Join us this Wednesday, December 8th, for our Arabic Conversation Circle #12 at 6:10 PM in 207 Knox Hall.
Please note that this is going to be the last Arabic Conversation Circle for Fall 2021.
Join us this Tuesday, November 30 for our Persian Conversation Hour!
Please note that this is going to be the last Persian Conversation Hour for Fall 2021.
Join us this Wednesday, December 1st, for our Arabic Conversation Circle #11 at 6:10 PM in 207 Knox Hall
Join us this Tuesday, November 30 for our Persian Conversation Hour!
Please note that the Persian Conversation will no longer be taking place on Fridays, but on Tuesdays instead starting Tuesday, November 30
Join us this Wednesday, November 24th, for our Arabic Conversation Circle #10 at 6:10 PM in 207 Knox Hall.
Dr. O'Sullivan’s paper introduces a variety of topics, including the production of the first Islamic legal treatises in Gujarati; the role of the jamaat council in each community as an interpreter and enforcer of 'sharia'; and competing interpretations of Islamic commercial law in three groups conspicuous for their economic success.
In the case of the Memons, he is interested in the relationship between individual jamaats and the ideas of law propounded by the rival Sunni masalik; in the case of the Bohras, the place of medieval Ismaili jurisprudence in the scholarly culture of the jamaat; and in the case of the Khojas, debates between Ismaili and Twelver Khojas over matters of law, hadith, scripture.
Join us for a virtual open house for prospective students on November 17th at 11am EST to learn more about the MA programs in Islamic Studies at Columbia University.
The virtual session will provide a program overview, including curriculum, benefits, admission requirements, deadlines and more. Faculty and staff will be ready to answer your questions. Read about the MA programs here.
Register for the Virtual Open House here.
We are excited to host once again the weekly Persian Circles, a place for Persian speakers of all levels to gather, practice communicating in Persian and learn about the culture, music, and foods of the region. No matter your previous language background or reasons to attend, you are welcome to join us!
Join us for our Arabic Conversation Circle at 6:10 PM in 207 Knox Hall. This will be a space for Arabic speakers to practice their conversational skills and to learn about the culture through activities, movies, and music. All language levels are welcome!
A talk by Teren Sevea (Harvard Divinity School) on his new book, Miracles and Material Life: Rice, Ore, Traps and Guns in Islamic Malaya
We are excited to host once again the weekly Persian Circles, a place for Persian speakers of all levels to gather, practice communicating in Persian and learn about the culture, music, and foods of the region. No matter your previous language background or reasons to attend, you are welcome to join us!
Join us for our Arabic Conversation Circle at 6:10 PM in 207 Knox Hall. This will be a space for Arabic speakers to practice their conversational skills and to learn about the culture through activities, movies, and music. All language levels are welcome!
We are excited to host once again the weekly Persian Circles, a place for Persian speakers of all levels to gather, practice communicating in Persian and learn about the culture, music, and foods of the region. No matter your previous language background or reasons to attend, you are welcome to join us!
Join us for our Arabic Conversation Circle at 6:10 PM in 207 Knox Hall. This will be a space for Arabic speakers to practice their conversational skills and to learn about the culture through activities, movies, and music. All language levels are welcome!
Join us for this Adab colloquium with Dr. Cyrus Ali Zargar, Distinguished Professor in Islamic Studies at the University of Central Florida, and discussant Dr. Ali Altaf Mian, Assistant Professor of Religion and Izzat Hasan Sheikh Fellow in Islamic Studies at the University of Florida, on "Sober in Mecca, Drunk in Byzantium: Antinomian Space in the Poetry of ʿAṭṭār.”
We are excited to host once again the weekly Persian Circles, a place for Persian speakers of all levels to gather, practice communicating in Persian and learn about the culture, music, and foods of the region. No matter your previous language background or reasons to attend, you are welcome to join us!
