Categories : Field-specific (academic)

The Islamic College

‘Vistas to the East’
Friday 28th of January 2022
6:00 pm – 8:30 pm (UK Time)
on Zoom
(3rd Online Webinar)
‘Mulla Sadra’s Philosophy: Continuity and Novelty’
Prof. Mohammad Fanaei
Prof. David B. Burrell

Professor Mohammad Fanaei Eshkevari studied both at the Qom seminary in Iran as well as McGill University in Montreal, Canada, where he received his PhD in philosophy. For the past two decades, he has been lecturing on comparative philosophy, mysticism and theology in Imam Khomeini Education and Research Institute in Qom. He has published more than fifty books and articles in Persian on different areas of Islamic thought.

Professor David Bakewell Burrell is an American educator, theologian, writer and translator. He is the Theodore Hesburgh Professor emeritus in Philosophy and Theology at University of Notre Dame, USA. He has written and published extensively on Judeo-Christian and Islamic traditions.

For more information and to register, see:
https://www.islamic-college.ac.uk/2022/01/3rd-webinar/

IMES Research Seminar Series
University of Edinburgh, Spring 2022
“De-centring (the study of) Shiʿism”

This Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies (IMES) Research Seminar Series builds on recent calls to “de-centre Shiʿism” (M. Künkler and M. Clarke, 2018). It brings together a range of perspectives on historical and contemporary topics that move beyond the cores and hierarchies within Shi‘ism – whether temporal, geographical, textual or sociological – which have long been assumed and given prominence in the field of Shiʿi studies. The Series also explores avenues to open up the field beyond its Shiʿi-centric confines and encourage more dialogue with the fields of Islamic and Middle Eastern studies more broadly.

The Monday seminars take place at 5.15pm UK time on Zoom. All welcome. To register, https://ed-ac-uk.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZYlcuyvqjgvHdaSodYsuXt5D9W4T3lim0DW.

7 February Edmund Hayes (Radboud University)
Decentring the Imamate: Did the Imams Create Shiʿism, or Did the Shiʿa Create the Imams?

21 February Lucy Deacon (UoE)
Karbala from Canvas to Stage: The Influence of Traditional Storytelling on the Iranian Taʿziyeh
Carlos Mendez (UoE)
Exploring the Intra-Shiʿi Moral Panic behind the Controversial Film “The Lady of Heaven”

7 March Siti Sarah Muwahidah (UoE)
Carving an Inclusive Online Learning Space Under Constraints: A Study of Minority Shiʿi Women’s Digital Da’wa_in Indonesia

21 March Jeroen Gunning (Aarhus University/London School of Economics) & Morten Valbjørn (Aarhus University)
Where Have All the (Sunni) Islamists Gone? Bridging Studies of Sunni and Shia Islamism

4 April Songül Mecit (UoE)
Transnational Lives and Transnational Politics: The Alevis in Germany

For enquiries, please contact the convenor of the Series, Elvire Corboz (elvire.corboz@ed.ac.uk)

The 1st AMI Graduate Islamic Studies Conference: Call for Papers

The Al-Mahdi Institute is pleased to announce the launch of the 1st AMI Graduate Islamic Studies Conference. The conference is aimed at graduate students at the masters level working in the field of Islamic studies with the aim of providing those intending to pursue a career in research and academia with an opportunity to gain experience presenting at a conference and to network with like minded peers.

Students enrolled on a masters programme (taught or research) in any discipline at the time of the conference at any university or institution in the United Kingdom are invited to submit abstracts on any topic in Islamic studies, broadly conceived as the study of Islam and Muslim societies.

The conference will be held in-person at the Al-Mahdi Institute between Saturday the 28th May and Sunday the 29th May 2022. Provisions are in place should the conference be required to move online due to changes in public health guidance.

The deadline for submissions is 23.59 GMT on the 4th March 2022. Abstracts sent after this date will not be considered.

Travel, accommodation, and food
There are arrangements in place for accommodation. Further information on this will be provided when the abstracts have been selected. The cost and arrangement of travel is the responsibility of each person attending. Participants are encouraged to speak to their respective universities who often offer financial support for attending conferences. For those selected to speak but who will face financial difficulties attending, please email the conference convenor. Lunch and dinner will be provided for each conference participant thanks to the hospitality of the Al-Mahdi Institute.

The Oxford Nizami Ganjavi Centre invites scholars and postgraduate students to participate in the upcoming seminar series: Approaching Safavid Majmū‘a(s) and Jung(s): History, Philology, Palaeography, and Arts of the Book. The seminar series will take place in the Faculty of Oriental Studies, Oriental Institute, on a fortnightly basis starting from January 2022.

