates?
- How were intersex people illustrated in premodern Persian and Arabic literature in terms of their behavioural and biological characteristics?
- What was the reception of intersex people in premodern Muslim culture?
- What is the correlation between intersex (khunthā) and effeminate (mukhannath) in premodern Muslim vernacular culture as depicted by Persian and/or Arabic poetry and prose?
The conference is a primary step towards an edited volume on the theme. I thus invite accepted contributors to submit their papers to this volume for publication in a peer-reviewed university press after the conference.
Please send your abstract (no more than 300 words) and CV (no more than 150 words) in one document by email to m.alipoorkalaei@uu.nl before March 1, 2024
Conference date: 26 June 2024
Organizer: Mehrdad Alipour
Venue: Drift 21, room 0.05 (Sweelinckzaal), Utrecht University
Costs of the Conference: Reservations for the conference hall, lunch, and conference dinner (only for the speakers) will be covered by the organisation. Applicants should cover their own travel expenses and accommodations.
For more information on the conference and the project “Beyond Binaries: Intersex in Islamic Legal Tradition” go to the following link: https://beyondbinaries.nl
5. Events on Islamic Law at Wolfson College, Oxford, 22 February 2024
The first event is a panel discussion at 2.30 pm titled “Islamic Law and the Modern State: Rupture or Continuity?” with Rob Gleave (University of Exeter), Morgan Clarke (University of Oxford), and Dominik Krell (University of Oxford).
Later on the same day, Baudouin Dupret (Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique) will give a talk titled “Is There Such Thing as Islamic Law”.
Between the panel discussion and the lecture, all participants will be invited to join us for coffee, tea, cakes, and snacks. More information can also be found here.
Please register by using this link.
We look forward to welcoming you to both events.
Law in Societies Cluster, Wolfson College
6. UCLA Iranian Studies
Forugh Farrokhzad: A Journey Along the Line of Time
فروغ فرخ زاد: سفری در خط زمان
A Film Screening and Panel Discussion
Sunday, March 3, 2024 at 3:30pm Pacific Time | Royce Hall 314
Alternate live stream on Zoom:
https://ucla.zoom.us/j/94371748384
(No need to register in advance, just click the link at 3:30pm on March 3 to join.)
7. L. Chamankhah, ‘Hall ul-fusus and its Main Tenets: A Reading into Mīr Sayyid `Alī Hamadānī’s Commentary on Fusus ul-Hikam’
The Muslim World, 2024
Open Access at: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/muwo.12477
8. University of Chicago’s Heshmat Moayyad Lecture Series 2024
Please Join us for Prof. Kathryn Babayan’s Talk on Wednesday 2/28 at 5pm CST as part of the University of Chicago’s Heshmat Moayyad Lecture Series 2024.
This talk spotlights a rant ascribed to a woman from the Bakhtiari tribal group of Lurs living in the vicinity of Isfahan in southwestern Iran. The letter is undated. It finds its way to Isfahan as a collector’s item recorded in several late seventeenth-century anthologies. The vernacular language deployed in the letter ascribed to a Bakhtiari woman uses sexual insults to publicize the infidelity of her husband. I will read this rant to project the female voice excluded from epistolary collections of seventeenth century anthologies.
Prof. Kathryn Babayan specializes in the social history and culture of the early-modern Persianate world, gender studies, and the history of sexuality. She is the author of two award winning books, Mystics, Monarchs and Messiahs: Cultural Landscapes of Early Modern Iran (Cambridge M.A.: Harvard University Press, 2003), and The City as Anthology: Eroticism & Urbanity in Early Modern Isfahan (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2021). Prof. Babayan has also co-authored Slaves of the Shah: New Elites of Safavi Iran, with Sussan Babaie, Ina Baghdiantz-McCabe, and Massumeh Farhad (London: I.B. Tauris, 2004), and co-edited two books Islamicate Sexualities: Translations Across Temporal Geographies of Desire with Afsaneh Najmabadi (Cambridge M.A.: Harvard University Press, 2008), and An Armenian Mediterranean: Words and Worlds in Motion with Michael Pifer (Cham, Switzerland: Palgarve Macmillan, 2018).
