Categories : Field-specific (academic)

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.

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

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.

The Collection of the Qurʾān in the Early Shīʿite Discourse: The traditions ascribed to the fifth Imām Abū Jaʿfar Muḥammad al-Bāqir

Rethinking the Islam/Modernity Binary: Ali Shariati and Religiously Mediated Discourse of Sociopolitical Development

Annual Conference 2015 – Imamia Medics International

New Book on Bahrain

Call for Papers: The first International Seminar on
Shariati and the Future of Human Sciences/ Humanities
Date: Dec. 14-15: 2015

Institute for Humanities and Cultural Studies in Cooperation with the Institute for Culture, Art and Communication, and the Iranian Sociological Association Tehran, Iran

Proposals are invited for the first international conference on Shariati and the future of Human Sciences/ Humanities to be held from 14 to 15 December 2015 at the Institute for Humanities and Cultural Studies, Tehran (http://www.ihcs.ac.ir/Pages/Features/Home.aspx?wid=66) .

Topics:
– Shariati and Quran Studies
– Shariati and Critique of the west
– Shariati and Mysticism and Sufism
– Shariati and Iqbal
– Shariati and History and Philosophy of Religions
– Shariati and Existentialism
– Shariati and Islamology
– Shariati and philosophy
– Shariati and the Critique of Orientalism
– Shariati and Religious Intellectualism
– Shariati and post-colonial Critiques
– Shariati and Heidegger
– Shariati and Politics
– Shariati and Marxism
– Shariati and Literary Studies
– Shariati and Intellectualism

Submission of Abstracts:

The Deadline for abstracts is 22 Sep. and for papers is 22 Oct., 2015. Abstracts of up 400 words should be submitted in Word format by email to seyedjavad@hotmail.com .

For academic enquiries contact: ++98-21-88052301- ++98-936-159-5025

The University of Chicago Shiʿi Studies Group Symposium

Call for Papers (CFP):

“The Acquisition and Transmission of Knowledge: The Role of Shiʿi Institutions of Learning in the Spread and Defense of a Tradition”

Abstract submission deadline: November 1st, 2015
Completed papers due: March 1st, 2016
Date of Symposium: April 1st – 2nd 2016

The study of Shiʿi institutions of learning, traditions, and scholarly practices serve as important areas of research within Islamic intellectual and social history. The role of religious institutions of learning, intra-Muslim polemics over the methods and praxis of knowledge preservation and dissemination, and the means by which authority is conferred to texts and discourses provide rich sources for questions regarding Shiʿism in both contemporary and historical periods.

This symposium seeks to bring together an international and inter-disciplinary group of scholars to address questions that are central to an understanding of Shiʿi Islam. What role do institutions of learning play in the propagation, spread and defense of the Shiʿi tradition? And how do institutions shape and, in turn, become shaped by the nature and practice of the transmission and legitimization of knowledge in Shiʿism? We welcome contributions from scholars and graduate students working on these questions from any relevant scholarly perspective, including social, intellectual and political history, anthropology, political science, literature, and religious studies.

The theme of the symposium encourages scholarly research on core questions regarding epistemic, cultural, and historical studies on the important topic of Shiʿi production of knowledge. Papers may focus on both modern and pre-modern subject areas might address such topics as the following:

Shiʿi conceptions regarding how knowledge may be disseminated and transferred institutionally;

The polemics and debates on verification and authorization of knowledge and texts;

Institutional histories of centers of learning, such as on the unique Twelver Shiʿi institution of the hawza (“seminary”);

The geographic and historical dimensions of centers of Shiʿi learning in cities such as Qom, Najaf, Hilla, Baghdad, Isfahan, and more recently in cities in North America and Europe;

Transnational dimensions of formal scholarly practice of the acquisition and transmission of knowledge;

The means by which clergy and scholars for various minority Shiʿi groups (including Nusayri- Alawites, Zaydis, Ismailis, Alevites) promote scholarly and/or clerical learning and transmit religious knowledge in a formal setting.

Format of the Symposium
Presenters will be requested to present for 20 minutes followed by substantial additional time for moderated discussion between panelists and the audience. The papers will be pre-circulated and should be no longer than 10,000 words.

Abstracts of around 300 words along with a CV must be submitted by November 1st, 2015. Send abstracts to Mohammad Sagha at msagha@uchicago.edu, with the words “UChicago Shiʿi Studies Symposium Application” in the subject line.

Due to the limited amount of funding available, we encourage participants to apply for independent sources of funding, including from their home institutions or other relevant bodies supporting such academic endeavors.

About the Symposium
The University of Chicago Shiʿi Studies Symposium is an endeavor of the Shiʿi Studies Group, established in 2010, to provide an interdisciplinary, non-area-specific forum for the discussion of research on Shiʿism by faculty and graduate students at the University and beyond. The annual symposium aims to strengthen the field of Shiʿi Studies by bringing together a group of both senior and early-career scholars to present research and to cultivate an environment for intellectual discussion and collaboration. At each symposium we aim to address a focused set of questions with cross-cutting relevance to scholars working on various periods and from various disciplinary perspectives.

Funding and support for this symposium is provided by various funders within the University of Chicago, including Norman Wait Harris Fund, the Martin Marty Center at the Divinity School, the Division of the Humanities, the Franke Institute for the Humanities, the Council for Advanced Studies Islamic Studies workshops and MEHAT workshops, the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, the Department of Anthropology, and the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Chicago.

See https://shii-studies.sites.uchicago.edu/ for more details on our past and future events.

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