Happening @ Michigan https://events.umich.edu/list/rss RSS Feed for Happening @ Michigan Events at the University of Michigan. IISS Lecture Series. Theology, Ideology and Polemic: The Image of the Rāfiḍa in al-Jāḥiẓ’s Corpus (October 29, 2020 1:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/78780 78780-20123141@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Thursday, October 29, 2020 1:00pm
Location: Off Campus Location
Organized By: Global Islamic Studies Center

IISS is pleased to announce the public lecture "Theology, Ideology and Polemic: The Image of the Rāfiḍa in al-Jāḥiẓ’s Corpus" by Professor Hussain Abdulsater (Department of Classics, University of Notre Dame):

Texts are mirrors that can reflect sentiments and tactics that authors captured and channeled into society in their portrayals. In particular, sectarian polemics served as discourses of legitimation in the formative period of Islamic theological schools. According to the great Muʿtazilī master Abū ʿAlī al-Jubbāʾī (d. 915), his ancestor the great littérateur Abū ʿUthmān al-Jāḥiẓ (d. 868-9) is famed for his obsessive compulsion to argue against the Rāfiḍa.

This talk examines how Jāḥiẓ portrayed the Imāmī community (rāfiḍa) in terms of both its theological views and its social practices. What emerges from his writings on the Rāfiḍa is an image of a community of simple-minded fanatics. One the one hand, the Imāmīs adhere to anthropomorphic and deterministic beliefs and are blind followers of authority. On the other hand, they are passionate believers who strongly stand in solidarity with one another. This, for Jāḥiẓ, explains their coalition with the superficial traditionalists against the rationalist Muʿtazilīs.

Please register at https://umich.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJUqceyhpj4vGdK2ABUNb1QFv1UbVT3ZX6ih

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Lecture / Discussion Thu, 22 Oct 2020 14:57:59 -0400 2020-10-29T13:00:00-04:00 2020-10-29T15:00:00-04:00 Off Campus Location Global Islamic Studies Center Lecture / Discussion event_image
Sacred Time Project (February 6, 2021 12:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/80554 80554-20816974@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Saturday, February 6, 2021 12:00pm
Location: Off Campus Location
Organized By: Muslim Students' Association

The time has finally come for the most EXCITING event of the year!

U of M MSA’s annual Sacred Time Project Conference on February 6th—-Prospering Through the Pandemic

Will be hosted by three AMAZING speakers including Imam Wisam Sharieff, Sr. Dunia Shuaib, & Us. Majed Mahmoud. Take a well-needed break from your life for lectures and workshops to re-energize your spirituality. Make sure to sign up to receive the link and schedule the day of the event.
tinyurl.com/STP21signup

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Lecture / Discussion Mon, 18 Jan 2021 12:59:37 -0500 2021-02-06T12:00:00-05:00 2021-02-06T17:00:00-05:00 Off Campus Location Muslim Students' Association Lecture / Discussion Picture of Imam Wisam Sharieff, Sr. Dunia Shuaib, and Us. Majed Mahmoud
MEMS Faculty Showcase. Early Islamic World 1: Orientalism and the Erasure of Arab Women Poets (March 12, 2021 1:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/81553 81553-20925407@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Friday, March 12, 2021 1:00pm
Location: Off Campus Location
Organized By: Medieval and Early Modern Studies (MEMS)

Orientalism and the Erasure of Arab Women Poets: Reinscribing Gender in Medieval Adab Culture

Arabic manuscripts in world archives transmit the speeches and poetry of women from pre-Islamic times to the modern era, citing at least 400 named women. Gendered eloquence (Balāghāt al-Nisāʾ) was a widely recognized category of verbal art in adab-humanities, from the ninth century onward. Thousands of texts document a Shahrazadian (logo-centric) counter-culture resistant to ossified patriarchal authority in pre-Islamic and medieval Arabo-Islamic societies. Over the past five centuries, though, oriental studies has taken little notice of the phenomenon and modern print sources have hardly done justice to the legacy of women’s verbal art. Western scholarship has in effect muted Arab women poets for centuries, with the attendant risks of permanent extinction of an intangible world heritage. How and why did this erasure happen? This talk shifts frame between the contemporary and the premodern, between the ghosts of orientalist scholarship and the legacy of premodern Arab women demanding to be heard and remembered once again.