Join us for our Arabic Conversation Circle at 6:10 PM in 207 Knox Hall. This will be a space for Arabic speakers to practice their conversational skills and to learn about the culture through activities, movies, and music. All language levels are welcome!
We are excited to host once again the weekly Persian Circles, a place for Persian speakers of all levels to gather, practice communicating in Persian and learn about the culture, music, and foods of the region. No matter your previous language background or reasons to attend, you are welcome to join us!
Join us for our Arabic Conversation Circle at 6:10 PM in 207 Knox Hall. This will be a space for Arabic speakers to practice their conversational skills and to learn about the culture through activities, movies, and music. All language levels are welcome!
Through engagements with Islamic jurists and contemporary scholarship on both the Shari’a and modern state law, this paper is an invitation to raise four questions: (i) What does it mean to study acts of worship (‘ibadat) as an integral part of Islamic jurisprudence (fiqh)? (ii) What does their omission tell us about assumptions regarding the categories of law and Shari’a in contemporary scholarship? (iii) To what extent does the inclusion of acts of worship in their relation to social interactions (mu’amalat) entail revisiting the thesis of the Shari’a’s demise in present times? (iv) How have contemporary Islamic scholars revisited the relationship between acts of worship and social interactions as a response to the constitution of “the present” as an epistemic problem for Islamic legal knowledge?
We are excited to host once again the weekly Persian Circles, a place for Persian speakers of all levels to gather, practice communicating in Persian and learn about the culture, music, and foods of the region. No matter your previous language background or reasons to attend, you are welcome to join us!
Join the Columbia Muslim Student Association for a discussion on understanding current-day Islamophobia. This event will host Dr. Mohamad Amer Meziane, a postdoctoral research scholar in the Institute for Religion, Culture and Public Life, on Islamophobia’s intersections with colonialism, racism and institutional violence.
Join us this Wednesday, October 6th, for our third Arabic Conversation Circle at 6:10 PM in 207 Knox Hall. During this session, we will be talking about the Middle Eastern cuisine, the most popular flavors and dishes across the Arab world and their similarities with other cultures. The circles will be a space for Arabic speakers to practice their conversational skills and to learn about the culture through activities, movies, and music. All language levels are welcome! This event is hosted by the Middle East Institute and The Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian and African Studies (MESAAS). It will be held weekly, at the same time and location.
Join us next Wednesday for third Arabic Conversation Circle at 6:10 PM in 207 Knox Hall. This will be a space for Arabic speakers to practice their conversational skills and to learn about the culture through activities, movies, and music. All language levels are welcome!
Join us next Friday, October 1st, at 12:00 PM in 207 Knox Hall, for our second Persian Circle. Through weekly meetings, these circles will offer a place for Persian speakers of all levels to gather, practice communicating in Persian and learn about the culture, music, and foods of the region. No matter your previous language background or reasons to attend, you are welcome to join us!
Join us next Wednesday, September 29th, for our second Arabic Conversation Circle at 6:10 PM in 207 Knox Hall. This will be a space for Arabic speakers to practice their conversational skills and to learn about the culture through activities, movies, and music. All language levels are welcome!
Join us for the next installment of Readings in the Khalidiyya with Ahmed El Shamsy and Torsten Wollina on 28 September 2021 at 1pm New York / 8pm Jerusalem.
The Damascene manuscript aficionado Tahir al-Jaza'iri (1852-1920) not only catalogued the Khalidiyya library; he also used the manuscript fragments he found in the library's scrap paper cache to reconstruct its oldest texts. His activities illustrate the change in attitudes toward manuscripts and their value during his lifetime.
Ahmed El Shamsy is Associate Professor at the University of Chicago. He studies the intellectual history of Islam, focusing on the evolution of the classical Islamic disciplines and scholarly culture within their broader historical context. His research addresses themes such as orality and literacy, the history of the book, and the theory and practice of Islamic law.
