Join us for an evening of music from South Asia, Central Asia, Southwest Asia to North Africa.
Columbia University’s Music Performance Program is proud to present the Arab Music Ensemble Spring 2023 Concert, free and open to the public.
The topic of this talk is an anonymous collection of fourteen tales which survived in a single manuscript, written in Middle Arabic, in Maghribī script.
Providing a longue durée perspective on the Arab uprisings of 2011, Benoît Challand narrates the transformation of citizenship in the Arab Middle East, from a condition of latent citizenship in the colonial and post-independence era to the revolutionary dynamics that stimulated democratic participation in the region in 2011.
How did oil's demiurgic powers mould the social and cultural life of the Middle East in the twentieth century as the largest petroleum producing region in the world?
Join us on April 14th at 7pm for a performance celebrating the classical Iraqi Maqam of Baghdad, Basra and Mosul. Tickets are free and open to the public!
Join us on April 14th from 3-5pm to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Iraq with a panel of distinguished scholars and an exhibition of "The Al-Mutanabbi Street Starts Here" collection.
In conversation with the artist Amitis Motavelli, we will discuss her work in relation to cultural resistance and survival of people living in poverty, conflict, and war.
This conference will reflect on climate-caused displacement in Pakistan, India, and Bangladesh, working through the lens of historical pasts, politics, and embedded presents.
This conference recentres the imperialist question as the principal contradiction to analyses of the 21st century political dynamics in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. It aims to analyze the emerging socio-political formations in the South of the world, and diagnose the status of US-led imperialism globally.
In what genres did scholars explicitly discuss religious experience in the Middle Ages? In the pre-modern world, the cultivation of a religious disposition was traditionally seen as the domain of either ethics or spiritual discipline.
Inspired by true events, FARHA tells the story of a young Palestinian girl whose dream changes from seeking an education in the city to surviving Al-Nakba in Palestine 1948.
This talk reflects on the existential dimension of poetry in contemporary Iran through an historical and ethnographic approach. As a counterpoint to narratives that discuss the relevance of the poetic tradition in Iran by focusing on nationalism, identity or the politics of self-expression, this research foregrounds the idea of poetry as an impersonal mode of existence. Through a description of poetic assemblies and conversations with local poets in the city of Shiraz, the talk argues that this poetic modality, seen relationally, unfolds its power by reconfiguring the latent tension between norms and desire.
Join us for a book talk with Bilal Orfali and Maurice A. Pomerantz moderated by Sara bin Tyeer and Matthew Keegan.
Biographical dictionaries often also served as anthologies with—at times—detailed analyses of poetry and literary aesthetics.
This paper, drawn from parts of two projects in progress (on the social history of the Sogdian language, and on Chorasmian texts in Arabic script), surveys the later stages of the Middle Iranian languages Bactrian, Chorasmian, Parthian, and Middle Persian.
Hybrid Event; In-Person & Zoom Links Above
Buell Hall, East Gallery (Maison Française)
In coming together for this conference, the organizers look forward to providing the space to push the conversation on urbanism and spatial production in Middle Eastern and North African cities, and the theoretical implications of theorizing about the urban from the MENA region.
Middle East Urbanism Beyond Conflict: Current Research and Debates is an interdisciplinary conference that seeks to bring together doctoral students and scholars working on issues related to urbanism and the production of space in Middle Eastern and North African cities (MENA). The MENA region has been mainly discussed and narrated from the perspective of conflict and delineated as a space from which theory cannot emerge. However, the critical research coming out from the Middle East and North African cities is providing cutting-edge scholarly contributions on how urban space is shaped by a range of actors (including political parties, international aid organizations, religious groups, and NGOs) and a variety of geopolitical flows (such as capital, migration, labor, revolutionary solidarities, and militarization) that produce space and the built environment from housing and infrastructure to borders and refugee camps. This emerging body of urban scholarship is contributing to theorizing about the urban condition from the Global South at large.
Recent spasms of activism (throughout the world) and massive governmental reform has brought great change to the GCC countries in the creative sectors in terms of trying to breach the gap of representation, recognition, and value, as well as in terms of openness, conversations, and communications. How have these changes impacted the cultural ecosystem and specifically the art world? With more diverse voices being heard, do we have different exhibitions and curatorial discourses? Does gender impact the input and the outcome? It is interesting to ask these questions, to pause and ponder the process of the systemic change we are experiencing: where are we on its timeline? What have we learned and what still needs to be done? If there is such a thing as ‘gendered perspective on culture,' how does it function and translate into the everyday art world, within the realm of museums, institutions, curators, and artists?
This presentation contextualizes Şahidi and his rhyming lexicon to explore the role played by Persian religious literature (and specifically Mevlevi works) in the history of language use in the Ottoman Empire.
This talk focuses on a debate in 1970s Iran about the poetry of Hafez of Shiraz (ca. 1315-1390) between Ayatollah Morteza Motahari (1919-1979), an influential theorist of the Islamic Republic, and Ahmad Shamlou (1925-2000), a prominent Modernist poet. At the center of the debate is the meaning of ‘erfan in the poetry of Hafez, expanded and contracted to fit the political aspirations of the poet and the ayatollah. I argue that this phase in refashioning of ‘erfan shows the mutually constitutive relationship between “religion” and “literature” and the role they played in shaping the political discourse of pre-revolutionary Iran.
This a closed event; if you wish to be emailed regarding regular updates on MEI's workshops and colloquiums, register using the link above. You may then attend this event.
December 5th, 6:10pm - 7:40pm
Join us every Monday in Knox 208 for our Arabic Conversation Circle. All levels welcome!
