The Arab Revolutions that began in 2011 reignited interest in the question of theory and practice, imbuing it with a burning political urgency. In Revolution and Disenchantment, Fadi A. Bardawil redescribes for our present how an earlier generation of revolutionaries, the 1960s Arab New Left, addressed this question. Bardawil excavates the long-lost archive of the Marxist organization Socialist Lebanon and its main theorist, Waddah Charara, who articulated answers in their political practice to fundamental issues confronting revolutionaries worldwide: intellectuals as vectors of revolutionary theory; political organizations as mediators of theory and praxis; and nonemancipatory attachments as impediments to revolutionary practice. Drawing on historical and ethnographic methods and moving beyond familiar reception narratives of Marxist thought in the postcolony, Bardawil engages in "fieldwork in theory" that analyzes how theory seduces intellectuals, cultivates sensibilities, and authorizes political practice. Throughout, Bardawil underscores the resonances and tensions between Arab intellectual traditions and Western critical theory and postcolonial theory, deftly placing intellectuals from those traditions into a much-needed conversation.

A century before the publication of Edward Said’s Orientalism, a passionate discourse emerged in the Ottoman Empire, rebutting politicized Western representations of the East. Until the 1930s, Ottoman and early Turkish Republican intellectuals, well acquainted with the European political and cultural scene and charged with their own ideological agendas, deconstructed tired clichés about “the Orient.” In this book, Zeynep Çelik unearths an important episode in modern Middle Eastern intellectual history and curates a selection of primary texts illustrating the debates.

Sufism is typically thought of as the mystical side of Islam. In recent years, it has been held up as a supposedly peaceful alternative to the spread of forms of Islam associated with violence, an embodiment of democratic ideals of tolerance and pluralism. Are Sufis in fact as otherworldy and apolitical as this stereotype suggests?

Modern Sufis and the State brings together a range of scholars, including anthropologists, historians, and religious-studies specialists, to challenge common assumptions that are made about Sufism today. Focusing on India and Pakistan within a broader global context, this book provides locally grounded accounts of how Sufis in South Asia have engaged in politics from the colonial period to the present. Contributors foreground the effects and unintended consequences of efforts to link Sufism with the spread of democracy and consider what roles scholars and governments have played in the making of twenty-first-century Sufism. They critique the belief that Salafism and Sufism are antithetical, offering nuanced analyses of the diversity, multivalence, and local embeddedness of Sufi political engagements and self-representations in Pakistan and India. Essays question the portrayal of Sufi shrines as sites of toleration, peace, and harmony, exploring cases of tension and conflict. A wide-ranging interdisciplinary collection, Modern Sufis and the State is a timely call to think critically about the role of public discourse in shaping perceptions of Sufism.

This event has been postponed due to the graduate strike an will be rescheduled at a later time. Please check back for more information .

You are cordially invited to join a Columbia University webinar organized by the CSMS, the MEI, and the Department of Art History and Archaeology. This event is part of the series Re-Approaching Architecture of the Lands of Islam.

Please find the information below, as well as web registration.

From the early nineteenth century onwards, the depiction and analysis of mosque architecture by Europeans, central to the Western discovery of the lands of Islam, has been heavily shaped by Orientalist visual constructs. From the exoticized but scenographic environments depicted by Orientalist painters to the later “scientific” and technical drawings produced by archaeologists and historian, the representation of mosque architecture has had deep impact on disciplinary understandings of these buildings. To trace this effect, this paper will analyze the evolution and reproduction of the plans of five historical mosques through their publication in several of the canonical survey texts of Islamic architecture produced by Western scholars in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Through this study of the shifts in each building’s representation, the paper will argue for a relationship between the purification and isolation of the drawing and the translation of the mosque into an idealized and timeless monument. Articulating this connection highlights the gaps of knowledge reproduced with these canonical texts and their impacts on the discipline of architecture.

