Rethinking Islam & the West: A New Narrative for the Age of Crises

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SherAli Tareen (Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Franklin & Marshall College) joined us on 27 April to discuss his new work on the idea of the Hindu-Muslim encounter in colonial India. SherAli’s first book is “Defending Muhammad in Modernity” (2019, University of Notre Dame Press) which reanimates the contours of the infamous Barelvi-Deobandi polemic as a contest between competing political theologies. In 2020, the book was awarded the American Institute of Pakistan Studies book prize. Alka Patel – Associate Professor in the Department of Art History and in the PhD Program for Visual Studies at the University of California, Irvine. CIS Outreach – Yomna Helmy on ‘Maqāṣid Discourse from Islamic Modernism to Theorising Authoritarianism‘

The capital of the Hoysala dynasty (ca. 1000-1346 CE), in present-day Halebidu, Karnataka, is best known for its elaborately sculptural Hoysaleshvara temple, dedicated to Shiva. Yet the Hoysala-period city (then called Dorasamudra) was home to numerous temples serving multiple religious communities. Dorasamudra’s Jain temples were among the most prominent in the city, attracting elite patronage, artistic innovation, and royal attention.In this talk, Dr. Kasdorf will look to the Parshvanatha temple, its inscriptions, and other Jain material from Dorasamudra—including two more monumental Jinas—to explore the role of Jain temples in the Hoysala capital and the prestigious networks in which they participated.Don’t miss this thought-provoking panel discussion on the continued significance of the Caliphate in modern Muslim discourse. Although often viewed negatively in the West as an outdated institution, for Muslims, the end of the Ottoman Empire marked the end of the last Muslim Caliphate, and its legacy still holds a sense of nostalgia and romanticism. CIS Public Talks – Prof. Abdelwahab El-Affendi and Dr Azmi Bishara on ‘Standing the Democratic Transition Paradigm on its Head: New Reflections after the Arab Revolutions‘ Julia Hegewald is Professor of Oriental Art at the University of Bonn. She focuses on artistic and architectural expressions of different forms of dependency in Asian, particularly South Asian, art and architecture. She employs the theory of ‘re-use’ to show how different people have reacted in a variety of situations of extreme dependency, frequently in very creative ways, to integrate the old and the new, to bridge divides and eventually to contribute to cultural processes which are able to heal and mediate between at times wide and violent disparities of cultural expression. Ahmed Paul Keeler was born in 1942 and christened Paul Godfrey. He was brought up during the 1940s and 50s in a conservative, upper middle-class, Anglo-Catholic family. On leaving school he became deeply involved in the cultural movements of the 1960s.

This often leads to students constructing a (false) dualism between being Muslim and their academic work, with the relation between the two frequently superficial or distorted. Additionally, for socially conscious students, the dynamics of socio-political engagement in the West require them to make increasingly difficult choices that can often be at odds with their faith. As graduate students struggling with these challenges ourselves, we see an urgent need for a space for Muslim university students to reflect on such questions, and to try to collectively imagine a more holistic experience for Muslims in secular Western universities, and indeed other secular spaces. Emma Flatt is an Associate Professor at UNC. Her research has focused on mentalities and practices in the courtly societies of the Indo-Islamicate Deccani Sultanates of South India. Her doctoral thesis, which she is currently revising for publication, explored the world of the peripatetic courtier, who moved across regions and between courts in search of generous patrons and focuses on three case studies of different “knowledges” that helped a courtier attain success: letter-writing, wrestling, and astrology. These three case studies illustrate the ways in which the acquisition of expertise in a particular knowledge provided the courtiers with opportunities for self-fashioning. From Konkan to Coromandel – Deepthi Murali on “ Painted Chests and Sculpted Beds: Tracing Artistic Connections Between the Malabar Coast and the Broader Indian Ocean World ‘‘ In this talk, Hussam R. Ahmed will speak about his new book, The Last Nahdawi: Taha Hussein and Institution Building in Egypt, released in June 201 by Stanford University Press. The book explores the efforts of Taha Hussein (1889-1973), one of the most influential thinkers and statesmen of the modern Arab world, in formulating and implementing Egypt’s cultural and educational policies within a challenging colonial context. Neither existing historiography nor literary projects grounded in postcolonial studies do justice to the institutional and political context in which Hussein was writing and making decisions. Drawing on state and university archival records and Hussein’s private papers, The Last Nahdawi shifts the focus from Hussein the Dean of Arabic Literature to the lesser-known politician and civil servant and offers the first biography in which his intellectual outlook and public career are taken equally seriously.A conference @CambridgeUniversity Sun, 3rd Nov, 2019. Organised by Cambridge University Islamic Society. Watch the videos from the conference below, featuring Imam Dawud Walid, Abdulhakim Murad (Tim Winter) and IHRC’s Arzu Merali. Muslim Thought in South Asia– Anand Vivek Taneja on ‘ Sharing a Room with Sparrows: Maulana Azad and Muslim Ecological Thought’ The lecture will focus on the patterns of governance of Islam in post-communist Eastern Europe, which are found to differ from those common in Western Europe. Governance of Islam in Eastern Europe, and particularly in countries with autochthonous Muslim populations, is arguably permeated by ‘churchification of Islam’. Churchification here is understood as a state-pursued policy strategy in governing of religious plurality, whereby the national legislation pertaining to governance of religions, including Islam, foresees institutional and structural churchification of registered religious collectivities along the lines of the (once) dominant (national) Christian Churches. Research findings reveal that leading Muslim religious organizations in countries under research have accepted the state-set rules of the game and have been (willingly) turning themselves into church-like institutions (national Muslim Churches), reminiscent particularly of Orthodox Churches.

At times I felt the book depicted Islamic history with rose tints and at times I felt it went off course. I've read books in the past that touch upon the idea that perhaps the dominant Ideology/Culture of our age (Western Secular Liberalism) uses a standard for progress that might not be the best. We seem to collectively understand that for us to agree that society is progressing, we look at things such as individual liberty and technological advancement. These books however, argue that maybe we should take other factors more seriously too. From Konkan to Coromandel – Holly Shaffer on “ Gangaram Tambat: A Deccan Artist and a British Archive’‘CIS Public Talks – Magnus Marsden on ‘ ‘Inter-Asia’ through Inland Eyes: Afghan Trading Networks across Land and Sea.‘ CIS-DHF Malabar series– Richard Eaton on ‘ The Persianate World: What is it? How did it appear? Why did it Collapse?’ With regards to Economics, then once again if we were to remove Religion from the equation, then we end up with intense societal equality, overarched by financial systems which embed people in debt and general oppression. It isn’t hard to see that this too is where we find ourself in the world today. Subhashini Kaligotla is Assistant Professor of Indian and South Asian Art at Yale University. Her area of expertise is early medieval Deccan India, 500 – 800 CE, with specific research interests in the multisensorial experience of sacred architecture, the agency of makers and images, the intersections between visual and textual representation, landscape history and culture, and the historiography of South Asian art history.