Programming – March 1st-March 14th

Tuesday, March 2nd

• University of Illinois: A Sociolinguistic Profile of Ahirani, a Language of India

• • 12:00 PM (CST)
  • Click here to register in advance for this webinar.
  • Speaker: Sakshi Bhalla

 

Wednesday, March 3rd

• University of Illinois: Affirming African Agencies

• • • 12:00 PM (CST)
    • Click here to register in advance for this webinar.
    • Speaker: Chambi Chachage, 2018-2021 Princeton African Humanities Postdoctoral Research Associate and Lecturer at Princeton University

• Indiana University: Questioning Hermeneutics and Intellectual History in Medieval Islam

• • 12:00 PM (EST)
  • Ossama A. S. Abdelgawwady’s presentation sheds new light on Muslim historiography by demonstrating how understanding the nature of the struggle in writing biographical works (ṭabaqāt) recasts the foundations of Islamic thought. Many scholars of Islamic legal history argue that biographical texts are literary sources, yet they are frequently used only for data mining. Their approaches to ṭabaqat are ad hoc, inconsistent, intuitive (rather than evidence-based), and sometimes they simply misread the sources. Ossama A. S. Abdelgawwad’s presentation questions the assumption that biographers copy previous historians’ texts without injecting their views into the material. It also questions the effectiveness of the common practice of using the ṭabaqāt genre as “dictionaries” for data mining without examining the entire text or understanding the author’s approach. 
  • Click here to register for this webinar.

 

• Michigan State: Muslim Journeys Book Discussion of I Was Their American Dream

• • 7:00 PM (EST)
  • I Was Their American Dream is at once a coming-of-age story and a reminder of the thousands of immigrants who come to America in search for a better life for themselves and their children. The daughter of parents with unfulfilled dreams themselves, Malaka navigated her childhood chasing her parents’ ideals, learning to code-switch between her family’s Filipino and Egyptian customs, adapting to white culture to fit in, crushing on skater boys, and trying to understand the tension between holding onto cultural values and trying to be an all-American kid. Malaka Gharib’s triumphant graphic memoir brings to life her teenage antics and illuminates earnest questions about identity and culture while providing thoughtful insight into the lives of modern immigrants and the generation of millennial children they raised. Malaka’s story is a heartfelt tribute to the American immigrants who have invested their future in the promise of the American dream.
  • Click here to register for this book discussion.

 

• Rutgers University: Paola Tartakoff Book Talk: Bildner Center

• • 7:00 PM (EST)
  • In England in 1234, Jews were accused of having abducted, circumcised, and converted a five-year-old Christian boy to Judaism. As a result of this charge, Jews were executed, and Jewish homes were looted and torched. Professor Paola Tartakoff will speak on her new book, Conversion, Circumcision and Ritual Murder in Medieval Europe, which explores the “Norwich Circumcision Case” and sheds new light on medieval anti-Judaism, religious conversion, and the predicaments of children whose identities Jews and Christians contested. Examining the links between conversion, circumcision, and ritual murder accusations, Professor Tartakoff proposes a solution to the mysterious events of 1234.
  • Click here to register for this book discussion.

 

Thursday, March 4th

• Indiana University: Charles Hirschkind (Berkeley), “The Feeling of History: Islam, Romanticism, and Andalusia”
  • 4:00 PM (EST)
  • Professor Charles Hirschkind (Berkeley, Anthropology) will discuss his new book, The Feeling of History: Islam, Romanticism, and Andalusia (University of Chicago Press, 2021). In today’s world, the lines between Europe and the Middle East, between Christian Europeans and Muslim immigrants in their midst, seem to be hardening. Alarmist editorials compare the arrival of Muslim refugees with the “Muslim conquest of 711,” warning that Europe will be called on to defend its borders. Violence and paranoia are alive and well in Fortress Europe.
  • Click here to register for this book discussion.

 

Friday, March 5

• University of Michigan: IISS Lecture Series. Revelations from the Cairo Geniza on the Ottoman Era in Egypt
  • 1:00 PM – 2:30 PM (EST)
  • The Interdisciplinary Islamic Studies Seminar is pleased to announce our new public lecture ‘Revelations from the Cairo Geniza on the Ottoman Era in Egypt with Professor Jane Hathaway. The Abstract: “In this talk, I will present findings from my recent research in Ottoman-era documents of the Cairo Geniza. While the Geniza is well-known as a rich source for the economic and social history of Egypt and the eastern Mediterranean during the high Middle Ages (roughly 10th-early 13th centuries), the smaller volume of documents from the Ottoman period has remained understudied. For the past several months, I have worked with Arabic-script documents from this corpus. My talk will focus on a paleographically challenging document describing an inheritance dispute in the Mediterranean port of Damietta in 1538, only twenty-one years after the Ottoman conquest of Egypt. The case sheds light on the status of Jewish converts to Islam, on Ottoman efforts to revive Damietta as a commercial entrepôt, and on continuities between late Mamluk Sultanate-era and Ottoman-era judicial and chancery practices”.
  • Click here to register for this event.