Maria Frederika Malmström’s new book deals with both the backstage and the frontstage of politics in Egypt, especially since the takeover by the military, through connecting two bodies of theory—affect and materiality. She has tried to bring “large-scale events such as war, public demonstrations, state-sponsored violence and armed repression into the scale of the everyday, the bodily, the sensory and the local” as well as to bring the “backstage and the frontstage of politics into a deep dialogue.” Affect theory shows how sonic vibrations – important stimuli within everyday experience, with a unique power to induce strong affective states – mediate consciousness, including heightened states of attention and anxiety. Sound, or the lack thereof, stimulates, disorients, transforms, and controls. As an object, sound has a particular status. Sound is measurable, which means it is material, if invisible. It permeates our bodies and the environments in which we live. We cannot keep our ears closed or sounds out. Sound also creates environments: revolution takes place largely with the energy generated in chants and songs; church bells and the Islamic call-to-prayer sacralised space. In this talk, Malmström focuses on sound and affective transformative politics in Egypt.

From the early nineteenth century onwards, the depiction and analysis of mosque architecture by Europeans, central to the Western discovery of the lands of Islam, has been heavily shaped by Orientalist visual constructs. From the exoticized but scenographic environments depicted by Orientalist painters to the later “scientific” and technical drawings produced by archaeologists and historian, the representation of mosque architecture has had deep impact on disciplinary understandings of these buildings. To trace this effect, this paper will analyze the evolution and reproduction of the plans of five historical mosques through their publication in several of the canonical survey texts of Islamic architecture produced by Western scholars in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Through this study of the shifts in each building’s representation, the paper will argue for a relationship between the purification and isolation of the drawing and the translation of the mosque into an idealized and timeless monument. Articulating this connection highlights the gaps of knowledge reproduced with these canonical texts and their impacts on the discipline of architecture.

This event will be rescheduled in light of the GSSA strike.

Upcoming Events at the MEI

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MEI Events & Opportunities

Book Talk: Revolution & Disenchantment: Arab Marxism and the Binds of Emancipation with Fadi Bardawil

Date: Tuesday, March 30
Time: 12 PM-1:30 PM

The Arab Revolutions that began in 2011 reignited interest in the question of theory and practice, imbuing it with a burning political urgency. In Revolution and Disenchantment, Fadi A. Bardawil redescribes for our present how an earlier generation of revolutionaries, the 1960s Arab New Left, addressed this question. Bardawil excavates the long-lost archive of the Marxist organization Socialist Lebanon and its main theorist, Waddah Charara, who articulated answers in their political practice to fundamental issues confronting revolutionaries worldwide: intellectuals as vectors of revolutionary theory; political organizations as mediators of theory and praxis; and nonemancipatory attachments as impediments to revolutionary practice. Drawing on historical and ethnographic methods and moving beyond familiar reception narratives of Marxist thought in the postcolony, Bardawil engages in "fieldwork in theory" that analyzes how theory seduces intellectuals, cultivates sensibilities, and authorizes political practice. Throughout, Bardawil underscores the resonances and tensions between Arab intellectual traditions and Western critical theory and postcolonial theory, deftly placing intellectuals from those traditions into a much-needed conversation.

This event was postponed due to the GSSA strike. Check back to our website for rescheduling.

Come chat with us at the Halaqa ʿArabiyya (Arabic Circle). This weekly conversation hour provides extra language practice for Arabic language students in a conversational setting. All Arabic language learners are welcome regardless of level. This is a great way to get extra conversation practice to supplement your classes or to keep up with your Arabic skills even if you're not enrolled in an Arabic class.

Join us for the Persian Conversation Hour! This is a weekly opportunity for Persian-speaking students of all levels to meet and interact with each other, instructors, TAs, and native Persian speakers from the local community. Learners of all levels are welcome so long as they have some proficiency, however basic, in Persian language.

