The Pe
rsianate Studies Workshop at the University of Michigan is delighted to host a virtual writing workshop with Dr. Ali Altaf Mian, who will be presenting a paper titled: “Surviving Desire: Reading Hafiz in Colonial India“. The event will take place on Monday, April 19, 5:00 – 7:00 pm(EST).
This journal article stems from Mian’s broader attempt to rethink the Islamic discursive tradition in colonial India by considering the survival of the Persian literary tradition alongside the robust discursive and institutional practices of theology as well as jurisprudence. This article thus contributes to scholarship on Muslim humanities, Islam in modern South Asia, and Urdu literary criticism in colonial India. It does so by contextualizing and closely reading the Deobandi Sufi-theologian Ashraf ʿAlī Thānavī’s (1863-1943) commentary on the Dīvān of the fourteenth-century Persian poet Ḥāfiz̤. Unlike his modernist contemporaries, Ashraf ʿAlī does not read Ḥāfiz̤ through the prisms of social reform or anti-colonial nationalist struggle. Rather, in his capacity as a Sufi master, he approaches Ḥāfiz̤’s Dīvān as a mystical text in order to generate insights through which he counsels his disciples. He uses the commentary genre to explore Sufi themes such as consolation, contraction, annihilation, subsistence, and the master-disciple relational dynamic. His engagement with Ḥāfiz̤’s ghazals enables him to elaborate a practical mystical theology and to eroticize normative devotional rituals. Yet, the affirmation of an analogical correspondence between sensual and divine love on the part Ashraf ʿAlī also implies the survival of Ḥāfiz̤’s emphases on the disposability of the world and intoxicated longing for the beloved despite the demands of colonial modernity.
Dr. Ali Altaf Mian is Assistant Professor of Religion and Izzat Hasan Sheikh Fellow in Islamic Studies at the University of Florida. His research has been published in Islamic Law and Society, History of Religions, Der Islam, Qui Parle, and ReOrient. He is currently working on two book projects: Muslims in South Asia (for Edinburgh University Press) and Surviving Modernity: Ashraf ‘Ali Thanvi (1863-1943) and Genres of World-Making in Modern South Asian Islam. He is also the editor of The Bruce B. Lawrence Reader: Islam beyond Borders, which was published earlier this year by Duke University Press (https://www.dukeupress.edu/the-bruce-b-lawrence-reader).
Please RSVP to Shahla Farghadani at (sfarghad@umich.edu) for a Zoom link and a copy of Mian’s paper.