 

• Indiana University: Nada Al-Ahdal: Married and Divorced at Age 11

• • 10:00 AM (EST)
  • Yemeni human rights activist, Nada Al-Ahdal will be sharing her life experience with forced child marriage and the work of her foundation to advocate and provide education about and for the rights of young girls. Nada al-Ahdal is a Yemeni human rights activist known for escaping two different child marriage pacts her parents had made for her. In 2013, Nada al-Ahdal posted a YouTube video decrying child marriage and her being forced into marriage contracts, which quickly went viral and prompted coverage of Yemen’s continued practice of child marriage. In 2018 and 2019, Nada al-Ahdal was nominated for the Nobel Prize for Children. In 2017, Nada Al-Ahdal established the Nada Foundation, which has helped provide educational resources and advocacy for underage girls experiencing domestic violence and forced/early marriage. The Nada Foundation also coordinates a number of awareness programs aimed at both the international community and Arab-majority countries.
  • Click here to register for this event.

 

• Northwestern: Global Lunchbox: Stranger Fictions: A History of the Novel in Arabic Translation (Rebecca Johnson)

• • 12:00 PM (CST)
  • Rebecca Johnson, Director of the Middle East and North African Studies Program and Associate Professor of English and the Humanities at Northwestern, will discuss her new book, Stranger Fictions: A History of the Novel in Arabic Translation (Cornell University Press, January 2021). In Stranger Fictions, Rebecca Johnson offers a transformative new account of modern Arabic literature by incorporating these works into the history of the Arabic novel. Considering the wide range of 19th- and early 20th-century translation practices—including “bad translation,” mistranslation, and pseudo-translation—Johnson argues that the circulation of European novels and genres in the Arabic world, and the multiple translation practices that enabled it, form the conceptual and practical foundations of Arab literary modernity, which includes the development of Middle Eastern print culture, the cultivation of a reading public, the standardization of Modern Arabic, and the establishment of modern literary canons.
  • Click here to register for this event.

 

• Rutgers University: Emily Greble: Distinguished Lecture in European History

• • 2 PM (EST)
  • Emily Greble’s research interests include Islam in Europe, the transition from empire to nation-state, civil conflict, and local responses to socialism. Greble’s first book, Sarajevo, 1941-1945: Muslims, Christians, and Jews in Hitler’s Europe (Cornell, 2011) examines the persistence of institutions and networks in the city of Sarajevo under Nazi occupation during the Second World War.  At her Rutgers talk, Greble will present from the forthcoming book, Muslims and the Making of Modern Europe (Oxford, 2021), which spans from early experiments of Muslim citizenship in the 1880s to the development of “Muslim minority” policies in the wake of WWI, to the formation of revivalist and Islamist insurgencies in the 1940s. The talk will discuss the ways that Islamism emerged as a distinctly European mass movement in the 1930s, how it operated within Hitler’s European order, and then the forgotten civil war of the 1940s when Islamists battled against Communists in order to save Shari’a.
  • Click here to register for this event.

 

• Rutgers: Rutgers Meets Japan: Foreign Teachers, Missionaries, and Overseas Students in the Early Meiji Era

• • 07:00 PM – 10:00 PM (EST)
  • In 1867 Taro Kusakabe (1845-70), a young samurai from Fukui, Japan, began studying at Rutgers College. Several years later, his former tutor and Rutgers alumnus William Elliot Griffis (1843-1928) left for Japan to teach, first in Fukui and later in Tokyo. The year 2020 marked the 150th anniversary of two landmark events in the history of the Rutgers-Japan relationship: the untimely death of Kusakabe only months before his graduation and his friend Griffis’s departure to Japan. This conference is held to commemorate and celebrate the special friendship between Rutgers and Japan. It will illuminate the roles of students, teachers, and missionaries, particularly those from Rutgers and the Dutch Reformed Church, in the modernization of Japan in the late nineteenth century. It also aims to shed new light to the nature of early cultural contacts between the United States and Japan and the diverse perspectives through which the encounter was remembered and told. 
  • Click here to register for this event.

 

Sunday, March 7th

• University of Wisconsin: ¡ACTIVISTA! An International Women’s Day Celebration Framing Solidarity Through Culture
  • 4:00 PM – 6:00 PM (CST)
  • An ad-hoc group of women hailing from various sectors in the arts and activism communities today announced that they have joined forces with the award-winning Chicago-based nonprofit arts presenter HotHouse and publisher Haymarket Books to curate and present an online cultural event to mark International Women’s Day. The program will be broadcast over the HotHouseGlobal streaming platforms on March 7, 2021 at 4pm CST. The program includes performances from women-identified artists, speakers, and messages from places located throughout the world. The two–hour free event is focused on concerns that impact the lives of women and reflect issues that represent the overarching values of the producers – climate change, access to health care (clean water, housing, childcare), immigration, safe provisions for family life, economic mobility and self-determination.
  • Click here to register for this event.

