February 23: "Ethical Teachings of Abū Ḥāmid al-Ghazālī: Economics of Happiness" with Sami Al-Daghistani

Tuesday, February 23, 2021, 1:00 pm EST

Register for the Zoom webinar here

Sami Al-Daghistani will discuss his new book, 'Ethical Teachings of Abū Ḥāmid al-Ghazālī: Economics of Happiness,' which explores the interplay of economic philosophy and moral conduct as reflected in the writings of al-Ghazālī (d. 1111), one of the most renowned scholars in Islamic history. He analyses and revives al-Ghazālī’s contribution to economic thought, emphasizing his economic philosophy and its correlation between Sharī‘a’s moral law and the tradition of taṣawwuf.

Hiba Bou Akar's "For the War Yet to Come" wins 2019 Nikkie Keddie Book Award, Anthony Leeds Prize

Hiba Bou Akar's For the War Yet to Come: Planning Beirut's Frontiers was awarded the 2019 Middle East Studies Association Nikkie Keddie Book Award and the Anthony Leeds Prize, sponsored by the American Anthropological Association (AAA) - Society for Urban, National, and Transnational / Global Anthropology (SUNTA) section. The Nikki Keddie Book Award recognizes outstanding scholarly work in the area of religion, revolution, and/or society. The Leeds Prize is awarded each year for the outstanding book published the previous year in urban, national and/or transnational anthropology. The prize is awarded to a book that uses ethnographic data from complex, transnational, urban societies in methodologically and theoretically innovative ways.

Hiba Bou Akar is an Assistant Professor in the Urban Planning program at Columbia GSAPP. For the War Yet to Come examines how Beirut’s post-civil war peripheries have been transformed through multiple planning exercises into contested frontiers that are mired in new forms of conflict. It contributes to planning thought by studying planning practice within a framework of past and anticipated violence.

"Open to Reason: Muslim Philosophers in Conversation with the Western Tradition" by Souleymane Bachir Diagne

What does it mean to be a Muslim philosopher, or to philosophize in Islam? In Open to Reason (Columbia University Press) , Souleymane Bachir Diagne traces Muslims’ intellectual and spiritual history of examining and questioning beliefs and arguments to show how Islamic philosophy has always engaged critically with texts and ideas both inside and outside its tradition. Through a rich reading of classical and modern Muslim philosophers, Diagne explains the long history of philosophy in the Islamic world and its relevance to crucial issues of our own time.

From classical figures such as Avicenna to the twentieth-century Sufi master and teacher of tolerance Tierno Bokar Salif Tall, Diagne explores how Islamic thinkers have asked and answered such questions as Does religion need philosophy? How can religion coexist with rationalism? What does it mean to interpret a religious narrative philosophically? What does it mean to be human, and what are human beings’ responsibilities to nature? Is there such a thing as an “Islamic” state, or should Muslims reinvent political institutions that suit their own times? Diagne shows that philosophizing in Islam in its many forms throughout the centuries has meant a commitment to forward and open thinking. A remarkable history of philosophy in the Islamic world as well as a work of philosophy in its own right, this book seeks to contribute to the revival of a spirit of pluralism rooted in Muslim intellectual and spiritual traditions.

Souleymane Bachir Diagne is a professor in the departments of French and philosophy at Columbia University. His books in English include African Art as Philosophy: Senghor, Bergson, and the Idea of Negritude (2011) and The Ink of the Scholars: Reflections on Philosophy in Africa (2016).

"Shari'a Scripts: A Historical Anthropology" by Brinkley Messick

A case study in the textual architecture of the venerable legal and ethical tradition at the center of the Islamic experience, Sharīʿa Scripts (Columbia University Press), is a work of historical anthropology focused on Yemen in the early twentieth century. There—while colonial regimes, late Ottoman reformers, and early nationalists wrought decisive changes to the legal status of the sharīʿa, significantly narrowing its sphere of relevance—the Zaydī school of jurisprudence, rooted in highland Yemen for a millennium, still held sway.

Brinkley Messick uses the richly varied writings of the Yemeni past to offer a uniquely comprehensive view of the sharīʿa as a localized and lived phenomenon. Sharīʿa Scripts reads a wide spectrum of sources in search of a new historical-anthropological perspective on Islamic textual relations. Messick analyzes the sharīʿa as a local system of texts, distinguishing between theoretical or doctrinal juridical texts (or the “library”) and those produced by the sharīʿa courts and notarial writers (termed the “archive”). Attending to textual form, he closely examines representative books of madrasa instruction; formal opinion-giving by muftis and imams; the structure of court judgments; and the drafting of contracts. Messick’s intensive readings of texts are supplemented by retrospective ethnography and oral history based on extensive field research. Further, the book ventures a major methodological contribution by confronting anthropology’s longstanding reliance upon the observational and the colloquial. Presenting a new understanding of Islamic legal history, Sharīʿa Scripts is a groundbreaking examination of the interpretative range and historical insights offered by the anthropologist as reader.

Brinkley Messick is Professor of Anthropology and Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African studies as well as the director of the Middle East Institute at Columbia University. He is the author of The Calligraphic State: Textual Domination and History in a Muslim Society (1993) and a coeditor of Islamic Legal Interpretation: Muftis and Their Fatwas (1996).