To join on Zoom (registration required)
https://uchicagogroup.zoom.us/j/92591319924?pwd=UUxacGZnSlA5U2UwL1Njd3NJN0JRdz09
9. The Rebellion of Forms in Modern Persian Poetry: Politics of Poetic Experimentation
Farshad Sonboldel, Bloomsbury, 2024
https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/rebellion-of-forms-in-modern-persian-poetry-9798765103593/
10. M-Classi, a new digital tool in knowledge organization
Dear colleagues, dear friends,
I am happy to announce the creation of “M-Classi”, a new digital tool to catalogue and interrogate the classifications of the sciences in Islam. Its development will be focused by priority on Arabic, Persian, and Turkish classifications, but for comparative purposes it will also integrate taxonomies in languages such as Syriac, Greek, Latin, or Hebrew. The current Beta version of the program is now available on request at https://sites.uclouvain.be/erc-philand/dissemination/m-classi/, where a short demo video is also to be found.
Godefroid de Callataÿ
Prof. of Arabic and Islamic Studies
UCLouvain
PI of PhilAnd Advanced ERC grant
https://sites.uclouvain.be/erc-philand/
11. Leibniz Institute of European History – postdoctoral position (research associate) (m, f, x) in the History of Islam and Muslims in Europe (16th–20th c.)
https://www.h-net.org/jobs/job_display.php?id=66864
12. Spring 2024 AMECYS Digital Series
Friday February 23, 11 am CDT
Dr. Heidi Morrison
Associate Professor of History, University of Wisconsin- La Crosse,
Editor of Lived Resistance against the War on Palestinian Children
(forthcoming, University of Georgia Press, August 2024)
F March 8, 11 am CDT
Rusha Latif
Independent researcher
Author of Tahrir’s Youth: Leaders of a Leaderless Revolution
(American University of Cairo, 2022)
Wednesday March 20, 1 pm CDT
Dr. Jessica M. Marglin
Professor of Religion and
Ruth Ziegler Chair in Jewish Studies
Author of The Shamama Case:
Contesting Citizenship Across the Modern Mediterranean
(Princeton University Press, 2022)
Links/registration info for series will sent to all AMECYS listserv members, so make sure signed up for the listserv! Digital medium for series is Zoom (https://zoom.us/download).
13. Edinburgh – The Alwaleed Centre has a number of public seminars taking place in February to which all are warmly welcome.
Fakes and Forgeries in the Islamic Art Market: A Study of Two Problematic Pieces of Mina’i Ware
Friday 16 February, 3pm, Room G06, 50 Geroge Square + online
A special seminar by Richard Piran McClary (University of York) exploring the ways in which fakes and forgeries present in Islamic ceramic wares in both public and private collections. This event is free to attend either in-person or online but registration is necessary. Click here for further information and free registration
Book Talk: On Muslim Democracy
Friday 23 February, 3pm, Room G06, 50 George Square + online
Join Andrew F. March (University of Massachusetts Amherst/Harvard University) as he discusses his and Rached Ghannouchi’s new book ‘On Muslim Democracy’. This event is free to attend either in-person or online but registration is necessary. Click for further information and registration.
SAVE THE DATE: Prof. Saul Takahashi on Palestine
Tuesday 27 February, 5:30pm, Appleton Tower Lecture Theatre
The Alwaleed Centre is to be welcoming Prof. Saul Tahahashi (Osaka Jogakuin University) to discuss his time as Deputy Head of Office in Occupied Palestine (Ramallah), United Nations High Commission for Human Rights. Further details + registration to follow in due course. For now, please save the date.
Islam and the Spice Trade: Towards a New History of Global Commerce
Wednesday 28 February, 4pm, Screening Room, 50 George Square (in-person only)
An in-person lecture by Professor Joel Belcher (George Washington University) on lesser-known ports and practices of the 15th century spice trade. This event is in collaboration with the Edinburgh Centre for Global History and the Alwaleed Centre for the Study of Islam in the Contemporary World.
Free to attend, in-person only – no need to register. Click here for further information.