 

Monday, March 8th

• Northwestern: Dialogue with Kamran Heidari, Director of the Documentary Film Dingomaro: Iran’s Black South
  • 12:00 PM – 1:30 PM (CST)
  • Please join the MENA Graduate Student Group for this dialogue with filmmaker Kamran Heidari, director of the documentary film Dingomaro: Iran’s Black South. Hamid Said, a famous black musician in Iran, is traveling by motorbike across the province of Hormozgan to organize a concert with the best black musicians in the country. Besides Persians, Indians, Arabs and Europeans, Iran’s “black south” has been influenced primarily by the descendants of slaves and merchants from Africa. Although Shiites, they still hold Voodoo ceremonies. Said must overcome numerous hurdles. One such hurdle is his wife, who is completely against his plan.
  • Click here to register for this event.

 

• University of Wisconsin: Nadine Naber: “Joint Struggle: A Decolonial, Abolitionist approach to Middle East Studies”

• • 12:00 PM (CST)
  • In this talk, Professor Naber will analyze the limits and possibilities of coalitional BIPOC movements in the U.S. that have strived to end anti-Blackness and U.S. imperialism simultaneously. Professor Naber will develop her analysis through the lens of decolonial feminisms while focusing on the significance of coalitional politics, or “joint struggle,” to the field of Middle East Studies.
  • Click here to register for this event.

 

Tuesday, March 9th

 

• Indiana University: Sticky Gender Norms and Polygynous Marriages in Kyrgyzstan
  • 2:00 PM (EST)
  • Professor Michele Commercio is the author of Russian Minority Politics in Post-Soviet Latvia and Kyrgyzstan: The Transformative Power of Informal Networks (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010). She has published articles in Political Science Quarterly, Studies in Comparative International Development, Nationalities Papers, Problems of Post-Communism, and Politics, Groups, and Identities. Commercio’s current projects analyze women’s activism in Kyrgyzstan and the causes and consequences of polygynous marriages in Kyrgyzstan.
  • Click here to register for this event.

 

• University of Illinois: Hurtful Lovers, Outraged Servants: The Politics of Religious Outrage in Pakistan

• • 12:00 PM (CST)
  • Click here to register for this event.

 

Wednesday, March 10

 

• • University of Iowa: Renewing a Human Rights Agenda: Defending Democracy in the U.S.-The Role of Journalism and Social Media
    • 12:00 PM (CST)
    • This panel discussion will examine the current impact of misinformation and disinformation on the democratic process in the U.S. context. Panelists will provide perspectives on the relationship between journalism and democratic governance, the media environment in the U.S. and its implications for “governing”, digital citizenship, and efforts to establish ethical protocols to curtail mis and disinformation in the social media world. The panel will critically examine and develop conclusions from Freedom House’s recent report on the state of democracy in the U.S. as an introduction to these concerns (see Freedom House’s U.S. Index).

• Click here to join this event (no registration required).

• Northwestern: Black Literary Islam in the Caribbean (Aliyah Khan)

• • 1:00 PM (CST)
  • Professor Aliyah Khan, associate professor of English Language and Literature, and Afroamerican and African Studies, at the University of Michigan, will discuss the Islamic writings of two West African men enslaved in Jamaica in the early 1800s, Muhammad Kaba Saghanughu of Côte d’Ivoire and Abu Bakr al-Siddiq of Timbuktu; and the Sufi-influenced religious poetry of Hopkinson in 20th century Guyana. Professor Khan will also discuss historical cross-racial and interreligious connections between Indian Muslims and people of African descent during the colonial Shi’a Muslim Tadjah/Hosay festival in British Guiana and Trinidad, in the 1838-1917 period of indentureship following the abolition of slavery in the British West Indies.
  • Click here to register for this event.

 

• Penn State: The Jews of Ottoman Izmir: A Modern History

• • 12:00 PM (EST)
  • Dina Danon, Assistant Professor of Judaic Studies and History at Binghamton University, will discuss her recent book, The Jews of Ottoman Izmir: A Modern History. By the turn of the twentieth century, the eastern Mediterranean port city of Izmir had been home to a vibrant and substantial Sephardi Jewish community for over four hundred years, and had emerged as a major center of Jewish life. The Jews of Ottoman Izmir tells the story of this long overlooked Jewish community, drawing on previously untapped Ladino archival material.
  • Click here to register for this event.

 

Thursday, March 11th

 

• Rutgers: Isomorphic or Poly-Ontological Pluralism? A Chinese Puzzle of Religious Diversity (David Palmer, University of Hong Kong)
  • 7:00 PM – 8:30 PM (EST)
  • In this presentation, Professor David A Palmer of the University of Hong Kong will discuss the pluralistic structures of Chinese religion to propose a critical re-examination of conventional Western-derived norms and values of religious pluralism. Religious pluralism is generally seen as a value to be cherished, promoted, and even celebrated, at least in liberal societies and cultural circles; and its acceptance as a global norm is reflected in the fact that few would dare to openly deny it, even when they adhere to effectively anti-pluralist or intolerant ideologies. However, conventional understandings of pluralism inadvertently exclude widespread forms of religious diversity from the pluralistic religious field.
  • Click here to register for this event.