El Shamsy’s first book, The Canonization of Islamic Law: A Social and Intellectual History, traces the transformation of Islamic law from a primarily oral tradition to a systematic written discipline in the eighth and ninth centuries. In his second book, Rediscovering the Islamic Classics: How Editors and Print Culture Transformed an Intellectual Tradition, he shows how Arab editors and intellectuals in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries used the newly adopted medium of printing to rescue classical Arabic texts from oblivion and to popularize them as the classics of Islamic thought. Other recent research projects investigate the interplay of Islam with other religious and philosophical traditions, for example by exploring the influence of the Greek sage Galen on Islamic thought and the construction of a distinct self-identity among early Muslims. More Info
Torsten Wollina is Research Associate at Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin - Preußischer Kulturbesitz. He received his Ph.D. from Freie University in Berlin and his MA degree from the University of Jena. He has worked at the Orient-Institut Beirut, Hamburg University and has received a Marie Curie Cofund fellowship from Trinity College, University of Dublin (cohort 2019-20). He is currently working in the DFG funded project "Orient-Digital" at the Staatsbibliothek in Berlin. Torsten’s research focuses on questions of provenance, especially the translocations of Damascene manuscripts in the 19th and 20th centuries. Another research interest is in how intellectual and social history affect each other in textual production, e.g. in the writing of contemporary history. Some of his research can be followed at his blog Damascus Anecdotes.
This panel explores fruitful connections between Persianate studies, largely a land-based endeavor, with scholarship on relevant port cities. The question of to what extent Persianate studies relates to the domain and lens of Indian Ocean studies (and vice versa) was opened decades ago, yet remains underdeveloped today. Pathbreaking scholarship has brought merchants, shipowners, and various types of people circulating through South Asian port cities from Iranian lands and also Persian speakers from the broader Persianate West, Central, and South Asia lands into view. More recent scholarship on Indian Ocean circulation through port cities has emphasized the plural nature of these spaces, against the longue durée understanding of transformations of the Indian Ocean from a Muslim Sea to a British Lake from medieval to early modern to modern times. This panel’s focus is on early modern port cities, connected to West and South Asian empires, at both the height of Persianate culture’s spread and the Indian Ocean’s increasingly globalized connections. How do port cities such as Surat and Hormuz diverge or reflect the social and cultural constitutions of the Persianate empires of Timurid Hindustan or Safavid Iran? Is there such a thing as a littoral or maritime Persianate? What can we learn from viewing prevalent understandings of early modern Persianate cultures and societies from ports (rather than courts)?
Organized by the Association for the Study of Persianate Societies (ASPS)
Co-sponsored by the Center for the Study of Muslim Societies; the Middle East Institute; and the South Asia Institute
Join us for this Adab colloquium with Dr. Haifa S. alFaisal, Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at King Saud University and discussant Dr. Boutheina Khaldi, Professor of Arabic and Comparative Literature at the American University of Sharjah on "From Balāgha to ʾIntiqād: Politicising the Science of Literature in Modern Arabic Literary Thought.”
We are excited to host once again the weekly Persian Circles, a place for Persian speakers of all levels to gather, practice communicating in Persian and learn about the culture, music, and foods of the region. No matter your previous language background or reasons to attend, you are welcome to join us!
This event is hosted by the Middle East Institute and Columbia's Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies, and will continue at the same time and location throughout the semester.
![[Postponed] SHARIA WORKSHOP | "The Legal Exception?: Varieties of Sunni and Shi'i Law among the Gujarati Muslim Commercial Castes."](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/57ad079f59cc684a27edde39/1632845355588-D3OCMH3EKVPF7E59ICT7/Sharia+Workshop+11%3A18%3A21+with+commentator.png)
![[Cancelled] Book Talk: Miracles and Material Life: Rice, Ore, Traps and Guns in Islamic Malaya](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/57ad079f59cc684a27edde39/1635780337731-RHEM8ODEZN84NRSHGO7O/Miracles.jpg)