With very best wishes,
The Alwaleed Centre for the Study of Islam
in the Contemporary World
University of Edinburgh
16 George Square
Edinburgh
EH8 9LD
0131 650 4615
14. Fri. Feb. 23, 12pm EST: Literary Modernity and Anticolonial Revolution in the Muslim World: A Conversation Between Nergis Ertürk, Sam Hodgkin, and Annette Damayanti Lienau
Arabic, Persian, and Turkic, as shared literary languages of the Muslim world, provided a means of communication and a basis for political coordination to the early generations of radical anticolonial writers and thinkers from Jakarta, Cairo, and Timbuktu; Bukhara, Lahore, and Tabriz; Istanbul, Kazan, and Kashgar. These revolutionaries read each other’s newspapers, spent years of exile in each other’s regions, and developed rich literary subcultures based on their shared cultural traditions. Ultimately, these activists’ shared projects of independence, vernacularization, and national modernization produced a far less continuous linguistic and cultural space, with new patterns of coordination and solidarity. Three new books explore this transnational world of literary and political revolution, providing different vantage points on the ways that world contributed to the making of the national literatures and world literature that we have inherited today. This will be a public conversation between Nergis Ertürk (Writing in Red: Literature and Revolution Across Turkey and the Soviet Union, Columbia, April 2024), Sam Hodgkin (Persianate Verse and the Poetics of Eastern Internationalism, Cambridge, December 2023), and Annette Damayanti Lienau (Sacred Language, Vernacular Difference: Global Arabic and Counter-Imperial Literatures, Princeton, January 2024), in which the three scholars will reflect on the politics of literary form and language in the circuitries of literary internationalism.
You can register for the webinar here.
15. From Konkan to Coromandel: Societies and Cultures of the Deccan World
Webinars co-organized by the Center of Islamic Studies, University of Cambridge, and Art, Resources and Teaching Trust, Bangalore, presenting the pioneering scholarship across various fields of knowledge from both the Northern and Southern Deccan regions of India.
FEBRUARY
The Rise and Fall of the Goan Temple
Amita Kanekar (Architectural Historian) on February 16th at 1 PM London (8 AM New York and 6:30 PM India)
MARCH
Mughal Burhanpur: Dynamic Urbanism at the Edge of Empire
Rachel Hirsch (Harvard University) on March 22nd at 1 PM London (9 AM New York and 6:30 PM India)
APRIL
Translating Dakani Poetry and Nusrati’s Gulshan-i ‘Ishq
Makoto Kitada (Osaka University) on April 19th at 11 AM London (4:30 PM India/8 PM Japan)
MAY
Exploring the Library of Tipu Sultan
Ursula Sims-Williams (The British Library) on May 17th at 2 PM London (9 AM New York and 6:30 PM India)
All webinars will take place on Zoom. Free and open to the public. Prior registration is mandatory.
Please visit https://www.cis.cam.ac.uk/activities/lectures-workshops/from-malabar-to-coromandel/ to register and receive the Zoom link.
If you have issues signing up please email Neil Cunningham, nc524@cam.ac.uk.
16. Iran Heritage Foundation Grants
MISSION STATEMENT OF THE IHF ACADEMIC COMMITTEE
The Iran Heritage Foundation is pleased to announce that, after a lapse of several years due to Covid and administrative disruptions, its Academic Committee will be reconstituted. Like its predecessor, its overall aim will be to foster knowledge and appreciation of Iran’s rich cultural heritage by awarding research-related grants. It will, however, have a fuller agenda than was previously the case. It will operate two cycles each year, the first disbursing £15,000 and the second £20,000. The Trustees will review the awards process and may consider occasional support over and beyond the annual grant budget in exceptional circumstances.
In this, the initial year, the deadlines for receipt of applications are 30 May 2024 and 29 August 2024. As before, the Committee will assess applications for research grants in various academic disciplines, with a particular emphasis (in alphabetical order) on archaeology, arts, history, linguistics, and literature, though applications from other disciplines may be considered. Projects to be supported may include the most various academic initiatives, from fieldwork to workshops to building databases and digitising images, and will – as previously – privilege new research such as editions and translations of key texts. In order to support multiple initiatives in each cycle, grants will preferably not exceed £3,000.
The application process and conditions for such grants will shortly be laid out on the website of the IHF https://www.iranheritage.org/. In its second cycle, the Committee will also award two book prizes each year; one in memory of Iradj Bagherzade, the late founder of I.B. Tauris Publishing (now a subsidiary of Bloomsbury Publishing), as an enabling prize to defray some of the costs of a book still to be published; and the other for an already published book making a significant contribution to the world of Iranian studies. The terms and conditions for these book prizes will also be laid out on the website of the IHF.
