2022
Conversations in Modern Islamic Philosophy with Safet Bektovic
Join us for the last CIMS seminar of fall 2022 with Safet Bektovic on Islamic Philosophy.
Time and place: Dec. 8, 2022 12:15 PM – 1:30 PM, Eilert Sundts hus, A-blokka aud. 4
Islamic philosophy has seen a rebirth during the second half of the 20th century, and it became an important part of the intellectual discourse and cultural renaissance in a broad sense. Among the main issues that Muslim philosophers deal with are the concept of knowledge, relationship between philosophy and other disciplines, and relationship between tradition and modernity. There are significantly distinct solution approaches observed in respect of these problems from the perspectives of traditionalism, modern rationalism, historicity, hermeneutics, deconstruction, etc. Several different positions regarding the role and significance of philosophy can be identified. This presentation will shed light on some of these positions by using examples of some distinguished thinkers.
Safet Bektovic (b. 1966) is Associate Professor of Islamic Studies at the Faculty of Theology, University of Oslo. He is teaching Islamic philosophy and theology, Sufism, Social ethics and aesthetics, and his research area includes philosophy of religion, Søren Kierkegaard, Interreligious theology, Christian-Muslim dialogue, and Islam in Europe. Among his publications are Islamisk filosofi (2012) and Kulturmøder og religion (2004). He has published a large number of articles in different publications and Journals.
Organizer
Centre for Islamic and Middle East Studies
Book Talk: The Hundred Years' War on Palestine
Join us for a book talk with Rashid Khalidi.
Time and place: Dec. 2, 2022 2:15 PM – 3:30 PM, On Zoom
The past century for the Palestinians has been one of denial: denial of statehood, denial of history, and denial of their very existence. In The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917-2017 historian Rashid Khalidi offers an original and personal view of how the Palestinian people confronted a colonial-cum-national project that has progressively taken over their homeland, via an ongoing multi-stage war, supported and often initiated by the great powers.
Rashid Khalidi is Edward Said Professor of Arab Studies at Columbia University. He is co-editor of the Journal of Palestine Studies and is the author of eight books, most recently The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine: A History of Settler-Colonialism and Resistance, 1917-2017, and has co-edited three books.
A Conversation on Sextarianism: Sovereignty, Secularism, and the State in Lebanon
Join us for a fascinating book talk with Maya Mikdashi.
Time and place: Nov. 25, 2022 2:15 PM – 3:30 PM, On Zoom
The Lebanese state is structured through religious freedom and secular power sharing across sectarian groups. Every sect has specific laws that govern kinship matters like marriage or inheritance. Together with criminal and civil laws, these laws regulate and produce political difference. But whether women or men, Muslims or Christians, queer or straight, all people in Lebanon have one thing in common—they are biopolitical subjects forged through bureaucratic, ideological, and legal techniques of the state.
With this book, Maya Mikdashi offers a new way to understand state power, theorizing how sex, sexuality, and sect shape and are shaped by law, secularism, and sovereignty. Drawing on court archives, public records, and ethnography of the Court of Cassation, the highest civil court in Lebanon, Mikdashi shows how political difference is entangled with religious, secular, and sexual difference. She presents state power as inevitably contingent, like the practices of everyday life it engenders, focusing on the regulation of religious conversion, the curation of legal archives, state and parastatal violence, and secular activism. Sextarianism locates state power in the experiences, transitions, uprisings, and violence that people in the Middle East continue to live.
Maya Mikdashi is an Associate Professor in the Department of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Rutgers University. Her first book Sextarianism: Sovereignty, Secularism and the State in Lebanon (SUP, 2022) theorizes the relationships between sexual difference and political difference, the religious and the secular, and law, bureaucracy, and biopower. Her work is grounded in ethnographic and archival research, and has been translated into Arabic, Turkish, French, Spanish and German.
Maya has been published in several peer reviewed journals, including the International Journal of Middle East Studies, Gay and Lesbian Quarterly, Transgender Studies Quarterly, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, the Journal of Palestine Studies, and the American Indian Culture and Research Journal. She has also been published in peer reviewed edited volumes and in public facing venues. She is a co-founding editor of Jadaliyya.
Women's Rights in Post-Taliban Afghanistan - 1 Year after the Takeover
Join us for a panel discussion on women's rights after the Taliban takeover with Hasina Shirzad and May Homira Rezai.
Time and place: Nov. 18, 2022 12:15 PM – 1:30 PM, Scene HumSam in Georg Sverdrups hus
CIMS proudly convenes a special panel discussion featuring Dr. Homira May Rezai and Hasina Shirzad, two Afghan women’s rights activists who will discuss the women's rights situation in Afghanistan since the Taliban's seizing of power in August 2021. Dr. Rezai is a tireless advocate for the Hazara people, and Shirzad is a journalist, researcher, and adviser who has written on the Afghan diaspora and media landscape.
Dr. Homira Rezai is the Chair of Hazara Committee in the UK (HCUK), a non-profit organization working for freedom of religious belief. She is passionate about women’s and minority rights and has been a vocal advocate in the past years. Through her work at HCUK, she has written several reports and parliamentary briefs on the Hazaras providing accurate information what is really happening on the ground. Rezai is a board member of World Hazara Council and was one of the organisers who co-led the #StopHazaraGenocide campaign which increased the conversation on the persecution of Hazaras in Afghanistan around the world. Rezai holds a PhD in medical research and is the Executive Operations Officer at MirZyme Therapeutics, an innovative pharmaceutical company developing diagnostics and therapeutics for pregnancy complications such as preeclampsia.
Hasina Shirzad is currently an adviser at Nansen Fredssenter. Previously, she has worked as an adviser at OsloMet - the metropolitan university and with communications and diplomacy at the Afghan embassy in Norway. Hasina is involved in the Afghan diaspora, and she is active in the Norwegian media in matters related to minorities and freedom of expression. She has a bachelor's degree in journalism from Kabul University and a master's degree in journalism from OsloMet. She wrote a master's thesis on identity in exile.
Hasina has written academic articles in the area of freedom of expression and is active in women's rights topics; the article published in the Guardian, "what it means to be truly independent women", was an interesting piece which attracted much attention in Norway.
Organizer
Centre for Islamic and Middle East Studies and Humanities and Social Sciences Library in Georg Sverdrups hus
Defeated or Preparing a Comeback? Jihadist Movements in the MENA region
Join us for a morning seminar with Brynjar Lia on an overview of the current situation of jihadist movements today and what the strengths and weakness indicators of previous insurgencies mean for the future of jihadism.
Time and place: Nov. 11, 2022 10:15 AM – 11:30 AM, Eilert Sundts hus, A-blokka Auditorium 2
Since the collapse of the Islamic State’s Caliphate in 2017-19, a series of setbacks has raised serious questions about the future of jihadist movements in the Middle East and North Africa. Not only have the jihadists suffered devastating military defeats and the loss of nearly all its territorial proto-states and sanctuaries in the region, but also massive leadership losses have seemingly left previously feared jihadist networks in disarray. After having been perhaps the major object of security attention in global threat perceptions, jihadists no longer enjoy the intense media spotlight of the early 9/11 era.
This lecture seeks to offer an overview of what we know about the current status of jihadist movements in the MENA region, focusing on the remaining al-Qaida branches and Islamic State provinces in the region. By linking empirical observations to specific strength/weakness indicators and by exploring patterns of ebbs and flows in previous jihadist insurgencies, we will try to make sense of what we are seeing today and what this means for the future of jihadism.
Dr. Brynjar Lia is a professor of Middle East Studies at the Department of Culture Studies and Oriental Languages at the University of Oslo. He has published extensively on Islamist and jihadist movements over the past two decades and is the author of several books on these topics.
Syrian War Literature: A Conversation with Khaled Khalifa on its Significance
Join us for a for a digital book talk with Khaled Khalifa.
Time and place: Nov. 4, 2022 2:15 PM – 3:30 PM, On Zoom
DEATH IS HARD WORK. What does that even mean? These words resonate in the lives of those deprived of the most fundamental rights, such as democracy and a decent life. Khaled Khalifa, the writer who is considered one of the greatest chroniclers of Syria's ongoing and catastrophic civil war, refused to leave his country. Despite the scourge of war that befell him, he kept escaping his brutal reality into the world of writing in order to be a bearer of hope amid pain and suffering.
During this seminar, Khalifa will delve into two of his notable war literature novels, "Praise of Hate" and "Death is hard work." He will discuss the main characters in his stories to show how Khaled conveys political and religious oppression during the time of the conflict between the Muslim Brotherhood and the ruling authority in the early 1980s. Khalifa will also highlight women's role in his novels depicting the harsh realities of war.
Khaled Khalifa is a Syrian novelist and screenwriter (born in Aleppo, 1964). His works were translated to many different languages, and Norwegian is one of them. He wrote 6 novels: " ḥāris al-Khadīˁa" (The Guard of Deception) 1993, dafātir al-qurbāṭ (The Gypsies' Notebooks) 2000, "madīḥ al-karāhiyya" (In Praise of Hatred) 2006 which was a finalist for the International Prize for Arabic Fiction (IPAF), "lā sakākīna fī maṭābikh hadhihi al-madīna" (No Knives in the Kitchens of This City) 2013, which was also shortlisted for the IPAF and won the Naguib Mahfouz Medal for Literature in 2013, "al-mawt ˁamal shāq" (Death Is Hard Work) 2016 which was named a finalist for the 2019 National Book Award for Translated Literature, "Lam yusalli ˁalayhum ʾaḥad" ("No-one Prayed Over Their Graves") 2019 which was longlisted for the IPAF. Also, the writer has multiple TV series such as "Sīrat āl -l-Jalāli" (the life of El Jalali family) 1999, and "Hudū ' nisbi" (Relative Serenity) 2009.
Space in Modern Egyptian Fiction
In this seminar, Yasmine Ramadan explores the generational shift along the lines of rural, urban, and exilic space in Modern Egyptian Fiction.
Time and place: Oct. 28, 2022 1:15 PM – 2:30 PM, On Zoom
In 1960s Egypt a group of writers exploded onto the literary scene, transforming the aesthetic landscape. Space in Modern Egyptian Fiction argues that this literary generation presents a marked shift in the representation of rural, urban, and exilic space, reflecting a disappointment in the project of the postcolonial nation-state in post-revolutionary Egypt. If the countryside ceased to be the idealized space of the nation, neither the Cairene metropolis nor the city of Alexandria took its place. Moreover, the transgression of borders to an exilic space served to unsettle categories of national and regional belonging.
In this talk, Yasmine Ramadan describes the emergence and establishment of this significant literary generation, while also providing examples of the spatial transformations evidenced in their work. The disappearance of an idealized nation in the Egyptian novel reveals a great deal about the social, economic, political, and aesthetic changes during a pivotal moment in Egypt’s contemporary history.
Yasmine Ramadan is an Associate Professor of Arabic and the Director of the Arabic Program at the University of Iowa. Her research and teaching centers on cultural production from the MENA region, particularly on the intersection between nationalism, artistic production, space, and resistance in the contemporary period. Yasmine’s first book Space in Modern Egyptian Fiction (EUP, 2019) explores the spatial representations in the fiction of the sixties generation in Egypt. She has been published in the Journal of Arabic Literature, Alif: Journal of Comparative Poetics, and Arab Studies Journal.
Religious and political authority among the Ibadis of Sahara: Not Sunni, not Arab, but Algerian?
A Thursday seminar with Knut Vikør on how the Berber Ibadi community navigated challenges related to French colonialism, religious and worldly authorities in the twentieth century.
Time and place: Oct. 27, 2022 12:15 PM – 1:30 PM, P. A. Munchs hus, rom 7
In the Sahara, the oasis of Mzab is the home of a small minority of Berber-speaking Muslims, the Ibadis. Long time isolated, they were for the first time integrated into what became “Algeria” with French colonialism. This raised the challenge for the religious and worldly authorities of the community: Should they resist integration into the new larger entity, or should they join in a wider, national struggle for Islamic renewal? How should they relate to the foreign, French authorities? This seminar will place the Mzab in Ibadi history, and trace how the community responded to these challenges during the twentieth century.
Knut S. Vikør recently retired from the professorship in Middle East history at the University of Bergen. He has published on Sufism in nineteenth-century North Africa, on the history of Islamic law, and on various topics in Saharan and West Africa Muslim history, as well as generally on the Middle East.
Book launch of Global Crossroads: The Changing Gulf Monarchies
Welcome to a book launch of Global Crossroads: The Changing Gulf Monarchies. The authors explore the change in the Gulf monarchies' more global prominence and how it affects internal and external conditions such as identity and human rights, political stability, and the environment and climate.
Time and place: Oct. 14, 2022 12:15 PM – 1:30 PM, Scene HumSam in Georg Sverdrups hus
In recent years, the Gulf monarchies, the oil and gas exporting monarchies on the Arabian Peninsula, have increasingly dominated the international news scene. Until recently, the Gulf monarchies were almost exclusively mentioned in connection with energy production or the annual Muslim pilgrimage, but today they are recognized by an increasing number of people as central players in both the regional and global game of political and financial power.
The Gulf monarchies have financial muscle and are now investing heavily in new arenas within banking and finance, trade, education and research, tourism, travel, and sport. They host many millions of people from all over the world, and both extremely rich and very many poor people seek the Gulf to improve their lives. The Gulf monarchies have developed into what can be called global crossroads: They demand to be seen and recognized, and they are - also in far more ways than they would like.
In this seminar we try to understand what is happening; what lies behind this change and what consequences it has both internally in the Gulf monarchies and externally in the regional political game. These countries have undergone enormous changes in the space of a few years, which challenges this creates in relation to national and religious identity, human rights, political stability and, not least, climate and environment.
Discussants:
Berit Thorbjørnsrud, professor emerita Middle Eastern Studies
Jon Nordenson, advisor for the Middle East at Landinfo
Bjørn Olav Utvik, professor in Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Oslo
Pınar Tank, senior researcher at the Peace Research Institute
NB. This seminar will be held in Norwegian.
