Monday, December 2
5:00 PM - 7:00 PM
Knox Hall, Room 509
Join James Weaver, Professor at the University of Zurich in the Middle Eastern Studies Department, for a conversation on the historical and theological underpinnings of the doctrine of Waṣiyya (designation) and its role in early Shīʿī thought. To attend this event, please register below to receive the pre-circulated paper.
Friday, November 22
4:10 PM - 6:00 PM
Knox Hall, Room 208
Join Devin J. Stewart, Professor of Arabic and Islamic Studies at Emory University’s MESAS Department, for a conversation on Taqīyah and Tawriyah: Dissimulation and the Art of Ambiguity. To attend this event, please register below to receive the pre-circulated paper.
Tuesday, November 19
6:10 PM - 8:00 PM
612 Schermerhorn
From an early date, Islamic writers connected the Qur’anic Thamud with Hegra, an abandoned Nabatean- Roman site in the Northern Hijaz now known, by reason of that association, as Mada’in Salih. The site itself thus forms a kind of bridge across the historical rupture separating Islam from Jahiliyya. What exactly happens to such a site when it becomes “Islamic?” This talk explores how the idea of constructing Islam works as a monumentalizing lens that changes the way we look at pre-Islamic architecture by blurring some features even as it makes others stand out in sharp relief. At Hegra, it will be argued, the effect of this reinterpretation produces rupture where it might have been possible to see continuity in a way that turns Nabatean ruins into an infrastructure for producing Islam.
Join Professor Sevea Teran, Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Associate Professor of Islamic Studies at Harvard University, to discuss his essay Singapore’s Islamic Pasts: Alexanders in an Island Below the Winds.
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