The Committee’s mandate includes advice to the Trustees on the merits of major academic conferences, exhibitions and cultural events of value which the IHF has historically helped support or has itself organised in the past. This will involve advice on the selection of institutional partners such as prestigious universities and museums, and collaboration with other charities dedicated to the celebration and preservation of Iranian culture. We shall seek to support endeavours covering Prehistoric, Ancient, Islamic, Modern and Contemporary Iran.
The five members of the Academic Committee will meet at regular intervals throughout the year. The membership of the Committee is as follows:
Hassan Hakimian, former Director of the London Middle East Institute at SOAS, is Professor of Economics and currently the Interim Dean of the College of Humanities and Social Sciences at HBKU University, Qatar. He is a Founding Member and a past President of the International Iranian Economic Association (IIEA). One of the programs he directed at SOAS won the Queen’s Prize for Higher and Further Education in 1996.
Professor Robert Hillenbrand, FBA (Universities of Edinburgh and St Andrews) has published 11 books, edited or co-edited 14 books, published some 200 articles, organised ten symposia and held ten visiting professorships. His specialties are Islamic architecture, painting and iconography with a special emphasis on Iran.
Professor Marcus Milwright (University of Victoria, Canada) is currently British Academy Global Professor at the University of York (2023-27). His research focuses on the art and archaeology of the Islamic Middle East, labour and traditional craft practices, and cross-cultural interaction. He has written six books and 82 papers.
Andrew Peacock is Bishop Wardlaw Professor of Islamic History at the University of St Andrews and a Fellow of the British Academy. His research focuses on the history and culture of Iran and the Persianate world. He has written or edited twelve books and published some 55 papers.
Dr Julian Raby, art historian and long-term Director of the Freer Gallery of Art, Washington D.C., has been founding editor of Oxford Studies in Islamic Art (14 volumes) and General Editor, Khalili Collection of Islamic Art (over 30 volumes). He has written numerous books and articles and mounted multiple exhibitions.
Applications are now invited.
17. The Text Pre Exegetical Test ( TPET ) has just been published in Iran. This book is an interdisciplinary relationship between Qur’anic studies and engineering; Machine learning and Digital Humanities (DH) TPET tries to methodize the type of encounter with the text as the most important event in the field of text-oriented Islamic studies. The pre- Exegetical nature of these rules means that the researcher must define his position regarding the results of these tests before interpreting the text. Testing the text before interpretation practically provides the researcher with the prepared and processed text. The result of this test of the text is not necessarily the interpretation of the text; Rather, putting all the possible possibilities of the text on the table is on the interpreter’s desk; so as to provide the context for a better judgment of the commentator and a more accurate interpretation of the text. It is clear that the more the number of these tests on the text; The percentage of error probability (Tafsir-e- be Ray) is reduced.
TPET book is the first book-length publication emerging from the IQP project “Ind. Int. Quranic Parliament”.
https://iict.ac.ir/1402/10/pishatafsiri-3/
18. This year, the Iranian Studies Program at the Yale MacMillan Center is hosting the major Afghan novelist and memoirist Homeira Qaderi as our Writer in Residence.
Over the course of this year, Qaderi is conducting several conversations with other Persian-language writers about their craft. These are online webinars conducted in Persian, and we invite Persian-speakers from all over the world to tune in.
Following up on a fascinating conversation with Aliyeh Ataei in November, we are pleased to announce two more upcoming conversations with Qaderi:
Tues. Feb. 20, 12-1:30pm EST: A reading and conversation with Prof. Fatemeh Shams on the art of poetry, moderated by CMES fellow Bezhan Pazhohan
Tues. Mar. 26, 12-1:30pm EST: A reading and conversation with Mujib Mehrdad on Afghan literature, moderated by the Yarshater Fellow in Iranian Studies, Latifeh Aavani
To register for the event, follow this link. This event is co-sponsored by the Yale Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, the Center for Middle Eastern Studies, the Department of Comparative Literature, and the Jaleh Esfahani Cultural Foundation.
- February 10, 2024
- by Andrew Newman
- 0 Comment