Organizer
Centre for Islamic and Middle East Studies and Humanities and Social Sciences Library in Georg Sverdrups hus
The Graves of Others: Memory and Questions of Identity in Islamic Java
A morning seminar with Verena Hanna Meyer.
Time and place: Sep. 30, 2022 10:15 AM – 11:30 AM, P. A. Munchs hus, rom 4
Ahmad Dahlan (d. 1923) was the founder of Muhammadiyah, a modernist Islamic mass organization in Indonesia. Paradoxically, his grave is a popular destination for young traditionalists who come there to pray, even as members of Muhammadiyah do not, because modernists, including reportedly Ahmad Dahlan himself, have rejected such visitations as superfluous or even un-Islamic. The distinction between “traditionalists” and “modernists” has pervaded identity politics throughout the Muslim world. Yet, for us as scholars and publics, the complex processes at play in erecting or contesting this distinction often remain invisible. Drawing on ethnographic field research in the central Javanese city of Yogyakarta, traditional Javanese literature, and classical Arabic sources, Verena Meyer argues that traditionalists and modernists have very different understandings of the relationship between the living and the dead, and, consequently, between memory and identity. By calling into question conventional parameters of memory and its agency, her traditionalist interlocutors invite a thorough rethinking of the meaning of identity and ideological belonging.
Verena Meyer received her Ph.D. from Columbia University’s Department of Religion and is now a Postdoctoral Fellow at MF Norwegian School of Theology, Religion and Society. Trained in Islamic Studies and specializing in Islam in the Malay-Indonesian world, her research has focused on the construction of self-consciously pious Islamic identities in Indonesia and their situatedness in transnational intellectual networks, popular culture, and the politics of knowledge of postcolonial Indonesia. In addition to her ethnographic work on contemporary Islam, she has also explored the reception of Arabic philosophical traditions in classical Malay and Javanese literature.
Whistleblowing within Arabic Democratic Transition: A Tunisian Case Study from 2011-2022
A digital Friday seminar with Dr. Khaoula Ben Mansour
Time and place: Sep. 16, 2022 12:15 PM – 1:30 PM, Zoom
What is whistleblowing? How has this internal ethical mechanism impacted Tunisian institutions? Edward Snowden is this decade's most heroic and iconic whistleblower. His fight for freedom of speech and digital data privacy in the US emphasizes how difficult it is to implement internal ethical mechanisms within organizations. The Arabic word thawra (revolution) impacts political and institutional freedom of speech especially by denouncing non-ethical acts, such as corruption and money laundering.
In this seminar, Dr. Mansour draws upon her research and experience to discuss designing and implementing anti-corruption mechanisms and whistleblowing in Tunisia's public sector. She highlights four public sectors after the "Arab Spring Revolution" of January 2011 to shed light on their shared mission of enhancing whistleblowing managerial mechanisms and detecting fraud. She also discusses the Tunisian Legal Evolution for protecting whistleblowers and how the country's political transition impacts the efficiency of freedom of speech within public and private sectors.
Khaoula Ben Mansour is a Management Assistant Professor at the Tunisian University of Economic and Management Sciences, with a 15-year career in the social sciences research field. She holds a PhD in Management Sciences from Paris Saclay University in France and the High Management Institute of Tunis (ESC Tunis) in Tunisia. Dr. Ben Mansour is also a Governance Consultant within Tunisian ONG (2022) and Tunisian UNDP from 2020.
Jews, Palestine, and Zionism in the Persian Gulf 1890-1948
Join us for a Thursday seminar with Eirik Kvindesland on connections between Palestine and the Persian Gulf.
Time and place: Sep. 8, 2022 12:15 PM – 1:30 PM, Eilert Sundts hus, A-blokka aud. 6
Jews, Palestine, and the Persian Gulf rarely meet in Middle Eastern studies. Despite a long Jewish history in the region, and today the growing importance of Gulf countries to the Palestine/Israel-conflict, hardly anything is known about Gulf Jews and how these two regions relate to each other. Drawing on his ongoing PhD research, in this lecture Eirik Kvindesland takes the perspective of Jewish history to explore transnational connections between Palestine and the Gulf. The result is a far-reaching narrative that touches on Jewish community-building, the connective role of British imperialism, and finally the Zionist movements’ overtures to the shaykhs and shahs of the Persian Gulf. Drawing on archives and literature in Arabic, Hebrew, Persian, French, and English, this lecture takes Jewish history as a transnational lens through which to understand both modern Palestine and the Gulf. This research helps strengthen our understanding of the Zionist movement, the attitudes of Iran, and the Arab Gulf states towards it and may contribute some new perspectives on the making of the modern Middle East.
Eirik Kvindesland is a PhD-candidate in History at St. Antony’s College, University of Oxford. His research interests include Iranian history, Jewish history in the modern Middle East, as well as histories of oil and empire. An eternal language student, he has lived and worked in cities like Jerusalem, Nablus, Mashhad and Riyadh. He occasionally tweets at @eirkvi.
The discussion will be led by Brynjar Lia, professor in Middle East studies at the University of Oslo.
Disruptive Journalism: Media and Politics in Lebanon During the 2019 Uprising
A seminar with Jacob Høigilt and Kjetil Selvik.
Time and place: May 20, 2022 12:15 PM – 1:30 PM, Scene HumSam
As in many countries around the world, Lebanese elites control and manipulate the media to serve their own purposes. TV channels, newspapers and famous, individual journalists are regarded as speaking for this or that political leader, as pawns in the internal conflicts between the decision-makers. However, during the popular uprisings in 2019 many journalists and some media channels broke with this system and sided with the people against the politicians as a whole. In this lecture, we investigate why this happened and what it tells us about the relations between politics and media in the contemporary Middle East.
Speakers:
Jacob Høigilt is a Professor in Middle East Studies at IKOS, University of Oslo. He holds a PhD in Arabic and Islamic Studies from the University of Oslo.
Kjetil Selvik is a Research Professor in the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs’ Research Group on Peace, Conflict and Development.
BOOK TALK: A History of Palestinian Islamic Jihad
A Thursday seminar with Erik Skare on his book A History of Palestinian Islamic Jihad.
Time and place: May 12, 2022 12:15 PM – 1:30 PM, Eilert Sundts hus aud. 5
Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) is one of the most important yet least understood Palestinian armed factions, both in terms of its history and ideology. Labelled a terrorist organization by the US and the EU, it has grown to become the second largest armed movement in the Gaza Strip and the third largest in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. Erik Skare discusses how he traces the history of PIJ from its origins in the early 1980s to today, using a wealth of primary sources. In this book talk, he highlights how the group was established, how it has developed in theory and practice, and how it understands religion and politics. He seeks to answer the key question of why the PIJ still exist despite the presence of its more powerful sister movement Hamas. This award-winning book fills an important empirical gap in the literature on Palestinian Islamism.
Erik Skare is a researcher at the University of Oslo and an associate researcher at Sciences Po. He is the author of A History of Palestinian Islamic Jihad (Cambridge University Press, 2021), for which he was awarded the Palestine Book Award, and Palestinian Islamic Jihad: Islamist Writings on Resistance and Religion (I.B. Tauris, 2021).
Organizer
Centre for Islamic and Middle East Studies
Anniken Huitfeldt: Norge i Midtøsten
Hvilken rolle spiller Norge i Midtøsten? Velkommen til tale ved utenriksminister Anniken Huitfeldt.
Time and place: May 6, 2022 12:15 PM – 1:15 PM, Sophus Bugge aud. 1
Senter for islam- og midtøstenstudier er stolte av å invitere til et unikt arrangement med den norske utenriksministeren. Fredag 6. mai holder Anniken Huitfeldt en tale på Universitetet i Oslo. Temaet vil være: Norge i Midtøsten.
Utenriksministeren har ansvar for norsk utenrikspolitikk, arbeidet med å fremme Norges interesser internasjonalt og utenrikstjenestens oppgaver. Utenrikstjenesten omfatter 100 utenriksstasjoner - ambassader, faste delegasjoner og generalkonsulater.
Utenriksministerens innlegg vil være på norsk.
Arrangementet er gratis og åpent for alle. Dørene åpner 11:45. Det bes om at man er presis til arrangementet.
Organizer
Senter for Islam- og Midtøstenstudier and Utenriksdepartementet
Global Iran? Beyond Borders and Binaries
A Thursday seminar with professor Arang Keshavarzian.
Time and place: Apr. 28, 2022 2:15 PM – 3:30 PM, Zoom
Particularities and exceptionalism are often foregrounded in discussions of Iran in the twentieth century. Implicit, and sometimes quite explicit, is the notion that Iranian society and politics are detached and out of step with international and regional processes. Whether it is Shiism, the Islamic Revolution, international sanctions, or Iranian nationalism, much attention has been on what separates and differentiates Iran from elsewhere and binds it into a single undifferentiated whole. In this talk, he will explore recent scholarship that has engaged with global history, critical literatures on globalization, and histories of capitalism to re-narrate Iranian politics as intimately participating in “the global” and shaping and being shaped by processes operating across multiple geographic scales — local, national, regional, and international.
Arang Keshavarzian is Associate Professor of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies at New York University. He is the author of Bazaar and State in Iran as well as several essays in academic journals and edited volumes on such topics as ulama-state relations, political economy of commerce and urbanism, and political contestation in postrevolutionary Iran. His most recent publication is a 2021 co-edited volume with Ali Mirsepassi titled Global 1979: Geographies and Histories of the Iranian Revolution (Cambridge University Press). Keshavarzian is currently completing a book on region-making in and out of the Persian Gulf in the past two centuries. He has been on the editorial committee for MERIP or Middle East Report at various junctures in the past two decades.
Arabic Science Fiction and Planetary Aesthetics: A Historical Approach to Genre
Merve Tabur explores the history of genre discussions in Arabic through the work of Egyptian pioneer Tawfīq al-Ḥakīm.
Time and place: Apr. 21, 2022 12:15 PM – 1:30 PM, Scene HumSam
The growing number of Arabic speculative fiction texts in the past decade has stimulated critical discussions on the possibilities and limits of defining a distinct Arabic science fiction genre. This lecture delves into the history of genre discussions in Arabic by examining how a pioneer of Egyptian science fiction, Tawfīq al-Ḥakīm (1898-1987), theorizes speculative fiction through his formulation of an “intellectual popular non-realism” and a planetary aesthetic. Al-Ḥakīm is particularly interested in the creation and globalization of hybrid literary genres that put Arabic folk tales, myths, and oral storytelling traditions in conversation with European literary trends. In one such hybrid text, "The Poet on the Moon," he merges classical science fiction tropes of space travel and colonization with Sufi allegory to criticize colonialism’s global legacies of environmental and epistemological violence. Putting al-Ḥakīm's fictional and nonfictional works into dialogue, this lecture examines how al-Ḥakīm employs speculative storytelling to address questions of self-representation in the postcolonial context.
Speaker:
Merve Tabur is a postdoctoral research fellow affiliated with the CoFutures project at the University of Oslo. She is a scholar of comparative literature and environmental humanities whose research examines speculative fiction narratives on climate change and environmental destruction from the Middle East and its Anglophone diasporas. She is currently working on a project that aims to conceptualize Middle Eastern futurisms from a comparative perspective. Merve is a co-creator of the "Unraveling the Anthropocene: Race, Environment, and Pandemic" podcast series, run by the Liberal Arts Collective at Penn State. She is also a translator of academic books and articles on topics such as gender politics, cultural history, and literary theory.
Discussant:
Teresa Pepe is Associate Professor in Arabic Studies at the University of Oslo. Her research interests span across Arabic literature, media studies, popular culture, sociolinguistics. She is the author of the book Blogging from Egypt: Digital Literature, 2005-2016 (Edinburgh: EUP, 2019) that explores blogs as new forms of literature emerging in Egypt during the rise of political protest of the Arab Spring. She is also the co-editor of the volume Arabic Literature in the Posthuman Age (with S. Guth, Harassowitz Verlag 2019) that examines the use of dystopia, necropolitics, monsters and satire in Arabic literature today. In 2021, she received a MECAM Fellowship (Merian Centre for Advanced Studies in the Maghreb) to join the Research Project "Imagining the Future: Dealing with Disparities"in the thematic cluster "Aesthetics and Politics". She has published several peer-reviewed articles in the Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication, Oriente Moderno, Journal of Arabic and Islamic Studies, and LEA- Lingue e Letterature d’Oriente e d’Occidente.
Organizer
Centre for Islamic and Middle East Studies and Humanities and Social Sciences Library
The Arabian Nights in Contemporary World Cultures: Global Commodification, Translation, and the Culture Industry
A Friday seminar with Professor Muhsin al-Musawi.
Time: Apr. 8, 2022 2:15 PM – 3:30 PM
This seminar will be on Zoom.
The stories in the Thousand and One Nights, or the Arabian Nights, are familiar to many of us: from the tales of Aladdin, Sinbad the Sailor, Ali Baba and his forty thieves, to the framing story of Scheherazade telling these stories to her homicidal husband, Shahrayar. This book offers a rich and wide-ranging analysis of the power of this collection of tales that penetrates so many cultures and appeals to such a variety of predilections and tastes. It also explores areas that were left untouched, like the decolonization of the Arabian Nights, and its archaeologies. Unique in its excavation into inroads of perception and reception, Muhsin J. al-Musawi's book unearths means of connection with common publics and learned societies. Al-Musawi shows, as never before, how the Arabian Nights has been translated, appropriated, and authenticated or abused over time, and how its reach is so expansive as to draw the attention of poets, painters, illustrators, translators, editors, musicians, political scientists like Leo Strauss, and novelists like Michel Butor, James Joyce and Marcel Proust amongst others. Making use of documentaries, films, paintings, novels and novellas, poetry, digital forums and political jargon, this book offers nuanced understanding of the perennial charm and power of this collection.