The seminar series are convened by Dr Mahroo Moosavi and Gennady Kurin and coordinated by the Oxford Nizami Ganjavi Centre, Faculty of Oriental Studies, University of Oxford.

Seminar Series Outline and Aims: The archives of Persian manuscripts in libraries across the world are filled with the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries Safavid Majmū‘a(s) and Jung(s); these collections of texts cover a wide range of genres and themes and compile them in ways which have hardly been explored. These themes and genres include chancellery inshā, personal epistles, royal decrees, seals, contracts, occult texts, poetry, non-chancellery prose, tales, riddles, treatises on art, medical texts, cooking recipes, dream interpretations and much more. The Oxford Nizami Ganjavi seminar series: Approaching Safavid Majmū‘a(s) and Jung(s): History, Philology, Palaeography, and Arts of the Book will focus on several such collections, and a handful of texts contained within them, while probing these on the historical, art-historical, urban, philological and literary aspects.

The seminar series will be particularly concerned with identifying and discussing potential methodologies through which this corpus may be approached, analysed, and studied. How and why were these texts collected, curated and assembled in such majmū‘a(s) and Jung(s)? What do these mechanisms of assembly and production reveal about the psychological, cultural, religious, and political currents within the Safavid society? Where in memory and through what collective networks do these diverse, seemingly unrelated, and at times fragmentary texts may intersect? And finally, is it possible that the Safavid archive, allegedly destroyed by the Afghans during their occupation of Isfahan, may in fact be contained within these thousands of collections? Through reading and translation of a selection of texts, drawn from several collections, and elaborating on questions outlined above, the seminar conveners hope to initiate scholarly discussion on the Safavid majmū‘a(s) and Jung(s) and move it beyond the normative discourse.

Format: The meetings will take place every two weeks, starting from Thursday January 20, 2022, 5-6:30 pm (GMT), at the Faculty of Oriental Studies, University of Oxford.

Scholars and postgraduate students with upper-intermediate and/or advanced proficiency in classical Persian are welcome to join the seminar series.

For every session, a participant will volunteer to prepare a text, or an extract, from the pre-selected set of texts. The volunteers will be expected to read, transcribe, and translate the respective texts – to the extent they are able to – which will be followed by a group reading, analysis and discussion from historical, art-historical, literary, or any other potential perspectives. A week prior to the session, the participants will be provided with a PDF copy of the text and a limited number of key English and Persian articles relevant to the topic (These sources are recommended but not mandatory to read).

Registration: Participants are required to email mahroo.moosavi@balliol.ox.ac.uk or gennady.kurin@orinst.ox.ac.uk with a brief information on the level of their classical Persian language proficiency.

About the conveners:
Mahroo Moosavi is Bahari Fellow in the Persian Arts of the Book at University of Oxford, Oliver Smithies Lecturer at Balliol College at University of Oxford, and Lecturer in Architectural History at the University of Sydney. Her research is concerned with the intertext of architecture/art and poetry/prose, with a focus on the early modern Safavid Iran, through an interdisciplinary study of architectural/art history, literature, and post-structuralist philosophy. Her current project analyses the interpretations of form and structure of rhetorical devices in the chancellery writings of sixteenth and seventeenth century Iran to identify possible resonances within the artistic and urban system of the new city of Isfahan.
Gennady Kurin is a DPhil candidate at the Faculty of Oriental Studies, University of Oxford. His research interests lie at the intersection of manuscript studies, history, and philology with a particular focus on West Asia.

Wladimir Ivanow and Modern Ismaili Studies

‘Heir of the Prophets, Veneration of Ḥusayn b. ‘Alī and the Socio-Religious Positioning of Twelver Shiism’
Hadi Qazwini
Islamic Studies, 60/3 (2021).

CALL FOR PAPERS: JOURNAL OF SHI‘A ISLAMIC STUDIES

As the premier English-language Shi‘a journal, the Journal of Shi‘a Islamic Studies (JSIS) is continuously in search of the latest and best research into Shi‘a Islam.

Now in its twelfth volume, JSIS covers all areas of Shi‘a studies, from the historical to the contemporary and from the theological to the philosophical. JSIS has a prestigious advisory board and is covered by the leading relevant indexing services.

Interested scholars are invited to submit their essays for the consideration of the Editor, at the address below. Essays undergo a process of blind peer review and should therefore not indicate the identity of the author(s).

LINK TO JOURNAL WEBSITE:
https://www.islamic-college.ac.uk/publications/jsis/
also available via Project Muse: https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/582

CONTRIBUTIONS:
Interested scholars are invited to submit their essays for the consideration by the Editorial Board, at the address below:
jsis@islamic-college.ac.uk