Book Launch: Gender, Governance and Islam

Compiled against a global backdrop of mounting culture wars in the realms of gender, family, and sexuality, Gender, Governance and Islam aims to unsettle and interrogate the key conceptual categories through which the politics of gender in Muslim majority countries and Muslim diasporas have been commonly apprehended. It does so through finely-grained analyses of a continuum of cases illustrating the politics of gender and patterns of grass-roots mobilization and resistance. Efforts to enforce gender hierarchies and uphold male entitlement on the one hand, and diverse patterns of grassroots resistance and (periodic accommodation by power holders), on the other, cut across all cases. A key conclusion is that this is a uniquely productive moment to de-Orientalize scholarship on gender in Muslim societies by breaking the shackles of lingering binaries such as tradition/modernity, Islam/secularism, imperialism/national authenticity.

More details here.

Lecture: Defeated Revolutionaries, Lasting Legacies

The Muslim World Manuscript Project: A Codicology Workshop

On September 20th, sixteen students, along with a number of faculty members and librarians, gathered in the Chang Seminar Room of RBML to attend a full-day workshop on codicology led by Dr. Kelly Tuttle, the Muslim World Manuscript (MWM) Project Cataloger at UPenn. The workshop was supported by the Center for the Study of Muslim Societies (CSMS), and is a part of a series of scholarly events and engagement activities around the ongoing MWM. (Check out the catalog of the digitized and cataloged manuscripts from the MWM project here and here.)

The aim of the workshop was “to give students a grounding in how to describe the material aspects of Islamicate manuscripts and to prepare students to identify key bibliographic features so that they may more confidently go to repositories and study manuscripts in person.” The day was full of hushed, intense discussions, with heads moving back and forth between the beautiful slides Kelly projected on the screen and the pages of the various manuscripts put in front of the students, who often worked in pairs on the numerous hands-on exercises Kelly had prepared.

Read the full blog post and view more photos from the workshop on the Global Studies Blog.

Al-Hariri's 12th-Century Trickster Tales and the Islamic Archive

DATE CHANGE: This seminar will take place on Thursday, October 3, 2019, 7:00-8:30 at The Faculty House.

For more information and to RSVP, contact Ruwa Mohammed Alhayek at rma2152@columbia.edu.