Speaker:
Muhsin Al-Musawi is Professor of classical and modern Arabic literature, comparative and cultural studies at Columbia University in New York. A renowned scholar and literary critic, he has research interests that span several periods and genres. He has taught at a number of universities in the Arab region. Al-Musawi is the author of more than 30 books (including 6 novels) and over sixty scholarly articles. He is also the editor of the Journal of Arabic Literature, the foremost academic journal in the field of Arabic literature, issued by Brill Academic Publishers. He has served as an academic consultant for numerous academic institutions in the US and abroad. Professor Al-Musawi is the recipient of numerous awards and honors, including the highly prestigious 2002 Owais Award in Literary Criticism, the 2018 Kuwait Prize in Arabic Language and Literature, and King Faisal International Prize in Arabic Literature in English ( 2022).
Discussant:
Rana Issa enjoys exploring the histories, theories and practices of translation. Her passion is to find the balancing point between public humanities, activist engagements and academic curiosity. She writes in a variety of genres and languages and has occupied leadership roles in various aspects of cultural production. She was the previous editor of Arabic and Translation in Rusted Radishes and is the artistic director of Masahat.no. She makes a living as a member of the faculty at the American University of Beirut and a Sr. Researcher at the University of Oslo. She is the recipient of the National Endowment for the Arts award with Suneela Mubayi for her ongoing translation of 19th century author, Ahmad Faris al-Shidyaq’s travelogue to Europe, Tickets to Malta, London and Paris by the Remarkable Ahmad Fares. Her book The Modern Arabic Bible is forthcoming in the fall of 2022 with Edinburgh University Press.
Book Launch: The Islamic Movement in Israel
A Friday seminar with Dr. Tilde Rosmer on her book The Islamic Movement in Israel.
Time and place: Apr. 1, 2022 10:15 AM – 11:30 AM, P. A. Munchs hus seminarrom 11
Since its establishment in the late 1970s, Israel’s Islamic Movement has grown from a small religious revivalist organization focused on strengthening the faith of Muslim Palestinian citizens of Israel to a countrywide sociopolitical movement with representation in the Israeli legislature. But how did it get here? How does it differ from other Islamic movements in the region? And why does its membership continue to grow?
Tilde Rosmer examines these issues in The Islamic Movement in Israel as she tells the story of the movement, its identity, and its activities. Using interviews with movement leaders and activists, their documents, and media reports from Israel and beyond, she traces the movement’s history from its early days to its 1996 split over the issue of its relationship to the state. She then explores how the two factions have functioned since, revealing that while leaders of the two branches have pursued different approaches to the state, until the outlawing of the Northern branch in 2015, both remained connected and dedicated to providing needed social, education, and health services in Israel’s Palestinian towns and village. This first book in English on this group, The Islamic Movement in Israel is a timely study about how an Islamist movement operates within the unique circumstances of the Jewish state.
Tilde Rosmer is an assistant professor in the College of Humanities and Social Sciences at Zayed University in the United Arab Emirates.
Bjørn Olav Utvik is a professor in Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Oslo.
Brynjar Lia is a professor in Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Oslo.
Organizer
Centre for Islamic and Middle East Studies
Navigating War, Migration and the Taliban – Sufi Survival Strategies in Afghanistan
A seminar with Dr. Annika Schmeding
Time and place: Mar. 25, 2022 2:15 PM – 3:30 PM, Zoom
Contemporary analysts suggest that Sufism is on the decline in Afghanistan, another victim of the ideological hard-lining that accompanies societies in conflict. On the contrary, Schmeding's ethnographic research shows that Sufi communities have not only survived but flourished, in large part because of their leaders' adaptive strategies during periods of instability and persecution. This talk offers an ethnographically-embedded view of various navigational strategies employed by Sufi leaders in Afghanistan over the past four decades, adaptations that have not only allowed Sufi thought and practice to continue but have affected the very concept of what it means to be a Sufi leader in Afghanistan.
Dr. Annika Schmeding is a post-doctoral junior fellow at Harvard’s Society of Fellows. She has worked and researched in Afghanistan repeatedly for the last decade. Her research explores belonging and community formation in (post) conflict settings as well as notions of representation and leadership among minority groups.
Organizer
Centre for Islamic and Middle East Studies
A Celebration of International Nowruz Day
Time and place: Mar. 24, 2022 4:00 PM – 6:00 PM, Union371
For more than 300 million people around the globe, Nowruz marks the first day of spring, or the vernal equinox, when the Sun appears to cross the celestial equator northward. According to the United Nations, Nowruz, which literally means “new day” in Persian, “is an ancestral festivity marking the first day of spring and the renewal of nature. It promotes values of peace and solidarity between generations and within families as well as reconciliation and neighborliness, thus contributing to cultural diversity and friendship among peoples and different communities.”
The Center for Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies (CIMS) marks this momentous holiday with a special public event on Thursday, March 24th. CIMS will host four presenters from the worlds of comedy, music, dance, and poetry who are inspired by its cultural and literary traditions! All are welcome!
Presenters:
Musician Ali Aalaei, Artist and performer Hedieh Azma; Storyteller Amin Senatorzade, Artist and Musician Jan Kabir; Comedian Mahmud Farjami.
Organizer
Centre for Islamic and Middle East Studies
In a Forest of Humans: 'The Urban,’ 'The Global,’ and Studying 1970s Revolutionary Socialism in Iran
A Thursday seminar with Dr. Rasmus Christian Elling.
Time and place: Mar. 17, 2022 1:15 PM – 2:30 PM, University of Oslo
Historical analyses tend to agree that the Iranian Revolution was an overwhelmingly ‘urban’ revolution. But how did the revolutionaries themselves see ‘the urban’, i.e. the material, social and ideological phenomena entangled with the processes of urbanization? In this talk, Dr. Elling presents recent research on a key socialist revolutionary guerilla organization in 1970s Iran and the broader questions of method and theory this research highlights.
Dr. Rasmus Christian Elling is an Associate Professor at the Department for Cross-Cultural and Regional Studies, University of Copenhagen, where he teaches Middle East Studies as well as Global Urban Studies. His work focuses on the cultural, social and political life (and, occasionally, death) of cities – and the historical and ethnographic focus of his work is on modern Iran in particular.
Organizer
Centre for Islamic and Middle East Studies
Women in Place: The Politics of Gender Segregation in Iran
A Thursday seminar with Dr. Nazanin Shahrokni
Time and place: Mar. 10, 2022 2:15 PM – 3:30 PM, Zoom
While much has been written about the impact of the 1979 Islamic revolution on life in Iran, discussions about the everyday life of Iranian women have been glaringly missing. Through a retelling of the past four decades of the state's gender segregation policies, Dr. Shahrokni throws into sharp relief the ways in which the state strives to constantly regulate and contain women’s bodies and movements within the boundaries of the “proper” but simultaneously invests in and claims credit for their expanded access to public spaces. In this lecture, she takes us onto gender-segregated buses, inside women-only parks, and outside men-only sports stadiums, and pushes us to contemplate the changing place of women in a social order shaped by capitalism, state-sanctioned Islamism, and debates about women’s rights. The Islamic character of the state, she demonstrates, has had to coexist, fuse, and compete with technocratic imperatives, pragmatic considerations regarding the viability of the state, international influences, and global trends.
Image may contain: Person, Clothing, Forehead, Lip, Chin.
Nazanin Shahrokni is Assistant Professor of Gender and Globalisation and Director of MSc Programme in Gender and Gender Research at the London School of Economics. She is the author of the award-winning book, Women in Place: The Politics of Gender Segregation in Iran (University of California Press 2020) which offers a gripping inquiry into gender segregation policies and women’s rights in contemporary Iran. Her research interests fall at the intersection of feminist geography, critical policy analysis, and ethnographies of the state. Her publications have appeared in Globalizations, Contemporary Ethnography, Current Sociology, and the Journal of Middle East Women's Studies. Nazanin serves on the Executive Committee of the International Sociological Association and is on the advisory board of Middle East Law and Governance, as well, the Global Dialogue.
Organizer
Centre for Islamic and Middle East Studies
Shifting Conceptions of Translation in Turkey: An overview from the early republican period until our day
A Thursday seminar with Dr. Şehnaz Tahir Gürçağlar
Time and place: Mar. 3, 2022 2:15 PM – 3:30 PM, Zoom
In this seminar, Şehnaz Tahir Gürçağlar explores changing conceptions and discourses on translation and translators in Turkey over the 20th and early 21st centuries. As a case in point, she will focus on the proceedings of five national publishing congresses which took place during the seven decades between 1939 and 2009 and explore continuities and shifts in approaches to translation, from the standpoint of both public and private institutions and persons. Tracing the discourse formed around translation during the congresses will facilitate a discussion on the political and cultural role of translation in Turkey throughout the period in question.
Şehnaz Tahir Gürçağlar is Professor of Translation Studies. She teaches at the Department of Translation and Interpreting Studies at Boğaziçi University, Istanbul, and at Glendon College, York University in Toronto. She holds a PhD in Translation Studies (Boğaziçi University) and an MA in Media Studies (Oslo University). Her research interests are translation history and historiography, translation sociology, retranslation, periodical studies and reception studies. She has widely published on these subjects. She currently works on the methodological relevance of periodicals for research on translation history.
Muslim Women Travellers across the Indian Ocean: Traversing Straits before the 1500s
A Thursday seminar with Dr. Mahmood Kooria.
Time and place: Feb. 17, 2022 12:15 PM – 1:30 PM, Zoom
Why are there hardly any travel accounts written by women in the premodern world? Does this mean that women did not travel back then? Not at all! They undertook long journeys across far distances, between Asia, Europe, Africa and the Americas. They even left behind elaborate traces of their diverse peregrinations as pirates, queens, prisoners, mystics, pilgrims, admirals, saints and diplomats.
Focusing on three journeys carried out by Muslim women in and around the Indian Ocean world between 700 and 1500 CE, this talk explores the specific features of medieval women on the move.
About the speaker
Mahmood Kooria holds research positions at Leiden University (the Netherlands) and University of Bergen (Norway) and is a visiting faculty of history at Ashoka University (India).
He received his PhD in Global History from Leiden University in 2016. In addition to numerous academic journal articles and book chapters, he has co-edited “Malabar in the Indian Ocean: Cosmopolitanism in a Maritime Historical Region” (2018) and “Islamic Law in the Indian Ocean World: Texts, Ideas and Practices” (2022).
Currently he is writing a book on the matriarchal Muslim communities in East Africa and South and Southeast Asia.
Organizer
Centre for Islamic and Middle East Studies
2021
A Conversation on Revolutionary Bodies
A Book Talk with Dr. K. Soraya Batmanghelichi
Time and place: Dec. 3, 2021 12:15 PM–1:30 PM, Niels Kaffebar
Batmanghelichi will present her latest monograph Revolutionary Bodies in which she interrogates how normative ideas of women's bodies in state, religious, and public health discourses have resulted in the female body being deemed as immodest and taboo over the past three decades in Iran. This research greatly benefits those looking at marginalized and under-studied communities, such as red-light districts, those in temporary marriages, and an HIV-AIDS advocacy organization in Tehran.
Speaker:
Dr. K. Soraya Batmanghelichi is Associate Professor for the Study of Modern Iran at IKOS, University of Oslo. She completed her PhD in Iranian Studies from the Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian and African Studies at Columbia University in New York City. Batmanghelichi's research focuses on contemporary women's movements, sexuality, and gendered public space in Iran and the modern Middle East.
Discussant:
Dr. Joakim Parslow is a Senior Lecturer in IKOS, University of Oslo. He holds a PhD in Near and Middle Eastern Studies from the University of Washington, and a Cand. mag. in Political Science and Turkish from the University of Oslo. His research centers on the political, legal, and intellectual history of modern Turkey.
The seminar is free and open to all. It will be hybrid, please register for Zoom to join digitally.
Book Talk: Mosul under ISIS - eyewitness accounts of life in the caliphate
Four years after the liberation of Mosul from ISIS, little is understood about the reality of its rule, or reasons for its failure, as seen by those who actually lived under it. In a new book Mathilde Becker Aarseth details what was going on on the inside of ISIS institutions.
Time and place: Nov. 26, 2021 12:30 PM–1:45 PM, Scene HumSam
The seminar is free and open to all, and will be held in English. To see the live stream of the event, please scroll down.
The book focuses on ISIS governance of education, healthcare and policing, and is built on interviews with civilians including: teachers who were forced to teach the group's new curriculum; professors who organized secret classes in private; doctors who took direct orders from ISIS leaders and worked in their headquarters; bureaucratic staff who worked for ISIS. These accounts provide unique insight into the lived realities in the controlled territories and reveal how the terrorist group balanced their commitment to Islamist ideology with the practical challenges of state building.
Moving beyond the simplistic dichotomy of civilians as either passive victims or ISIS supporters, Mathilde Becker Aarseth highlights those people who actively resisted or affected the way in which ISIS ruled. The book invites readers to understand civilians' complex relationship to the extremist group in the context of fragmented state power and a city torn apart by the occupation.
Speakers:
Mathilde Becker Aarseth is a postdoctoral researcher at the Center for Islamic and Middle East Studies (CIMS), University of Oslo. The book "Mosul under ISIS" is based on her PhD dissertation on ISIS governance.
Brynjar Lia is Professor of Middle East Studies at CIMS and an influential scholar on the history of Islamist and jihadist movements.
Kjetil Selvik is a Senior Researcher in NUPI’s research group on Peace Conflict, and Development. He works on struggles over states and regimes in the Middle East, and has published widely on politics in Syria, Iraq, and Iran.
Khalid Zaza is a jurist in international law and human rights. He is the founder of Zaza Consulting, which provides expert research and advice to international organisations carrying out projects in the MENA region, including Lebanon, Syria and Iraq.