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Livestream / Virtual Thu, 04 Mar 2021 11:00:39 -0500 2021-03-12T13:00:00-05:00 2021-03-12T14:30:00-05:00 Off Campus Location Medieval and Early Modern Studies (MEMS) Livestream / Virtual Bayad-oud-wine
EIHS Lecture: In Defense of Damascus: A Tradition in Words (April 1, 2021 4:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/79652 79652-20438370@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Thursday, April 1, 2021 4:00pm
Location: Off Campus Location
Organized By: Eisenberg Institute for Historical Studies

This is a portrayal of Damascus that is based on a continuous tradition of local representations of the city that began in the twelfth century and continued uninterrupted into the modern period. While comparing this textual tradition to its European counterpart of painted landscapes and exploring its relentless, subjective, and defensive nature, Professor Sajdi will offer a historical cartography of Damascus that is both critical of and faithful to this local practice of “cityscapes” in words.

Dana Sajdi (PhD, Columbia University 2002) is associate professor of Middle Eastern History at Boston College. She is the author of The Barber of Damascus: Nouveau Literacy in the Eighteenth-Century Ottoman Levant (2013, Turkish and Arabic translations in 2018); editor of Ottoman Tulips, Ottoman Coffee: Leisure and Lifestyle in the Eighteenth Century (2008, in Turkish 2014). She is the recipient of several fellowships including MIT-Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University.

Free and open to the public. This is a remote event and will take place online via Zoom.

This event is part of the Thursday Series of the Eisenberg Institute for Historical Studies. It is made possible by a generous contribution from Kenneth and Frances Aftel Eisenberg.

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Lecture / Discussion Wed, 13 Jan 2021 10:08:18 -0500 2021-04-01T16:00:00-04:00 2021-04-01T17:00:00-04:00 Off Campus Location Eisenberg Institute for Historical Studies Lecture / Discussion Dana Sajdi
CSAS Kavita Datla Memorial Lecture | Muslim Religious Ideas and Identities in Mughal North India (April 16, 2021 4:30pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/65327 65327-16571521@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Friday, April 16, 2021 4:30pm
Location: Weiser Hall
Organized By: Center for South Asian Studies

What was a Muslim’s religious identity? What were the factors that influenced and shaped the making of his identity? Immediate, pragmatic, or deep historical and ideological? In my lecture I will first mention in brief how the markers of Muslim identity underwent change in the early phases of their evolution. I will then consider in some depth the role of the religious ideas in its formation in Mughal India. The discussion will be with special reference to the debates between the two major Sufi orders of the time, the Chishti and the Naqshbandi-Mujaddidi, on some religious doctrines, ‘narrow’, sectarian or a non-sectarian and ‘pluralistic’. I will also consider some examples from the history of post-Mughal religious and political ideas.

This event is cosponsored by the U-M Global Islamic Studies Center.

Muzaffar Alam is George V. Bobrinskoy Professor of South Asian Languages at the Department of South Asian Languages and Civilizations, the University of Chicago. He is a historian with field specialties in medieval and early modern South Asian Muslim religious and political cultures. His research interests also include comparative history of the Islamic world (as seen from an Indian perspective).

He has held visiting research and teaching positions in several academic institutions in Europe and America. His major publications include *The Crisis of Empire in Mughal North India* (1986, New Oxford India Perennial Edition, 2013); *The Languages of Political Islam in India: c. 1200–1800* (2004); *Indo-Persian Travels in the Age of Discovery: 1400-1800 and Writing the Mughal World: Studies in Political Culture* (co-authored with Sanjay Subrahmanyam, 2007 and 2013).

Registration for this Zoom lecture is required: https://umich.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJItdO-rqjkjGdfZv5nOF7U-zjCpdEegd-ir

If you are a person with a disability who requires an accommodation to attend this event, please reach out to us at least 2 weeks in advance of this event. Please be aware that advance notice is necessary as some accommodations may require more time for the university to arrange.

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Lecture / Discussion Tue, 13 Apr 2021 16:29:13 -0400 2021-04-16T16:30:00-04:00 2021-04-16T18:00:00-04:00 Weiser Hall Center for South Asian Studies Lecture / Discussion Muzaffar Alam, Professor in South Asian Languages and Civilizations, University of Chicago