With this book, Rosie Bsheer explores the increasing secularization of the postwar Saudi state and how it manifested in assembling a national archive and reordering urban space in Riyadh and Mecca. The elites' project was rife with ironies: in Riyadh, they employed world-renowned experts to fashion an imagined history, while at the same time in Mecca they were overseeing the obliteration of a thousand-year-old topography and its replacement with commercial megaprojects. Archive Wars shows how the Saudi state's response to the challenges of the Gulf War served to historicize a national space, territorialize a national history, and ultimately refract both through new modes of capital accumulation.

With Author:
Rosie Bsheer, Harvard University

Discussants:
Sherene Seikaly, University of California at Santa Barbara
Fadi Bardawil, Duke University


Moderated by:
Hiba Bou Akar, Columbia University

This event was postponed due to the GSSA strike. Check back to our website for rescheduling.

Come chat with us at the Halaqa ʿArabiyya (Arabic Circle). This weekly conversation hour provides extra language practice for Arabic language students in a conversational setting. All Arabic language learners are welcome regardless of level. This is a great way to get extra conversation practice to supplement your classes or to keep up with your Arabic skills even if you're not enrolled in an Arabic class.

Join us for the Persian Conversation Hour! This is a weekly opportunity for Persian-speaking students of all levels to meet and interact with each other, instructors, TAs, and native Persian speakers from the local community. Learners of all levels are welcome so long as they have some proficiency, however basic, in Persian language.

Come chat with us at the Halaqa ʿArabiyya (Arabic Circle). This weekly conversation hour provides extra language practice for Arabic language students in a conversational setting. All Arabic language learners are welcome regardless of level. This is a great way to get extra conversation practice to supplement your classes or to keep up with your Arabic skills even if you're not enrolled in an Arabic class.

Join us for the Persian Conversation Hour! This is a weekly opportunity for Persian-speaking students of all levels to meet and interact with each other, instructors, TAs, and native Persian speakers from the local community. Learners of all levels are welcome so long as they have some proficiency, however basic, in Persian language.

Come chat with us at the Halaqa ʿArabiyya (Arabic Circle). This weekly conversation hour provides extra language practice for Arabic language students in a conversational setting. All Arabic language learners are welcome regardless of level. This is a great way to get extra conversation practice to supplement your classes or to keep up with your Arabic skills even if you're not enrolled in an Arabic class.

Join us for the Persian Conversation Hour! This is a weekly opportunity for Persian-speaking students of all levels to meet and interact with each other, instructors, TAs, and native Persian speakers from the local community. Learners of all levels are welcome so long as they have some proficiency, however basic, in the Persian language

Adapting to Reach Children in Crisis, Conflict & Pandemic Realities: Sesame Workshop & IRC

Join EPD, MENA Forum, and MEI in conversation with Rene Celaya, Vice President for Humanitarian Programs at Sesame Workshop and Heidi Rosbe, Senior Project Specialist, Ahlan Simsim at IRC, to talk about Sesame Workshop and ICR's experience in making education work for children in conflict during a global pandemic. Ahlan Simsim—“Welcome Sesame” in Arabic—offers a warm and joyful welcome to early learning to young children across the Middle East, especially those affected by displacement.

Join us for the Persian Conversation Hour! This is a weekly opportunity for Persian-speaking students of all levels to meet and interact with each other, instructors, TAs, and native Persian speakers from the local community. Learners of all levels are welcome so long as they have some proficiency, however basic, in the Persian language.

Join us for the Persian Conversation Hour! This is a weekly opportunity for Persian-speaking students of all levels to meet and interact with each other, instructors, TAs, and native Persian speakers from the local community. Learners of all levels are welcome so long as they have some proficiency, however basic, in the Persian language

Come chat with us at the Halaqa ʿArabiyya (Arabic Circle). This weekly conversation hour provides extra language practice for Arabic language students in a conversational setting. All Arabic language learners are welcome regardless of level. This is a great way to get extra conversation practice to supplement your classes or to keep up with your Arabic skills even if you're not enrolled in an Arabic class.