The Arab Ashkenazi: The Forgotten History of Jewish Eastern European Integration in the Levant
A seminar with Dr. Yair Wallach in cooperation with the Critical Historiography research group at IAKH.
Time and place: Nov. 19, 2021 12:15 PM–1:30 PM, Eilert Sundts hus aud. 2
Around 100,000 Ashkenazi Jews migrated from Central and Eastern Europe to the Levant - from the early 19th century to 1914. The large majority of these migrants settled in Palestine, with smaller numbers in Egypt, Lebanon and elsewhere. This migration is typically understood as ideologically driven by Zionist or proto-Zionist sentiments, and the relationship between the migrants and their Arab environment is seen as essentially antagonistic, framed through dichotomies of Europe and the Orient.
Wallach's research challenges this assumption, revealing the myriad paths of Ashkenazi integration and acculturation in the Levant: learning Arabic, adopting local dress and music, building neighbourly relations, commercial and political alliances. Belly dancers, soldiers, communist comrades, students, business partners, doctors, lovers and partners in crime: Ashkenazi-Arab relations were manifold and meaningful. But this integration was insufficient to withstand the political forces of the 20th century. The advent of Zionism and Arab resistance to it inevitably and retrospectively positioned local Ashkenazi Jews as European settlers against local Arabs. Ashkenazi “Arabisation” was undone and was erased from cultural memory and historiography. Challenging this reductive reading, Wallach places Ashkenazi migration to the Middle East within the larger story of migration into the Middle East, to explore the different paths of Ashkenazi integration, and the divergent political horizons it facilitated beyond separatism and settler colonialism.
Yair Wallach is a senior lecturer in Israeli Studies at SOAS, the University of London, where he is also the head of the SOAS Centre for Jewish Studies. He has written on urban and material culture in modern Palestine/Israel. His book, A City in Fragments: Urban Texts in Modern Jerusalem (Stanford 2020) dealt with the street texts of late Ottoman and British Mandate Jerusalem. He has also written for the Guardian, Haaretz, 972+, Newsweek and other publications.
Guardians of the Regime: The Varied Faces of Counter-Revolution during the Lebanon Revolutionary Uprising of 2019
A seminar with Dr. Jeffrey G. Karam in cooperation with Masahat.
Time and place: Nov. 5, 2021 12:15 PM–1:30 PM, Eilert Sundts hus aud. 2
Focusing on the massive social uprising that erupted in Lebanon on 17 October 2019, the seminar draws on a selection of new primary records and secondary accounts to examine how several foreign states acted as counter-revolutionary forces to guard the political regime after the beginning of the revolutionary situation. An examination of counter-revolutionary narratives and actions during revolutionary situations must both consider local considerations and analyze the confluence between international, regional, and domestic forces. By complicating the binary of revolutionary and counter-revolutionary situations, the seminar provides a new perspective on counter-revolution that underscores the fluidity of different forms of coercion and violence. This seminar is based on a chapter in a forthcoming book entitled, The Lebanon Uprising of 2019: Voices from the Revolution (London and New York: I.B. Tauris and Bloomsbury, 2022), that Karam is co-editing.
Dr. Jeffrey G. Karam is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the Lebanese American University. He is also a EUME Fellow of the Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung and FU Berlin, and an associate at Harvard University’s Middle East Initiative. Karam is the author and editor of numerous publications, including The Middle East in 1958: Reimagining A Revolutionary Year (London: I.B. Tauris and Bloomsbury, 2020). Karam is the co-editor of The Lebanon Uprising of 2019: Voices from the Revolution, which I.B. Tauris and Bloomsbury will publish in 2022.
Book Launch: The Palestinian National Movement in Lebanon
Why do Palestinian leaders spend exponential resources to retain political and military control in the camps of Lebanon? This is one of several questions author Erling L. Sogge asks in his new book “The Palestinian National Movement in Lebanon: A Political History of the 'Ayn al-Hilwe camp”.
Time and place: Sep. 24, 2021 2:30 PM–4:00 PM, Scene HumSam
Lebanon's Palestinian camps famously became primary bases for the PLO and its armed struggle against Israel from 1969 to ‘82. However, Palestinian factions made an effort to reclaim these self-governed spaces in 1999-01, and have since expanded their presence significantly. This particularly goes for ʿAyn al-Hilwe. Hosting 30,000 inhabitants on the outskirts of the south Lebanese city of Sidon, the camp known as the “Capital of the Palestinian Diaspora,” is regarded as a center for political activity in exile, and is governed by a myriad of militia groups. Yet the current Palestinian exile leaderships are seldom discussed in the context of broader Palestinian national politics.
We lack an understanding of their organizations, internal dynamics, goals, relationships with the camp populations, Palestinian elites elsewhere, and regional patrons. Based on extensive ethnographic research in the camp—focused on the actors who have shaped its modern political trajectory since the rupture caused by the 1993 Oslo Accords—The Palestinian National Movement in Lebanon casts new light on leadership structures in Palestinian politics, and argues that far more takes place outside of the established centers of power than what has been accounted for in the literature. It paints an up-close picture of how a myriad of internal and external actors—ranging from neighborhood militias to youth activists—stake their claim to the camp and attempt to shape the course of Palestinian (and Lebanese) politics. Ultimately, the book tells the story of how a refugee camp in the margins becomes a scene of the region’s most central struggles, where concepts such as self-determination and sovereignty are negotiated through a constant re-shaping of alliances and power balances, while the question of Palestinian statehood hangs in the balance.
Speakers:
Rex Brynen is Professor in political science at McGill University, Montréal. He is the author of Sanctuary and Survival: The PLO in Lebanon (Westview Press, 1990) and A Very Political Economy: Peacebuilding and Foreign Aid in the West Bank and Gaza (United States Institute of Peace Press, 2000), and has edited a number of other books. Professor Brynen joins us online from Montréal.
Manal Kortam is a Palestinian human rights activist from Lebanon and works in humanitarian development. She has published a book chapter on elections in the Shatila camp, Beirut. In 2018, she made international headlines when she launched an electoral campaign for a Palestinian seat in the Lebanese parliament. Kortam joins us online from Beirut.
Erling L. Sogge, is the author of the book and is a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Oslo. His research explores social movements among the Palestinian refugees, the internal dynamics of refugee camps, and as of lately; the role of customary justice committees in the West Bank. He has been a research fellow at the American University of Beirut and the Najah National University in Nablus, Palestine.
Chair:
The conversation will be led by Rania Maktabi, who is Associate Professor in political science at Østfold University College. Her research deals with the legal position of Arab women, and citizenship in states like Lebanon, Syria, Kuwait, Qatar, Morocco and Egypt.
Bilder av Muhammad i vår tid
Muhammads livshistorie har alltid blitt tolket opp mot samtidens idealer. I dette seminaret viser Jakob Skovgaard-Petersen hvordan.
Time and place: Sep. 20, 2021 12:15 PM–1:30 PM, Eilert Sundts hus aud. 7
I likhet med Jesus har Muhammad gjennom historien vært gjenstand for ulike tolkninger. Livshistorien hans -sira - har blitt lest og tolket slik at han til enhver tid levde opp til samtidens idealer. Hvilke idealer er det som har kommet til i de siste hundre årene? Og hvordan har profetens liv blitt fremstilt i filmer og TV-dramaer?
Jakob Skovgaard-Petersen Skovgaard-Petersen har nylig gitt ut boken Muslimernes Muhammad - og alle andres. Han er professor i islamske studier ved Københavns Universitet. Han har studert og arbeidet i Kairo, Damaskus og Beirut. Siden 1990 har han undervist og opplyst om Midtøsten og islam i danske medier. I 2011 mottok han Danmarks Radios Rosenkjærpris for sin formidling.
Arrangementet krever forhåndsregistrering for enten fysisk oppmøte eller zoom.
Caught between Heroization and Victimization. Idealized Masculinities in Modern Iran
A seminar with Dr. Olmo Gölz.
Time and place: May 28, 2021 12:15 PM–2:00 PM, Zoom
Since the Islamic Revolution of 1978/79 and the subsequent Iran-Iraq War (1980-88), the cult of martyrdom has been established as an integral part of the ideological core of the Islamic Republic of Iran. Certainly the male martyr who died fighting for Islam and Iran stands at the top of an imagined scale of heroism, and as a prototype hero, he has a huge impact on the gender order in contemporary Iran. At first glance, this seems to be sufficiently explained by the Shiite orientation of the system since the mythological reference point for Shiite Islam is to be found in the concept of martyrdom itself. However, the concept of the martyr not only hints in direction of heroism but also to the notion of the victim. Essentially, the invocation of martyrdom discourses leads to the reinterpretation of a victim as a winner and hero. Although it is a central aspect of all conceptions of martyrdom that the martyr dies willingly and consciously, the narrative encompassing that message must also always insist that things could have gone differently and that in a better world, the martyr would have survived. Hence, in reference to the ambiguous dimensions of martyrdom, the martyr is always framed in a discourse in which they are on the one hand granted agency (the ‘counter-power’ of letting oneself be killed) and that simultaneously underlines their victimhood. This in turn raises questions about the self-perceptions of those societies that make active use of the concept of martyrdom. Against these theoretical reflections, my lecture aims at rethinking the positivistic statement that the persistent cult of the martyr in Iran is sufficiently explained by references to the Shiite essence of the Islamic Republic. In discussing the emergence of discourses on the common man (or lutis) in Iranian politics during crucial episodes of 20th century Iran as well as the heroization of the downtrodden man (mostazafin), I will show the interdependencies between (self-)victimization and heroization and how the exaltation of both individual sacrifice and victimhood had been transformed into the cult of martyrdom as collective heroism. Accordingly, not only the full social impact of the concept of martyrdom but also the formation of the concept itself can be understood against the backdrop of idealized masculinities in 20th century Iran.
Dr. Olmo Gölz completed his PhD at the University of Freiburg in 2017, discussing urban violence and configurations of masculinities in his thesis “Racketeers in Pahlavi-Iran – Violent Entrepreneurs and the Gendered Meaning of Protection”. He lectures in Islamic and Iranian Studies at the University of Freiburg and is a principal investigator in the group "Masculinities" within the collaborative research center on "Heroes – Heroizations – Heroisms". Currently, he is working on dynamics of the heroic in the Iran-Iraq war and the topic of martyrdom in Muslim societies.
Writing the Lives of the Women of Cairo's roaring '20s
A seminar with Dr. Raphael Cormack.
Time and place: May 14, 2021 12:15 PM–2:00 PM, Zoom
We are often told that women's history is hard to tell, that it is hidden in the margins or cannot be recovered. However, in Cairo's 1920s entertainment scene, the stories of women cannot be ignored, they are at the centre of everything, running cabarets and theatre troupes, with their faces all over the magazines. This talk examines how female celebrities are constructed in Egypt, how myths gather around them, how their life stories are told and how they tell their own life stories. It will also look at both the benefits and the problems of constructing a picture of Cairo's nightlife from its most famous stars, asking whose stories are preserved and whose are not.
Raphael Cormack has a PhD in Egyptian theatre from the University of Edinburgh. This spring saw the release of his book Midnight in Cairo: The Divas of Egypt's Roaring '20s, a portrait of the ambitious and talented women whose work in the arts defined an era, Cairo's 1920s and ’30s.
A Poet and an Islamist? The Life of Sayyid Qutb Reconsidered
A seminar with Dr. Giedrė Šabasevičiūtė.
Time and place: Apr. 30, 2021 12:15 PM–1:30 PM, Zoom
Perhaps no Arab historical figure is more demonized than the Egyptian literati-turned-Islamist Sayyid Qutb. A poet and literary critic in his youth, Qutb is known to have abandoned literature in the 1950s in favor of Islamism, becoming its most prominent ideologist to this day. Little is known about Qutb’s literary past. In the dominant narratives, this formative period of his life is usually dismissed as characterized by Qutb’s failure to become famous literati. Departing from this common narrative, this talk invites to reconsider Qutb’s biography by taking seriously his literary past. Instead of understanding literature as opposed to Islamism, it argues that Qutb’s aesthetics fed his Islamist project. The talks shows how our understanding of Islamism can be advanced by considering it as part of social and intellectual life.
Giedrė Šabasevičiūtė is research fellow at Oriental Institute, Czech Academy of Sciences and external lecturer in Charles University in Prague. She’s the author of Sayyid Qutb: An Intellectual Biography (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2021).
Becoming Turāth: Tradition in Modern Egypt
A seminar with Dr. Mary Elston.
Time and place: Apr. 23, 2021 12:15 PM–2:00 PM, Zoom
Tradition is a central concept in the study of Islam in the modern period. While in recent decades, scholarship in Islamic studies has investigated the diverse conceptions of tradition that animate modern Muslim societies, a parallel conversation has considered tradition as an analytical category. Despite the importance of the concept of tradition to scholarly explorations of Islam and the Middle East in the modern period, there has been no systematic investigation of the history of the Arabic term for tradition that today dominates public discourses in much of the Muslim world: turāth. In this talk I analyze the writings, publishing efforts, and educational projects of three Muslim Egyptian intellectuals—Muḥammad ‘Abduh (1849-1905), Ṭaha Ḥusayn (1889-1973), and Ali Gomaa (1952-)—to trace the development of the concept of turāth from the late nineteenth century to the present. In my analysis, I demonstrate that prior to the twentieth century, the term turāth had one meaning—that of inheritance, whether property or social status—while through the intellectual and political projects of modernist intellectuals and Muslim scholars, such as those mentioned above, turāth took on the additional meanings of “heritage” and later “tradition.” By locating these etymological shifts within the context of reformist debates about authenticity and modernity, emergent articulations of Egyptian and Arab nationalism, and competing conceptions of religious authority in twentieth century Egypt, in this talk I construct a genealogy of the concept of tradition in modern Egypt.
