Join us for a book talk with Professor C. Cehyun Arslan on “The Ottoman Canon and the Construction of Arabic and Turkish Literatures” accompanied Professor Yaseen Noorani .
Join us for a book talk with Professor Annette Damayanti Lienau as she discusses her work, "Sacred Language, Vernacular Difference: Global Arabic and Counter-Imperial Literatures," accompanied by Professor Rebecca Johnson.
Join us for a talk with Professor Elisabetta Benigni and Professor Pier Mattia Tommasino as they explore the influence of the Divine Comedy on Arabic literature and intellectual debates in the 19th and 20th centuries.
Join us for this book talk about Naṣr Allāh Munshī's Persian translation/adaptation of Kalīla and Dimna, written in the 1140s CE and dedicated to the Ghaznavid sultan Bahrāmshāh.
Join us on 10/28 for a Book Talk with Professor Suzanne Stetkevych and Dr Huda Fakhreddine.
Join us for the first Adab Colloquium of the semester !
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.
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 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.
Several new poems by sixth-/twelfth-century Christian poets are now available in the recently rediscovered manuscript of Abū al-Maʿālī’s Zīnat al-Dahr. It is now possible to triangulate between ʿImād al-Dīn, who used Abū al-Maʿālī as a source, and several poems by Christians addressed to Muslims and vice versa, to reconstruct the space for Christian participation in late Abbasid literary discourse.
For access to this invitation-only event, click here. You will be added to the Workshops & Colloquiums email list.
Adab manifests itself in various ways in the works of Timurid intellectuals. Asil al-din Wâiz presents it as an all-encompassing concept in 1450s. Nawars works from in 1490s suggest that its main function was ensuring the social cohesion. Finally, Käshifi makes it the basis basis of his political philosophy around the 1500s.
September 30th, 12:10pm - 2:00pm
Join us for the Adab Colloquium to discuss this chapter, which explores what little is known about the Arabic typewriter, bringing the divergent origin-stories together.
April 29
Join us for the Adab Colloquium on Friday, April 29th, 11:10am - 1:00pm, to discuss this chapter which explores how genealogical notions of “Arabness” (‘urūbiyyah) structured the process of identity formation and the articulation of cultural memory in Nasrid Granada.
Join us on April 15th for this Adab colloquium with Presenter Helen Pfeifer, University Lecturer in Early Ottoman History, University of Cambridge and Discussant Tunç Şen, Assistant Professor, Columbia University, on “The Art of Conversation in the Ottoman Empire.”
Join us for this Adab colloquium with Presenter Tunç Şen, Columbia University, and Discussant Nir Shafir, University of California San Diego, on “An Emotional Biography of an Insecure Scholar in the Early Modern Ottoman Hierarchy of Learning”.
Join us for this Adab colloquium with Ziad Dallal, Visiting Assistant Professor of Arabic and The Humanities at Bard College, and discussant Matthew Keegan, Moinian Assistant Professor of Asian & Middle Eastern Cultures at Barnard College of Columbia University, on "Desire and the Diseases of Translation: The Metaphorology of Civilization in Alas, I am Not a European.”
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.”
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.”
Join us for this Adab colloquium with Oludamini Ogunnaike (University of Virginia) and discussant Mamadou Diouf (Columbia University) on "All Muhammad, All the Time: The Poetic, Prophetic Cosmology and Epistemology of Shaykh Ibrahim Niasse in Three Treatises and Poems”
Join us for this Adab colloquium with Cyrus Ali Zargar (University of Central Florida) and discussant Ali Altaf Mian (University of Florida) on "Sober in Mecca, Drunk in Byzantium: Antinomian Space in the Poetry of ʿAṭṭār."
Join us for this Adab colloquium with Presenter Domenico Ingenito (UCLA) and Discussant Sayeh Meisami (University of Dayton) on Beholding Beauty: Saʿdi of Shiraz and the Aesthetics of Desire in Medieval Persian Poetry (Brill, 2020)
Join us for the February Adab Colloquium with Presenter Maryam Wasif Khan (LUMS University, Lahore) and Discussant Jennifer Dubrow (University of Washington, Seattle) on the Martyr/Mujahid: Muslim Origins and the Modern Urdu Novel.
Join us for the first Adab Colloquium of 2021. With Presenter Murat Umut Inan, (Social Sciences University, Ankara) and Discussant Oscar Aguirre-Mandujano, (University of Pennsylvania) on the Süruri’s Bahrü’l-Ma‘arif: Conceptions and Discussions of Poetry in the Early Modern Ottoman World.
Join us for the Adab Colloquium with Presenter Hany Rashwan, University of Birmingham and Discussant Stefan Sperl, School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS)
Join us for the Adab Colloquium with Presenter Sara Hakeem Grewal (MacEwan University) and Discussant Purnima Dhavan (University of Washington).
Join us October 28th to hear Lara Harb discuss her new book, Arabic Poetics: Aesthetic Experience in Classical Arabic Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020). Focusing on Chapter One of her book, entitled “Wonder: A New Paradigm,”
The Imprint of the Era in the Adab of the Times: Circulation and the Persianate at Empire’s End with Presenter Mana Kia, Columbia University and Discussant Sunil Sharma, Boston University. In this Adab Colloquium, Dr Mana Kia will discuss her paper examining the relation between material circulation of texts, commemorations of collectives, and transregional social imaginaries at the end of Persianate empires between Iran and India.
