Shari’a Scripts: A Historical Anthropology

Shari’a Scripts: A Historical Anthropology
Wednesday, December 5, 2018
4:15 PM  6:00 PM

Heyman Center for Humanities
2nd Floor Common Room
74 Morningside Drive
New York City, NY 10027

Celebrating new books in the Arts & Sciences at Columbia University, the Heyman Center for the Humanities will host a roundtable discussion on Professor Messick’s book, Shari’a Scripts: A Historical Anthropology.

Speakers:
Brinkley Messick, Columbia University
Intisar Rabb, Harvard Law School
Gil Anidjar, Columbia University
Mashal Saif, Clemson University
Guy Burak, New York University
Islam Dayeh, Freie Universitat Berlin
Mahmood Mamdani, Columbia University

A case study in the textual architecture of the venerable legal and ethical tradition at the center of the Islamic experience, Sharīʿa Scripts 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.

Cosponsored by:
Ifriqiyya Colloquium
The Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies
The Society of Fellows and Heyman Center for the Humanities
Office of the Divisional Deans in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences
Institute for Social and Economic Research and Policy
Department of Anthropology
Center for the Study of Muslim Societies

Imagining & Narrating Plague in the Ottoman World

Imagining & Narrating Plague in the Ottoman World
A conversation with Orhan Pamuk and Nükhet Varlık

Monday, November 12, 2018, 6:30PM
Joseph D. Jamail Lecture Hall, Pulitzer Hall, Columbia Graduate School of Journalism
2950 Broadway, New York, NY 10027

This event is sponsored by The Sakıp Sabancı Center for Turkish Studies, The Columbia University School of the Arts, The Institute for Social and Economic Research and Policy, and The Department of History.

“Nobel Prize-winning novelist Orhan Pamuk and award-winning plague historian Nükhet Varlık will have a conversation with historian A. Tunç Şen about how a novelist and a historian can imagine and recount past plagues. Pamuk and Varlık will share insights drawn from Ottoman plague episodes and discuss the challenges of relating these experiences in historical and fictional writing.

Orhan Pamuk is currently finishing his latest novel, Veba Geceleri, set on a plague-infested Ottoman island at the turn of the twentieth century. He is the Robert Yik-Fon Tam Professor of the Humanities at Columbia University's School of the Arts.

Nükhet Varlık is the author of multiple award-winning Plague and Empire in the Early Modern Mediterranean World: The Ottoman Experience, 1347-1600. She is an Associate Professor of History at Rutgers University-Newark.

A. Tunç Şen is a historian of the Ottoman Empire and an Assistant Professor of History at Columbia University.

Join us for a discussion and Q&A with the writers.

The Second-Hand Binding: Gallery talk by Matthew Gilman

“The Second-Hand Binding” 
Gallery talk by guest curator and CU graduate student Matthew Gilman
October 23, 2018, 6pm-9pm
Butler Library, Room 523

Reproduction technologies, from chromolithography to digitization, have long been heralded as boon as to scholarship in the arts of the book. Nevertheless, bookbinding, especially that from the Muslim world, has remained at the fringes of the field. This talk examines the historical circumstances (such early modern libraries, second-hand book markets, and Orientalist scholarship) which create difficulties for the study of the art. They also, however, will offer an opportunity to reconsider the nature of manuscript culture at large. 

Lecture in conjunction with the exhibition "In the School of Wisdom: Persian Bookbinding, ca. 1575-1890." Talk will be held in Butler 523, followed by a reception for the exhibition in the Kempner Gallery, Rare Book & Manuscript Library (Butler Library, 6th Floor, East). This event is co-sponsored by the Center for the Study of Muslim Societies.  

"In the School of Wisdom: Persian Bookbinding, ca. 1575-1890."   
Exhibit open 10/22/18–3/1/19
Chang Octagon Room, Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Butler Library, 6th Floor, East. 
Free, handicapped accessible, and open to the general public.
Exhibit hours are the same as the RBML service hours.

You must have photo ID to enter the building. Please see Directions for more information.   

Celebrating Recent Work by Wael Hallaq

Celebrating Recent Work by Wael Hallaq
Wednesday, October 17, 2018  6:15PM
The Heyman Center, Second Floor Common Room

Restating Orientalism: A Critique of Modern Knowledge, by Wael Hallaq
Since Edward Said’s foundational work, Orientalism has been singled out for critique as the quintessential example of Western intellectuals’ collaboration with oppression. Controversies over the imbrications of knowledge and power and the complicity of Orientalism in the larger project of colonialism have been waged among generations of scholars. But has Orientalism come to stand in for all of the sins of European modernity, at the cost of neglecting the complicity of the rest of the academic disciplines?

In this landmark theoretical investigation, Wael B. Hallaq reevaluates and deepens the critique of Orientalism in order to deploy it for rethinking the foundations of the modern project. Refusing to isolate or scapegoat Orientalism, Restating Orientalism extends the critique to other fields, from law, philosophy, and scientific inquiry to core ideas of academic thought such as sovereignty and the self. Hallaq traces their involvement in colonialism, mass annihilation, and systematic destruction of the natural world, interrogating and historicizing the set of causes that permitted modernity to wed knowledge to power. Restating Orientalism offers a bold rethinking of the theory of the author, the concept of sovereignty, and the place of the secular Western self in the modern project, reopening the problem of power and knowledge to an ethical critique and ultimately theorizing an exit from modernity’s predicaments. A remarkably ambitious attempt to overturn the foundations of a wide range of academic disciplines while also drawing on the best they have to offer, Restating Orientalism exposes the depth of academia’s lethal complicity in modern forms of capitalism, colonialism, and hegemonic power.

Author: Wael Hallaq, Avalon Foundation Professor in the Humanities, MESAAS, Columbia University
Speakers: Mamadou Diouf, Leitner Family Professor of African Studies and History, Columbia University; Rashid Khalidi, Edward Said Professor of Modern Arab Studies, Columbia University; Sudipta Kaviraj, Professor, Indian Politics and Intellectual History, Columbia University