Mary Elston is a scholar of Islam focusing on the modern and contemporary Middle East. Her research interests are in the anthropology of Islam, religious studies, and Islamic intellectual history, with a focus on education, knowledge, politics, and language. In May 2020, Mary received her Ph.D. from Harvard University’s Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations. Her dissertation, “Reviving Turāth: Islamic Education in Modern Egypt,” combines ethnography and textual analysis to examine the politics, texts, and practices of a traditionalist education movement at Egypt’s al-Azhar, the preeminent institution of Islamic learning located in Cairo. Her dissertation received the Alwaleed Bin Talal Prize for best dissertation in Islamic Studies in 2020. Her research in Egypt was supported by the Loeb Dissertation Research Fellowship in Religious Studies, the Frederick Sheldon Traveling Fellowship, the American Research Center in Egypt, the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, and Harvard University Center for African Studies.
Turkish Kaleidoscope: Joining Art and Science
A seminar with Professor Jenny White.
Time and place: Mar. 26, 2021 12:15 PM–2:00 PM, Zoom
It is 1975 and Turkey is near civil war. Four medical students struggle on opposing sides in a society torn apart by violent political factions. Each has a different reason for joining the cause, with consequences that follow them into the present. Turkish Kaleidoscope, a graphic novel by Jenny White and the artist Ergün Gündüz, asks what causes people to sacrifice their lives, health and sometimes families for an autocratic leader and engage in violent acts. Inspired by oral history interviews and White's own experiences as a student in Ankara in the 1970s, the book does not give an ideological or event-driven analysis, but rather shows that violent factionalism has an emotional and cultural logic that defies ideological explanations. White will talk about why she chose to write a graphic book and what we can learn from it about Turkey in the 1970s and beyond.
Professor White is an internationally renowned scholar on Turkish society and politics. Holding a PhD from the University of Texas at Austin, she currently works at Stockholm University as Professor at the Department of Asian, Middle Eastern and Turkish Studies. In addition to numerous academic books and articles, she is also the author of several books of historical fiction. A full bibliography can be found here. Her latest book, the upcoming Turkish Kaleidoscope: Fractured Lives in a Time of Violence (Princeton, 2021), is a graphic novel illustrated by Ergün Gündüz that follows four protagonists in the political violence of 1970s Turkey.
Collecting the Archives of Past and Present Revolutions. The Project DREAM
A seminar with Dr. Leyla Dakhli.
Time and place: Mar. 19, 2021 12:15 PM–2:00 PM, Zoom
The project DREAM is investigating revolutions and revolutionary dreams in the context of the Arab Mediterranean area after independence (1950’s until today). One of the big challenges in writing these histories of “ordinary revolutionaries” is to access documentation and archives. In our work, we try to reflect on the status of the archives, may they be “official” archives of the state or independent archiving or else private documentation made accessible to us by some individuals. Two specific aspects will be dealt of in this presentation: the opening (even sometimes in a very ephemeral way) of once inaccessible or invisible state archives after 2011, and the multiplication of private archiving initiatives, documenting in particular recent revolts and revolutions, but also older memories. Does this private space complement or contradict the archive of power? What power regime does it build?
Leyla DAKHLI is a full-time historian in the French Center for National Research (CNRS), presently settled in the Marc Bloch Center in Berlin. Her work deals with the study of Arab intellectuals and social history of the South Mediterranean region, with a particular focus on the history of women and the question of exiled intellectuals and activists. She is the Principal Investigator of the ERC-founded program DREAM (Drafting and Enacting the revolution in the Arab Mediterranean). Her last publications include L’Esprit de la révolte. Archives et actualité des révolutions arabes, Éditions du Seuil, oct. 2020.
She will be in conversation with Rana Issa (Research Fellow at University of Oslo and co-founding member of Masahat) and Teresa Pepe (Chair of CIMS).
The seminar is part of the online festival Right to the City arranged by the organization Masahat.
Child is Father of the Man? Retribution or Reintegration of ISIS Youth in Mosul, Iraq
A seminar with Dr. Vera Mironova.
Time and place: Mar. 12, 2021 12:15 PM–2:00 PM, Zoom
What should be done with insurgent youth, from adolescent fighters to very young children? Using original survey data, we examine public opinion regarding adolescent/child soldiers and young children in the Islamic State (ISIS) in Mosul Iraq. Focusing retrospectively, we inquire about retributive punishment for minors who fought and worked for the Islamic State relative to adults. We find that punishment preferences toward minors are conditional on their participation in violence, beliefs about the determinants of adulthood and the role of agency versus coercion in the recruitment process. Thinking prospectively, we find the public divided between fear about the dangers posed by radicalized children of insurgency and hope for rehabilitation and reintegration. Our results raise concerns about detrimental effects of retributive justice and social stigma on the well-being of insurgent youth and children both now and later into adulthood.
Dr. Vera Mironova is a Research Fellow at Harvard University, author, journalist and frontline scholar, with extensive experience in studying conflict first hand, embedded in the field. Her award-winning first book From Freedom Fighters to Jihadists: Human Resources of Non-State Armed Groups (Oxford University Press) was published in 2019.
Law and Art as Agents of Change in Palestine
British-Palestinian author Selma Dabbagh in conversation with CIMS chair, Dr. Teresa Pepe.
Time and place: Feb. 26, 2021 12:15 PM–1:30 PM, Zoom
This talk will draw on the personal experiences of the lawyer and writer, Selma Dabbagh in working for human rights organisations, in the field of international criminal law and as a writer of fiction. The talk will consider the approaches of human rights non-governmental organisations and lawyers as well as the medium of literature (and art in general) in enhancing understanding of the Middle East in the West. Reference will be made to Selma’s novel, Out of It (Bloomsbury, 2012), set between Gaza, London and the Gulf and to her forthcoming anthology We Wrote In Symbols; Love and Lust by Arab Women Writers, (Saqi, 2021) which includes writing by women from the classical to the contemporary periods. The role of the imagination in envisaging a better future, through the medium of science fiction, will also be discussed.
Selma Dabbagh is a British-Palestinian writer of fiction who lives in London. Her writing is mainly set in the contemporary Middle East with recurring themes such as idealism (however futile), placelessness, political engagement (or lack thereof) and the impact of social conformity on individuals. Out of It was her first book and was met with critical acclaim. She is currently working on the forthcoming anthology We Wrote In Symbols; Love and Lust by Arab Women Writers.
Reflections on the 2011 Arab Uprisings from Norway: Ten Years After
A roundtable discussion on Zoom.
Time and place: Feb. 12, 2021 12:15 PM–1:30 PM, Zoom
On the 12th of February 2011, thousands of Egyptians gathered in Tahrir Square in Cairo to celebrate the resignation of Hosni Mubarak as president of Egypt, announced the day before following 18 days of country-wide protests. Less than a month before, Ben Ali had resigned as President of Tunisia after 23 years of power, following popular demands. The fall of these dictatorships has inspired similar protests all over the Arab region, from the ones in Syria, Yemen, Libya and Bahrain (2011), to the more recent ones in Sudan, Iraq, Lebanon and Algeria (2019), changing the Middle East region in unpredictable ways.
Ten years after this event, the Centre for Islamic and Middle East Studies (CIMS) at the University of Oslo invites you to a roundtable discussion where speakers from different fields will present their personal and scholarly perspectives on the 2011 Arab Uprisings and their aftermath. Some of the issues that will be tackled in the discussion include: regional perspectives (Egypt, Tunisia, Libya, Lebanon) the significance of this event for the wider Middle East region; historical and cultural outlooks on the uprisings; the nature of activism and revolutionary processes; political Islam and its role in the unfolding of the protests; teaching and discussing the Arab Spring in Norway.
Confirmed Speakers
Toufoul Abou-Hodeib (Associate Professor in History, IAKH, University of Oslo)
Jon Nordenson (Country Analyst, Middle East, Landinfo - Norwegian Country of Origin Information Centre)
Bjørn-Olav Utvik (Professor in Middle East Studies, IKOS, University of Oslo)
Knut Vikør (Professor in History, AHKR, University of Bergen)
Ragnhild Johnsrud Zorgati (Associate Professor in Religious Studies, IKOS, University of Oslo)
Moderator: Teresa Pepe (Chair of CIMS, Associate Professor in Middle East Studies, IKOS, University of Oslo)
2020
Polarized and Demobilized – Legacies of Authoritarianism in Palestine
A seminar with Dr. Dana El Kurd
Time and place: Nov. 27, 2020 12:00 PM–1:30 PM, Zoom
After the 1994 Oslo Accords, Palestinians were hopeful that an end to the Israeli occupation was within reach, and that a state would be theirs by 1999. With this promise, international powers became increasingly involved in Palestinian politics, and many shadows of statehood arose in the territories. Today, however, no state has emerged, and the occupation has become more entrenched. Concurrently, the Palestinian Authority has become increasingly authoritarian, and Palestinians ever more polarised and demobilised. Palestine is not unique in this: international involvement, and its disruptive effects, have been a constant across the contemporary Arab world. This book argues that internationally backed authoritarianism has an effect on society itself, not just on regime-level dynamics. It explains how the Oslo paradigm has demobilised Palestinians in a way that direct Israeli occupation, for many years, failed to do. Using a multi-method approach including interviews, historical analysis, and experimental data, Dana El Kurd reveals how international involvement has insulated Palestinian elites from the public, and strengthened their ability to engage in authoritarian practices. In turn, those practices have had profound effects on society, including crippling levels of polarisation and a weakened capacity for collective action.
Dana El Kurd received her PhD in Government from The University of Texas at Austin in June 2017. She specializes in Comparative Politics and International Relations. She works as a researcher at the Arab Center for Research and Policy Studies and as an assistant professor at the Doha Institute for Graduate Studies.
This seminar will take place on Zoom. Attendance requires pre-registration. Please register.
Jalal Al-e-Ahmad, Westoxication and the Politico-Theological Problem
A Seminar with Dr. Eskandar Sadeghi-Boroujerdi
Time and place: Nov. 20, 2020 12:15 PM–1:30 PM, Zoom
This talk will argue that the political thought of one of twentieth century Iran’s foremost intellectuals, Jalal Al-e Ahmad (1923–1969) and his seminal work Gharbzadegi (1962), often translated as ‘Weststruck-ness’ or ‘Westoxication’, can and should be understood through the critical study of race and racialisation. In contrast to the paradigms of ‘nativism’, ‘Islamic atavism’ and the demand for a return to ‘cultural authenticity’ that have traditionally framed the significance and reception of his thought, this article contends that Al-e Ahmad’s notion of gharbzadegi provides crucial insights into how predatory forms of colonial capitalism stratify the economic world order in accordance with what W.E.B. Du Bois famously called the ‘colour line’. I submit that Al-e Ahmad’s political thought sheds light upon the conditions of Eurocentric and racialised forms of knowledge production and immanent material practices, and how they structure the lived experiences of colonial and semi-colonial subjects, as well as providing a remarkable perspective on how ‘race thinking’ and the ‘racial state’ were conceived and institutionalised in twentieth-century Iran.
Dr Eskandar Sadeghi-Boroujerdi is Lecturer in Comparative Political Theory in the Department of Politics and International Relations at Goldsmiths, University of London. He was previously a British Academy Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Oxford, where he also obtained his doctorate. He is the author of Revolution and its Discontents: Political Thought and Reform in Iran (Cambridge University Press, 2019), co-editor of the e-zine Jadaliyya’s Iran Page, and series editor of Radical Histories of the Middle East (Oneworld).
This seminar will take place on Zoom. Attendance requires pre-registration. Please register.
(Dis)connected lives in prolonged displacement: an ethnographic study on media-use and sense-making practices within Iraqi refugee households in Jordan
A Seminar with Dr. Mirjam Twigt
Time and place: Nov. 6, 2020 12:15 PM–1:30 PM, Zoom
Among the worlds’ forcible displaced, prolonged legal and temporal uncertainty has become the norm rather than the exception. Institutionalized as ‘waiting’, living with suspended rights for years is a deeply active, affective mode of being. My forthcoming book seeks to further comprehend how digital connectivity interacts with everyday experiences of legal and temporal uncertainty of refugees, geographically residing in the Middle East. In order to provide more contextual recognition for the significance of technologies in refugees’ everyday lives beyond the ‘west’ and beyond their instrumental roles only, I draw upon ethnographic research largely conducted in 2015 among Iraqi refugee households in Jordan’s capital Amman.
Empirical examples enable me to point out the complex social and subjective roles that digital technologies can play in navigating in, and only sometimes out of, prolonged crises. These include refugees’ sense-making of and communication with the international refugee regime, sustaining dispersed family and friendship relations, the interaction between virtual and situated home making practices, the roles of technologies for sustaining hope for better futures elsewhere. But the same technologies that provide space to manoeuvre are easily morphed back into spaces of control and people’s mediated practices interact with situated and material realities. Supposedly ‘neutral’ technologies tend to further entrench unequal power relations and have a tendency for mapping into persisting inequalities around issues relating to class, ‘race’, gender and legalised status.
Experiences of digital connectivity occur simultaneously and in interaction with experiences of being and feeling disconnected. These include and go beyond offline and online material, social and embodied experiences of global neo-colonial and capitalist entanglements and inequality, including its bordering practices and (anti-Muslim/Middle Eastern/Arab/refugee) othering processes. Recognition for the significance of digital connectivity of people residing in legally precarious circumstances and in favour of transnational solidarity therefore equally warrants substantive caution for humanitarian approaches that presume that technologies would somehow be able to provide simple solutions for issues that are deeply political.
This seminar will take place on Zoom. Attendance requires registration. Please register.
Dr. Mirjam Twigt holds a PhD in Media, Communication and Sociology from University of Leicester, UK and was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Council for British Research in the Levant (CBRL), based at the British Institute of Amman in 2018 – 2019. The findings of her PhD and postdoctoral research are to be published in a forthcoming monograph on the roles of communication technologies in everyday experiences of Iraqi refugees residing in prolonged displacement in Amman, Jordan.
