Hisham Aidi awarded a Soros Equality Fellowship

September 22, 2020 by Guest User

Congratulations to professor Hisham Aidi for being awarded a Soros Equality Fellowship. Professor Aidi is one of a group of 13 remarkable individuals awarded the Soros Equality fellowship in 2020. The program, now in its fourth year, is designed to help incubate innovators and risk-takers striving to create and develop new ways of addressing the systemic causes and symptoms of racial disparity and discrimination.

Hisham Aidi will create a web documentary series and book project to study the rise of Afro-Arab and Amazigh migration and activism in the United States over the last 25 years.

Aidi is senior lecturer at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs. He is the author of Redeploying the State (Palgrave 2008), a comparative study of market reform and labor movements in Latin America; co-editor, with the late Manning Marable, of Black Routes to Islam (Palgrave 2009); and author of Rebel Music: Race, Empire and the New Muslim Youth Culture (Pantheon 2014). As a cultural reporter, his work has appeared in the Atlantic, the Nation, and the New Yorker.

Aidi is the recipient of the Carnegie Scholar Award (2008), the American Book Award (2015), and Hip Hop Scholar Award (2015). He is currently a scholar-in-residence at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, working on a project titled “W.E.B. Du Bois and the Afro-Arab World.” His most recent documentary short is titled Malcolm X and the Sudanese. He received his PhD in political science from Columbia University.

Matthew L. Keegan: The Stakes of Editing the Unruly Past

July 16, 2020 by Guest User

Faculty Profile

Matthew L. Keegan is the Moinian Assistant Professor in the Department of Asian and Middle Eastern Cultures at Barnard College. His research focuses on Islamic intellectual history and adab (usually translated as "literature" or "belles-lettres"). In particular, he writes about the commentaries on al-Hariri's Maqamat, a 12th-century collection of stories about an eloquent trickster.

Over the course of July 2020, he is moderating a series of online workshops hosted by the Columbia Global Center in Amman about Kalila wa-Dimna, a collection of stories about fictive humans and talking animals. Kalila wa-Dimna is the subject of the AnonymClassic ERC-sponsored project where Professor Keegan completed a postdoctoral fellowship in 2019. The following post discusses the very different manuscript traditions of Kalila wa-Dimna and al-Hariri's Maqamat.

The Stakes of Editing the Unruly Past

Arabic manuscripts are documents of social and intellectual history. The scribes who copied them, the readers who perused them, and the scholars who scribbled notes in their margins were all involved in shaping the way that manuscripts came to be read by their later readers. When texts from before the dawn of Arabic print culture in the 19th century came to be edited and put in print, editors often erased these testaments to the social lives of manuscripts.

Consider, for example, the case of al-Hariri's Maqamat, which was first read aloud to an audience of scholars in Baghdad in the year 1111 AD. Most copies of the Maqamat do not contain the brilliant illustrations that have become popular on book covers and event posters. Most copies contain the scribbles of later readers who glossed and annotated the text in the course of their reading and study.

Elaine van Dalen: Medical Perspectives on Epidemics in the Classical Islamic World

April 27, 2020 by Guest User

Faculty Profile

Elaine van Dalen is assistant professor of Classical Islamic Studies in the Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies at Columbia University. She is a philologist working on medical, botanical, and agricultural texts from the Classical Islamic world. Her research questions relate to the history of medicine and philology, the transmission and translation of knowledge, and practices of medical commentary. She teaches Columbia’s Contemporary Civilization course, and MESAAS’ core course Asian Humanities.

Her most recent publication “Pediatrics in Medieval Islamic Theoria” (JAOS) analyzes the pediatric material in the Arabic commentaries (written tenth–fifteenth centuries) on the Hippocratic Aphorisms by exploring the traces of its late-antique origins and highlighting the influences of contemporary Islamic sources.

Medical Perspectives on Epidemics in the Classical Islamic World

In the case of an epidemic, stay at home, and clean your house daily, recommends the classical Islamic physician al Rāzī (d.c. 925). Epidemics afflicted the pre-modern Islamic world at regular intervals, and physicians, just as historians and other scholars, engaged with them throughout Islamic history. Classical Islamic physicians theorized about the nature of epidemics and their causes, and attempted to explain why so many people could be afflicted by a disease in a certain place at the same time. They also thought about the prevention of epidemics, and suggested cures. This information can be found in their medical compendia and treatises. After the Black Death in 1348, a new genre of plague treatises developed that specifically focused on the discussion of plagues, including new types of explanation and treatment.