New Remedies in Early Modern Ottoman Medicine: Some from the New World, Some from Tombs
A Seminar with Dr. Akif Yerlioğlu
Time and place: Oct. 30, 2020 12:15 PM–1:00 PM, Zoom
This talk will offer a critical overview of the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century pharmacological world of the Ottoman “new medicine” (ṭıbb-ı cedīd). From the 1660s onwards, Ottoman physicians began to translate early-modern European medical sources and adapt medical ideas and theories based on chemical methods that stood out from the works of the ancients (e.g., Galen, Avicenna). This emerging corpus created fertile ground for lively discussions in Ottoman medical scholarship, which went hand in hand with the application of new curative substances, imported from various parts of the world, including, but not exclusive to the Americas. I approach these moments of critical translation and adaptation from lived aspects of medical practice, which are overlooked in current scholarship in the history of medicine that restricts the material to the intertextual domain of books and ideas. Using a range of archival sources (e.g., recipe books, pharmacological encyclopedias, palace inventories, travelogues), I argue that for physicians and other medical professionals, this new medical discourse was not considered mere exotica. Rather, novel cures and substances alongside their implementation (including, therefore, the newly-adapted apparatuses) were quickly incorporated into everyday medical practices, which would lay the groundwork for incorporation of chemical methodologies into both scholarly and popular medicine.
Akif Ercihan Yerlioğlu graduated from the Department of History and Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard University in 2020. He focuses on early modern Ottoman medical discourse, especially the novel ideas and practices, by analyzing medical texts and the interactions between the state and physicians in the medical marketplace. Previously supported by prestigious institutions (e.g., Mahindra Humanities Center, Gerda Henkel Stiftung, ANAMED), Yerlioğlu’s work situates the Ottoman lands into the global circulation of ideas, materials, and experts, and presents a more connected picture of the early modern world.
This event will take place on Zoom. Attendance required pre-registration. Please register.
Telegraphing Revolt: Protest Diffusion During the 1919 Egyptian Revolution
A Seminar with Dr. Neil Ketchley
Time and place: Oct. 23, 2020 12:15 PM–1:30 PM, Georg Sverdrups Hus, Auditorium 1
It is fashionable to emphasize how the internet has enabled the rapid diffusion of protest. This paper explores to what extent telegraph, postal, railway, and road networks shaped protest diffusion in the early twentieth century. The argument is illustrated with the case of Egypt during the 1919 Revolution, when anti-British protests broke out across the country in just a few days. Matching event data derived from Arabic-language newspapers and colonial security reports with geo-referenced maps, the paper shows how the country's communications infrastructure facilitated the rapid spread of protest in a semi-agrarian context characterized by political disorganization. Protest also diffused faster to areas with more students. These findings point to the enduring role of communications infrastructure in processes of revolutionary mobilization --- and highlight the potential uses of GIS for historical sociology.
Neil Ketchley is Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Oslo. He holds a PhD in Political Science from Department of Government, London School of Economics and Political Science. In 2018, the American Sociological Association awarded Ketchley the Charles Tilly Distinguished Contribution to Scholarship Book Award for his book Egypt in a Time of Revolution (Cambridge, 2017).
This event will take place in Auditorium 1, Georg Sverdrups Hus, Blindern. There is no pre-registration required for attending in person.
The event will also be streamed live on Zoom. To attend the Zoom stream, please pre-register.
Human Rights in Early & Medieval Islam: The Case of al-Ṭabarī's madhhab jarīrī
A seminar with professor Ulrika Mårtensson, NTNU.
Time and place: Sep. 18, 2020 12:15 PM–1:30 PM, Zoom
This seminar will be streamed live on Zoom. Access to the Zoom stream requires registration.
In the presentation I will show that a concept of ‘universal human rights’ can be seen in early and medieval interpretations of the Qur'anic sura 4 (al-Nisa', 'Women'), verse 1. The main case is the interpretation by Muhammad b. Jarir al-Tabari (d. 310/923), and I will analyse his concept of 'human rights' with reference to three issues: his legal methodology (al-madhhab al-jariri); and theories of natural law and social contract. As for concrete legal matters, I will argue tentatively that his concept of 'human rights' concerned peasants' property rigths, as part of more general notions of 'the common good' (maslaha). Finally, I will show that his 'human rights'-exegesis of Q. 4:1 was shared by later exegetes of various legal-theological schools, and draw out what this could imply for our conceptualisation of Islamic jurisprudence and law.
Ulrika Mårtensson is professor in the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies at NTNU, the Norwegian University of Science and Technology. She holds a PhD in the history of religions from Uppsala University.
The Journey of the Foreign Fighter
A seminar with associate professor Lars Gule, Oslo Metropolitan University.
Time and place: Sep. 11, 2020 12:15 PM–2:00 PM, Sophus Bugges Hus, Auditorium 1
Based on information from international research and the trials of foreign fighters from Norway, Dr. Gule will give a lecture summarizing what we know of the motives of foreign fighters who traveled to Syria to join the Islamic State, how they were received there, their assignments in the Islamic state, and their eventual return to countries of origin.
Lars Gule is is associate professor in the Department of International Studies and Interpreting at Oslo Metropolitan University. He took his doctorate at the University of Bergen (2003), where he also studied Middle Eastern history and Islamic political thinking.
Between desert and city: Building churches in the Arabian Peninsula
A seminar with Professor Berit Thorbjørnsrud, University of Oslo.
Free admission and open to all.
Time and place: Feb. 28, 2020 10:15 AM–12:00 PM, Eilert Sundts hus, Aud. 5
Church building is a controversial issue in the Arabian Peninsula. Churches should, in principle, be built in such as a way as to be unrecognizable as churches. Although generally built on land donated by the royal families, all churches are subject to restrictions regarding location and architecture and ordinances against making sounds. But why such a paradoxical policy? Why subsidize churches and yet submit them to restrictions making them “invisible?” What do such anonymized churches really look like? Differing views among both Christians and Muslims concerning which architectural elements actually transform a building into a church nevertheless allow space for creative use of some Christian symbols.
Berit Thorbjørnsrud is Professor of Middle East Studies at the Department of Culture Studies and Oriental Languages at the University of Oslo
If you have any questions concerning the seminar, please contact our CIMS coordinator, Alexandra H. Koritzinsky, either by email: a.h.koritzinsky@ikos.uio.no, or at: (+47) 957 21 103.
Walking in the minefield: The state of uncertainty and journalism in Iran
A seminar with Researcher Banafsheh Ranji, University of Oslo.
Free admission and open to all.
Time and place: Feb. 14, 2020 10:15 AM–12:00 PM, Eilert Sundts hus, Aud. 5
Iranian journalism is often discussed in relation to the ‘authoritarian’ political context of the country, and this has led to the established views that the tangible forms of control, including the state use of coercion and restrictive regulation are the only obstacles to journalism in the country. Consequently, the way the climate of uncertainty, shaped by national and international dynamics, influences journalism in Iran is neglected. This lecture discusses the more subtle and less visible mechanisms that restrict journalistic practices, in particular, investigative journalism, and addresses how ambiguities over the boundaries of acceptable coverage become effective and translate into Iranian journalists’ conduct.
Researcher Banafsheh Ranji has a PhD in media and communication from the University of Oslo. Her field of research includes sociology of journalism with a particular focus on politically restrictive contexts. She is currently in a teaching and research position at the University of Oslo.
If you have any questions concerning the seminar, please contact our CIMS coordinator, Alexandra H. Koritzinsky, either by email: a.h.koritzinsky@ikos.uio.no, or at: (+47) 957 21 103.
Book Talk: Leaving the Muslim Brotherhood: Self, Society and the State
A seminar with Dr. Mustafa Menshawy, Assistant Professor at the Doha Institute for Graduate Studies.
Free admission and open to all.
Time and place: Feb. 7, 2020 10:15 AM–12:00 PM, Eilert Sundts hus, Aud. 5
How and why have members of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood disengaged from it at a higher level and volume in 2011 and afterwards? How have those individuals constructed the meanings of their experience through the interaction of “micro” psychological and emotional factors, “meso” level organizational factors, and “macro” political developments linked to the specific case of the Brotherhood and Egypt during the Arab Spring? Dr. Mustafa Menshawy seeks in his new book to answer these questions informed by his a three-year fieldwork research across Egypt, Turkey, the UK and Qatar.
Dr. Mustafa Menshawy is an assistant professor at the Doha Institute for Graduate Studies. He previously worked at the London School of Economics and Political Science, London, and the University of Westminster, London, where he taught for six years. His previous book is State, Memory, and Egypt's Victory in the 1973 War: Ruling by Discourse (New York: Palgrave, 2017). His articles were published in peer-reviewed journals such as Journal of Contemporary Religion and Middle East Studies. His current projects focus on discourse analysis of the ‘First Ladies of Oppression’ in the Middle East.
If you have any questions concerning the seminar, please contact our CIMS coordinator, Alexandra H. Koritzinsky, either by email: a.h.koritzinsky@ikos.uio.no, or at: (+47) 957 21 103.
2019
Jihadism in the Middle East after the fall of the ISIS Caliphate
A seminar with Professor Brynjar Lia, University of Oslo.
Free admission and open to all.
Time and place: Nov. 29, 2019 12:15 PM–2:00 PM, Eilert Sundts hus, Aud. 6
Over the past two decades jihadi movements have come to play a more prominent role in Middle East politics, not merely as underground militants, but also as "governments" in state-like entities, such as the infamous ISIS "Caliphate" established in 2014. The latter represented a new generation of militant groups, surpassing al-Qaida and its affiliated groups as the leading, and most lethal, force in global jihadism.
With the collapse of "the Caliphate", however, as a territorial force in Libya, Syria and Iraq, and the recent death of its iconic leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the jihadi movement has suffered one of its most severe setbacks in its thirty year history. This lecture seeks to reflect upon the current status of the jihadi movement in the MENA region. How can we estimate the strength of the movement today? What does the future hold for the jihadi movement?
Brynjar Lia is Professor of Middle East Studies at the Department of Culture Studies and Oriental Languages at the University of Oslo. Over the past twenty years, he has published extensively on Islamist and jihadist movements in the Middle East. In spring 2020, he teaches a master course entitled "Making Sense of ISIS: Jihadist insurgencies and proto-states in the contemporary MENA region"
If you have any questions concerning the seminar, please contact our CIMS coordinator, Alexandra H. Koritzinsky, either by email: a.h.koritzinsky@ikos.uio.no, or at: (+47) 957 21 103.
Religious dimensions of violence
A seminar with Senior researcher Mona Kanwal Sheikh, Danish Institute for International Studies.
Free admission and open to all.
Time and place: Oct. 25, 2019 12:15 PM–2:00 PM, Eilert Sundts hus, Aud. 6
How does religion matter for explaining violent insurgencies? How do we measure religion and how do we know it is there “for real” and not just a rhetorical gloss over something “more real”? These are some of the questions that Mona Kanwal Sheikh has grappled with since she first met with Taliban militants in Pakistan in 2008. In this talk Sheikh will describe what she has learned from her interviews with Taliban activists and leaders, and through her continues research on religious violence. Part of the talk will focus on the question of conceptualizing religion and describe her own personal journey from being a student of “narratives” to increasingly becoming aware of the significance of religious experience, also for a field like security studies and International relations.
Senior researcher Mona Kanwal Sheikh has a PhD in Political Science from the University of Copenhagen. She works for the Danish Institute for International Studies as research coordinator for the International Security research unit and heads an ERC funded research project on “Transnational Jihad – Explaining Patterns of Escalation and Containment (2019-2023). She is a former visiting scholar at the Orfalea Center for Global and International studies at UC Santa Barbara and the Center for South Asia Studies at UC Berkeley. Sheikh has published widely on the topic of religion and violence, including Guardians of God – Inside the Religious Mind of the Pakistani Taliban (Oxford University Press, 2016), How does Religion Matter? Pathways to Religion in International Relations (Review of International Studies, 2012), A Sociotheological Approach to Understanding Religious Violence (Co-authored with Mark Juergensmeyer, Oxford Handbook of Global Studies, Oxford University Press, 2013) and latest, Entering Religious Minds – The Social Study of Worldviews (co-edited with Mark Juergensmeyer, Routledge, 2019)
If you have any questions concerning the seminar, please contact our CIMS coordinator, Alexandra H. Koritzinsky, either by email: a.h.koritzinsky@ikos.uio.no, or at: (+47) 957 21 103.
The Islamic Republic from the Bottom Up: Patterns of Transformation from the Iran Social Survey
A seminar with Assistant Professor Kevan Harris, University of California-Los Angeles.
Free admission and open to all.
Time and place: Oct. 11, 2019 11:15 AM–12:30 PM, Eilert Sundts hus, Aud. 6
Media coverage of the Islamic Republic of Iran, especially in European and American outlets, has emphasized one of two mutually-linked perspectives for the past two and a half decades. On the positive side, many Iranians - especially the young, urban, and educated citizenry autonomous from Iran's government - are supposedly "just like us." On the negative side, many Iranians - especially poor, provincial, and state-dependent citizens - are purportedly led by the Islamic Republic to "just want to kill us." The predictions stemming from this dual perspective are often confusing, as they rarely portray political and social change in Iran in an accurate manner. In this lecture, I will share results from a large-scale national survey of the Iranian population - the 2016 Iran Social Survey - and argue for a different accounting of social transformations and political cleavages in the Islamic Republic.
Kevan Harris is Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of California-Los Angeles. He is the author of A Social Revolution: Politics and the Welfare State in Iran (2017, University of California Press) and co-editor of The Social Question in the 21st Century: A Global View (2019, University of California Press). His articles and writings can be found at kevanharris.com/publications.
If you have any questions concerning the seminar, please contact our CIMS coordinator, Alexandra H. Koritzinsky, either by email: a.h.koritzinsky@ikos.uio.no, or at: (+47) 957 21 103.
Disorder and Diagnosis in the Gulf and Arabian Peninsula
A seminar with Post-Doctoral Research Fellow Laura Goffman, University of Oslo.
Free admission and open to all.
Time and place: Sep. 20, 2019 12:15 PM–2:00 PM, Eilert Sundts hus, Aud. 6
Histories of the Gulf and the Arabian Peninsula have focused on the political and economic dynamics of relationships between local elites, transregional merchant communities, British officials, and tribal challengers. But it was disease, rather than imperial politics or tribal skirmishes, that was the overwhelmingly predominant cause of daily hardships and loss of life in Gulf communities of the pre-oil period. The urgent need to address health issues prompted imperial governments and embryonic local states to intervene in the physical lives of Gulf residents. New institutions formed the basis of early state biopolitical interventions and mediated interactions between established communities and recent arrivals. Indigenous actors engaged with local and transregional processes in the spheres of health, sanitation, and medicine. In this lecture, I trace several specific health events to reconstruct how the convergence of the imperial state, disease, and changing imaginaries of medicine and science shaped experiences of empire and modernity in the Gulf and Arabian Peninsula.
Laura Frances Goffman is a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow in the Department of Culture Studies and Oriental Languages at the University of Oslo. She received her Ph.D. in Middle East History from Georgetown University in 2019. In August 2020 she will start a position as Assistant Professor of Health Studies of the Middle East and North Africa in the School of Middle Eastern & North African Studies at the University of Arizona.
If you have any questions concerning the seminar, please contact our CIMS coordinator, Alexandra H. Koritzinsky, either by email: a.h.koritzinsky@ikos.uio.no, or at: (+47) 957 21 103.
Book Launch: Literary Visions of the Middle East
Literary Visions assembles, in English translation, more than 40 prose texts of modern Arabic, Turkish, Persian, and Hebrew fiction that shed light on modern Middle Eastern lifeworlds.
Time and place: Sep. 13, 2019 1:15 PM–2:15 PM, Scene HumSam, GS
Welcome to the launch of "Literary Visions of the Middle East" an anthology by Stephan Guth, professor in Middle East Studies at IKOS.
The anthology
Literary Visions assembles more than 40 prose texts of modern Arabic, Turkish, Persian, and Hebrew fiction that have attained canonical status in their respective national literary historiographies – not only because they display “typical” stylistic features of the periods in which they were written, but also because they mirror, in an exemplary manner, the political and social situations under which they were produced.
As unfiltered comments by Middle Easterners who lived through decisive phases of their societies’ development and experienced the ups and downs of their peoples’ histories, the voices that speak from this collection have the quality of representative sources that grant us immediate insight into Middle Eastern lifeworlds, from the 1850s until today.
Program
- Åpning/innførende ord, Teresa Pepe
- Presentasjon av boka, Stephan Guth
- Det å lese skjønnlitteratur & emnetområdet "Literature, Cognition and Emotion (LCE)", Karin Kukkonen
The event is open to all, no registration required. Light refreshments.
Welcome!
Organizer
Humanities and Social Sciences Library and Centre for Islamic and Middle East Studies
Underground activism: The Muslim Brotherhood as a mass-underground movement 1954-1970, continuity and transformation
A seminar with PhD Candidate Ahmed El Zalaf, University of Southern Denmark.
Free admission and open to all.
Time and place: Sep. 6, 2019 12:15 PM–2:00 PM, Eilert Sundts hus, Aud. 6
On 26 October 1954, an alleged attempt on Gamal ‘Abd al-Nasser’s life, at al-Manshiyya square in Alexandria, marked a watershed in the history of the Muslim Brotherhood. Following the incident thousands of Brotherhood activists were arrested, and a hitherto unprecedented campaign of repression were inflicted on the Brotherhood. During the following months, 6 high-ranking members had been hanged and hundreds had received long prison terms. For many observers, the Brotherhood seemed to have disappeared from the Egyptian scene, as a result of the persecution.
As a consequence, western research have not comprehensively studied the history of the Muslim Brotherhood during this decisive period. This seminar explores the historical events that shaped the evolution of the Brotherhood during this period of ordeal “Miḥna”.
Ahmed El Zalaf is a PhD Candidate at the Department of History at the University of Southern Denmark. His dissertation studies the historical evolution of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt during the Nasserite years, 1954-70.
If you have any questions concerning the seminar, please contact our CIMS coordinator, Alexandra H. Koritzinsky, either by email: a.h.koritzinsky@ikos.uio.no, or at: (+47) 957 21 103.
Understanding the Political Agency of Non-State Armed Groups: Rebel Governance in Syria
A seminar with Dr. Benedetta Berti, Head of Policy Planning in the Office of the Secretary General at NATO.
Free admission and open to all.
Time and place: Aug. 29, 2019 12:15 PM–2:00 PM, Sophus Bugges hus, Aud. 3
Dr. Benedetta Berti serves as Head of Policy Planning in the Office of the Secretary General at NATO. She holds a BA in Oriental Studies from the University of Bologna, an MA and PhD in International Relations from the Fletcher School (Tufts University), and two post-doctorates in International Relations and Political Science. Furthermore, Berti is an international policy and security consultant, lecturer, author and a TED Fellow.
If you have any questions concerning the seminar, please contact our CIMS coordinator, Alexandra H. Koritzinsky, either by email: a.h.koritzinsky@ikos.uio.no, or at: (+47) 957 21 103.
The inflation and burst of Egypt’s emotional-political football bubble
A seminar with Postdoctoral Researcher Carl Rommel, University of Helsinki.
Free admission and open to all.
Time and place: May 24, 2019 12:15 PM–2:00 PM, Eilert Sundts hus, Aud. 6
This presentation traces developments within Egyptian football, from the late-Mubarak era, when the sport experienced an unprecedented boom, into the post-2011 period, when the game has lost much of its former appeal. Conceptualising the pre-revolutionary hype as ‘bubble’ encompassing state investments, satellite television, pop cultural productions and great results on the pitch, I illustrate how and why football became a core component of the Mubarak-regime’s soft power. The talk also outlines how and why the football bubble broke apart between 2009 and 2012. All in all, the presentation suggests an alternative, emotional-political reading of Egypt’s (counter-)revolutionary transformation, which locates the national game at the very centre.
Carl Rommel is a social anthropologist, who earned his PhD from SOAS, University of London, in 2015. His PhD dissertation explored the emotional politics of Egyptian football before and after 2011. Currently, Rommel holds a postdoctoral research position at the University of Helsinki. His ongoing field research in Cairo interrogates intersections between precarity, masculinity, temporality and urban space in, around and through a variety of large and small ‘projects’ (mashari‘).
If you have any questions concerning the seminar, please contact our CIMS coordinator, Alexandra H. Koritzinsky, either by email: a.h.koritzinsky@ikos.uio.no, or at: (+47) 957 21 103.
Messianism and Authoritarian Leadership in Turkey: 19th Century to Present
A seminar with guest researcher at IKOS, Alp Eren Topal (Phd, Bilkent University).
Free admission and open to all.
Time and place: May 10, 2019 12:15 PM–2:00 PM, Eilert Sundts hus Aud. 6
In this lecture I will trace the Messianic conceptions of politics that underlie and legitimize authoritarian leadership in Turkey from the mid 19th century to present. From the early 19th century onward, we observe secularization of certain classical concepts of Islamic political tradition and their reformulation in modern context to justify sovereign power in a state of exception. I will demonstrate through fragments how such Messianic conceptions survive over time and reflect on how they are transmitted and how leaders appeal to such conceptions.
Alp Eren Topal is a guest researcher with IKOS. He has received his PhD in 2017 from Bilkent University, Department of Political Science with his dissertation on Ottoman concepts of reform. In September 2019, he will join the Lifetimes project as a Marie Sklodowska Curie fellow.
If you have any questions concerning the seminar, please contact our CIMS coordinator, Alexandra H. Koritzinsky, either by email: a.h.koritzinsky@ikos.uio.no, or at: (+47) 957 21 103.
Book Launch: 'State of Translation: Turkey in Interlingual Relations'
A seminar with Associate Professor Einar Wigen, University of Oslo.
Free admission and open to all.
Time and place: May 3, 2019 12:15 PM–2:00 PM, Eilert Sundts hus Aud. 6
In this seminar, Einar Wigen will present his new book, State of Translation.
International politics often requires two or more languages. The resulting interlingual relations mean translation, either by interpreters who are quite literally in the middle of conversations, or by bilingual statesmen who negotiate internationally in one language and then legitimize domestically in another. Since no two languages are the same, what can be argued in one language may be impossible in another. Political concepts can thus be significantly reformulated in the translation process. State of Translation examines this phenomenon using the case of how 19th-century Ottoman and later Turkish statesmen struggled to reconcile their arguments in external languages (French, then English) with those in their internal language (Ottoman, later Turkish), and in the process further entangled them. Einar Wigen shows how this process structured social relations between the Ottoman state and its interlocutors, both domestically and internationally, and shaped the dynamics of Turkish relations with Europe.
Einar Wigen is associate professor of Turkish studies at the University of Oslo. His research is primarily at the intersection between international studies, translation, history and legitimacy in Ottoman and Turkish politics.
If you have any questions concerning the seminar, please contact our CIMS coordinator, Alexandra H. Koritzinsky, either by email: a.h.koritzinsky@ikos.uio.no, or at: (+47) 957 21 103.
Pious Power: The Phenomenon of Intellectual Female Preachers in Saudi Arabia
A seminar with PhD Candidate Laila Makboul, University of Oslo.
Free admission and open to all.
Time and place: Apr. 25, 2019 12:15 PM–2:00 PM, Eilert Sundts hus Aud. 6
In this seminar, Laila Makboul explores the phenomenon of female intellectual preachers in Saudi Arabia, known as al-dāʿiyāt al-muthaqqafāt. These women make use of their cultural, religious and intellectual capital to engage in the public sphere. Analysing their historical emergence, their fields of engagement and their epistemology, this seminar explores their presence in contemporary Saudi Arabia and what they can tell us about Islamist women’s engagement in religious, cultural, social and political domains.
Laila Makboul is a PhD Candidate at the Department of Middle East and North Africa Studies at the University of Oslo. Her dissertation studies the different roles Saudi female intellectual preachers perform and engage in as intellectuals and religious authorities.
If you have any questions concerning the seminar, please contact our CIMS coordinator, Alexandra H. Koritzinsky, either by email: a.h.koritzinsky@ikos.uio.no, or at: (+47) 957 21 103.
(This seminar was originally scheduled to be held on April 12th)
Islamic Political Philosophy after 40 years
To mark the 40th anniversary of the Iranian Revolution in 1979, we have invited Professor Mohsen Kadivar (Duke University) who will give a talk about Islamic political philosophy today.
Time and place: Mar. 29, 2019 12:15 PM–2:00 PM, Eilert Sundts hus Aud. 6
Professor Kadivar will talk about Islamic political philosophy 40 years after the Iranian revolution. He will place particular emphasis on Iran and Shia Islam.
Mohsen Kadivar is a prominent Iranian intellectual and currently works as a research professor of Islamic studies at the department of Religious Studies, Duke University, where he has been since 2009.
If you have any questions concerning the seminar, please contact our CIMS coordinator, Alexandra H. Koritzinsky, either by email: a.h.koritzinsky@ikos.uio.no, or at: (+47) 957 21 103.
Book Launch: 'Blogging from Egypt: Digital Literature, 2005-2016'
Six years before the Egyptian revolution of January 2011, many young Egyptians had resorted to blogging as a means of self-expression and literary creativity. This resulted in the emergence of a new literary genre: the autofictional blog. Welcome to the launch of Teresa Pepe's new book: Blogging from Egypt.
Time and place: Mar. 15, 2019 1:15 PM–2:15 PM, Scene HumSam, 1 etg. i HumSam-biblioteket i Georg Sverdrups hus
In this new book by Teresa Pepe, these blogs are explored as forms of digital literature, combining literary analysis and interviews with the authors.
The blogs analysed give readers a glimpse into the daily lives, feelings and aspirations of the Egyptian youth who have pushed the country towards a cultural and political revolution. The narratives are also indicative of significant aesthetic and political developments taking place in Arabic literature and culture.
- In the years that preceded and followed the 2011 revolution, the Egyptian blogosphere emerged as an ideal space for literary innovation. Blogging From Egypt offers an invaluable insight into this output, thus helping us understand the cultural roots of the revolution as well as its far-reaching impact, beyond political setbacks.
Richard Jacquemond
Professor of modern Arabic literature, Aix-Marseille Université
Program
- Teresa Pepe will introduce the book and read some excerpts.
- Joakim Parslow, Associate Professor of Middle Eastern Studies at IKOS and Director of the Center for islamic and Middle Studies will chair the event, and open the discussion.
- Stephan Guth, Professor in Arabic Studies at IKOS will contextualise the book in the field of Arabic literary studies.
- Questions from the audience.
The event is open to all, no registration required. Light refreshments.
Welcome!
Teresa Pepe is Associate Professor in Middle East Studies at the Department of Culture Studies and Oriental Languages, UiO.
She obtained her PhD in Middle Eastern Studies and Literature from the University of Oslo in 2014 with the thesis “Fictionalized Identities in the Egyptian Blogosphere”.
Climate Change Discourse in the GCC: Reconciling a Green Shift and Popular Legitimacy in Kuwait
A seminar with Dr. Jon Nordenson, University of Oslo.
Free admission and open to all.
Time and place: Feb. 15, 2019 12:15 PM–2:00 PM, Eilert Sundts hus Aud. 6
Kuwait – and the other GCC countries - face the double challenge of potentially destabilising effects of climate change as well as a changing international energy market in favour of renewables that may threaten the foundation of the oil-based economies dominating the region. Both these challenges point to the need for a transition towards more renewable energy sources and not least more sustainable patterns of energy consumption – a transition that will be demanding for state and society alike. A successful green shift depends on a certain level of popular support or acceptance, yet it has proven difficult for the Kuwaiti government to gain support for their proposed solutions, and to reconcile the necessary changes with the existing relationship between state and society. This paper explores these challenges by studying public discourse concerning two contentious issues that are at the heart of the government’s economic reforms and of Kuwait’s planned efforts to cut GHG-emissions, namely fuel subsidy reform, and water and electricity conservation.
Jon Nordenson is a postdoc-fellow within the field of environmental humanities, and take part in the project “GreenMENA: Climate Change and Energy Transition in the Middle East”. His research focus on how issues pertaining to climate change and the green shift are treated in public discourse in the Middle East and North Africa region. Previously, he has focused on online and offline activism in the MENA region; the relationship between activism, public discourse, and democratization; and language use online in the Arabic speaking countries.
If you have any questions concerning the seminar, please contact our CIMS coordinator, Alexandra H. Koritzinsky, either by email: a.h.koritzinsky@ikos.uio.no, or at: (+47) 957 21 103.
Iraqi Kurds on the Move: From Involuntary Immobility to Mass Migration
A seminar with Dr. Erlend Paasche, University of Oslo.
Free admission and open to all.
Time and place: Feb. 1, 2019 12:15 PM–2:00 PM, Eilert Sundts hus Aud. 6
Paasche will first offer some reflections on the potential for cross-pollination between Middle East and North Africa studies and migration studies. He then presents his doctoral dissertation on Iraqi Kurdish return migration from Europe, based on fieldwork completed before 2014, at a time of relative political stability, economic growth as well as a widespread sense of buoyant optimism in the streets of Erbil, Duhok and Suleymaniah. Corruption in the Kurdish Regional Government emerged as a central theme in the context of Iraqi Kurds’ return decisions as well as experiences of return and reintegration.
Erlend Paasche has a B.A and an M.A in Middle East studies from the University of Oslo. He is currently a post-doctoral fellow at the Department of Criminology and Sociology of Law at the University of Oslo, where he conducts research on border control and migration culture, and teaches migration studies. With fieldwork experience from Syria, Iraqi Kurdistan, Kosovo and Nigeria, he has been a visiting scholar at the University of Sussex and the University of Oxford.
If you have any questions concerning the seminar, please contact our CIMS coordinator, Alexandra H. Koritzinsky, either by email: a.h.koritzinsky@ikos.uio.no, or at: (+47) 957 21 103.
2018
Fiqh Facing Everyday Challenges: How Muftis Think
A seminar with Dr. Lena Larsen, University of Oslo.
Free admission and open to all.
Time and place: Nov. 16, 2018 12:15 PM–2:00 PM, Eilert Sundts hus Aud. 5
Muslim Women in Western Europe are torn between two opposing notions of morality and norms: one stressing women's duties and obedience, and one stressing women's rights and equality before the law. Based upon her book How Muftis Think. Islamic Legal Thought and Muslim Women in Western Europe (BRILL 2018) Larsen will focus on muftis who see "the time and place" as important considerations in fatwa-giving, and seek to develop a local European Islamic Jurisprudence, and how they deal with Women's dilemmas.
Lena Larsen is the Director of The Oslo Coalition on Freedom of Religion or Belief, Norwegian Centre for Human Rights, University of Oslo. She is co-editor of New Directions in Islamic Thought. Exploring Reform and Muslim Tradition (I.B. Tauris 2009) and Gender and Equality in Muslim family Law. Justice and Ethics in the Islamic Legal Tradition (I.B. Tauris 2013).
If you have any questions concerning the seminar, please contact our CIMS coordinator, Alexandra H. Koritzinsky, either by email: a.h.koritzinsky@ikos.uio.no, or at: (+47) 957 21 103.
How to draw change: the politics of Arab comics
A seminar with Associate Professor Jacob Høigilt, University of Oslo.
Free admission and open to all.
Time and place: Nov. 9, 2018 12:15 PM–2:00 PM, Eilert Sundts hus Aud. 5
Høigilt will present his forthcoming book Comics in Contemporary Arab Culture: Politics, Language and Resistance (I.B. Tauris 2018). Focusing on three themes – political critique, gender relations and youthfulness – he analyzes how comics represent a cultural trend of resistance to the prevailing Arab social and political order. The talk features a large number of illustrations, most of which are taken from Egypt and Lebanon.
Jacob Høigilt is Associate Professor of Middle East studies at the University of Oslo. He is also Research Professor at the Peace Research Institute, Oslo. He has published the monograph Islamist Rhetoric: Language and Culture in Contemporary Egypt as well as in various edited collections and journals.
If you have any questions concerning the seminar, please contact our CIMS coordinator, Alexandra H. Koritzinsky, either by email: a.h.koritzinsky@ikos.uio.no, or at: (+47) 957 21 103.
Harlem Comes to Tehran: On Ahmad Shamlu's Translations of Langston Hughes
A seminar with Senior Lecturer Samad Alavi, University of Oslo.
Free admission and open to all.
Time and place: Nov. 2, 2018 12:15 PM–2:00 PM, Eilert Sundts hus Aud. 5
How does a piece of writing come to be considered World Literature? By what criteria does a translator appraise a foreign text’s value for the domestic market? This presentation considers Ahmad Shamlu’s (1925-2000) Persian translations of the American poet Langston Hughes (1902-1967) with such questions in mind. Shamlu remains one of Iran's most popular and critically acclaimed poets in his own right and, as such, his renderings of Hughes' poetry offer insights into the processes of domestication and appropriation that shape any successful translation.
Samad Alavi is senior lecturer in the Department of Culture Studies and Oriental Languages at the University of Oslo where he teaches Persian language courses. His research focuses primarily on Persian cultural production with particular emphasis on modern poetry, social and aesthetic debates, and translation.
If you have any questions concerning the seminar, please contact our CIMS coordinator, Alexandra H. Koritzinsky, either by email: a.h.koritzinsky@ikos.uio.no, or at: (+47) 957 21 103.
In 2016: How it felt to live in the Arab World five years after the "Arab Spring"
Much has been written about democracy (or the lack of it), political Islam and violence in the Middle East after the ‘Arab Spring’. But how do these aspects relate to the realities of everyday life in the post-revolutionary Arab world? And aren’t there many other matters that are much more important to ‘ordinary’ Arabs than these three catchwords of western media coverage?
Time and place: Oct. 26, 2018 1:15 PM–3:00 PM, Scene HumSam, 1. etg. i HumSam-biblioteket
“Baby milk”, “Dual identities/Masking”, “Father figures”, “Football”, “Gated communities/Compounds”, “The Policeman criminal”, “Psychiatrists” – these are only a few out of more than sixty entries in a publication that assembles the results of the NFR-funded research project "In 2016" that looked into Arab everyday worlds in Egypt and Tunisia five years after the ‘Arab Spring’.
Underrepresented realities
A major objective of the project was to highlight aspects of post-revolutionary realities that tend to be heavily underrepresented in the media coverage as well as in mainstream academic treatment of the contemporary Arab world, dominated as they are by a focus on war and violence, Islamist extremism, autocratic rule, and humanitarian tragedy. To do so, the project focused on life-worlds as reflected in cultural production (fiction, cinema, music, architecture, art) and in social media.
Program
At today’s event, the research team will introduce its work to a larger public and unveil an interactive website that allows one to ‘jump right into’ these worlds and move around in them (via cross-references)—a tool that aims to enable users to form an impression of the experience of ‘how it felt’ (and feels) to live in the Arab World in this period of transition and historic change.
Participants: Stephan Guth, Albrecht Hofheinz and members of the research team in conversation with Brynjar Lia.
If you have any questions concerning the seminar, please contact our CIMS coordinator, Alexandra H. Koritzinsky, either by email: a.h.koritzinsky@ikos.uio.no, or at: (+47) 957 21 103.
Organizer
Centre for Islamic and Middle East Studies and Humanities and Social Sciences Library
Classical Wahhabism and Its Modern Revival
A seminar with Cole Bunzel, Yale University.
Free admission and open to all.
Time and place: Oct. 17, 2018 12:15 PM–2:00 PM, Eilert Sundts hus Aud. 3
In this lecture, Cole Bunzel explores the history of Wahhabism in Saudi Arabia and its contested legacy in jihadism and state-sponsored Salafism. Wahhabism began, in the mid-18th century, as a highly activist and exclusivist movement, one that sought to convert the nominal Islamic world to its version of the faith through coercive means, including violence. For the most part it persisted in this form until the early 20th century, when its more radical tendencies were curbed by the Saudi monarchy. Drawing on the speaker’s recent doctoral dissertation, the lecture challenges several common misconceptions about Wahhabism and explains the movement’s connection to the jihadi ideology of al-Qaida and the Islamic State.
Cole Bunzel is a postdoctoral research fellow in Islamic Law and Civilization at the Yale Law School, where his work focuses on the history of Wahhabism and the Jihadi Salafi movement in modern Islam. In 2017, he received the Porter Ogden Jacobus Fellowship, Princeton University’s top honor for graduate students. He is the editor of the blog Jihadica.
If you have any questions concerning the seminar, please contact our CIMS coordinator, Alexandra H. Koritzinsky, either by email: a.h.koritzinsky@ikos.uio.no, or at: (+47) 957 21 103.
Understanding Syria through Syrian Voices
A seminar with Associate Professor Wendy Pearlman, Northwestern University.
Free admission and open to all.
Time and place: Oct. 12, 2018 12:15 PM–2:00 PM, Eilert Sundts hus Aud. 5
Professor Wendy Pearlman will present her book, 'We Crossed a Bridge and It Trembled: Voices from Syria', an oral history of the Syrian conflict based on interviews that she has conducted with more than 400 displaced Syrians across the Middle East and Europe since 2012. Using exclusively Syrians’ own words, the book is a mosaic of stories and reflections that seeks to express the human dimension of the Syrian uprising, war, and refugee experience. Like the book, her talk will chronicle the origins and evolution of the Syrian conflict through the stories of ordinary people who have lived and been transformed by its unfolding, and thereby place the forced migration of millions of Syrians in its larger historical and political context.
Wendy Pearlman is the Koldyke Outstanding Teaching Associate Professor of Political Science at Northwestern University, where she specializes in Middle East politics. She is the author of four books, We Crossed A Bridge and It Trembled: Voices from Syria (HarperCollins, 2017), Violence, Nonviolence, and the Palestinian National Movement (Cambridge University Press, 2011) Occupied Voices: Stories of Everyday Life from the Second Intifada (Nation Books, 2003), and Triadic Coercion: Israel’s Targeting of States that Host Nonstate Actors (co-authored with Boaz Atzili, Columbia University Press, 2018).
If you have any questions concerning the seminar, please contact our CIMS coordinator, Alexandra H. Koritzinsky, either by email: a.h.koritzinsky@ikos.uio.no, or at: (+47) 957 21 103.
Can cultural-religious and linguistic contact engender political rapprochement? A philologist's perspective on the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians
A seminar with Professor Lutz Eberhard Edzard, University of Erlangen-Nürnberg.
Free admission and open to all.
Time and place: Sep. 21, 2018 12:15 PM–2:00 PM, Eilert Sundts hus, Aud. 5
There is broad consensus in the scholarly community that cultural-religious and linguistic contact between Muslim and Jewish societies and communities throughout the ages has often been fruitful and productive (cf., e.g., the contributions in Abdelwahab Meddeb and Benjamin Stora (eds.), _Histoire des relations entre juifs et musulmans des origines à nos jours_, Paris: Albin Michel, 2013). This presentation focuses on modern Israel and Palestine and offers reflections on the question of whether such dialogue has a realistic chance to interact and cope with the harsh realities of Realpolitik.
Lutz Edzard was professor of Hebrew and Semitic Linguistics at the University of Oslo from 2002 until 2016, and has served as "professor II" there until 2018. In 2013, he was appointed professor of Arabic and Semitic Linguistics at the University of Erlangen-Nürnberg.
If you have any questions concerning the seminar, please contact our CIMS coordinator, Alexandra H. Koritzinsky, either by email: a.h.koritzinsky@ikos.uio.no, or at: (+47) 957 21 103
Syria: The largest forced displacement crisis in the world
A seminar with Elizabeth Hoff, WHO Representative in Syria.
Free admission and open to all.
Time and place: Sep. 12, 2018 3:15 PM–5:00 PM, Georg Sverdrups hus, Aud. 2
The crisis in Syria continues to drive the largest displacement crisis in the world. There are over 5,5 million refugees across the region, and over six million internally displaced.
While fighting continues in some parts of Syria, recent developments on the ground have also meant that people have returned to areas where fighting has receded. Over the last seven years, WHO has led the health sector response for Syria's exhausted and traumatized civilians. This presentation provides an update on the current humanitarian situation, status of the health care system and WHO's response work.
Ms Elizabeth Hoff (Norway) has occupied the post of WHO Representative in Syria since 23 July 2012. Prior to this assignment, Ms Hoff was Leader, Emergency Risk Management and Humanitarian Response, at WHO headquarters, Geneva. Ms Hoff has a Master of Science Degree in Community Health, with a focus on maternal and child health, from the University of California, San Francisco, USA (1991), and a Degree in Conflict Resolution from Harvard Law School, USA (1996).
Ms Hoff has extensive experience working for international organizations in Africa, Asia, Eastern Europe and the Middle East. She has also served as WHO Regional Advisor for Family and Reproductive Health in Africa and as WHO Representative in Armenia. As Chief of Operations, UNITAID, and Cluster Leader at the Global Fund, Ms Hoff also worked in HIV/AIDS, TB and Malaria programmes.
If you have any questions concerning the seminar, please contact our CIMS coordinator, Alexandra H. Koritzinsky, either by email: a.h.koritzinsky@ikos.uio.no, or at: (+47) 957 21 103.
Palestinian Mobility in the Time of Closure/The US, Israel, and UNRWA
A seminar with Professor Julie Peteet, the University of Louisville, and Professor Rex Brynen, McGill University.
Free admission and open to all.
Time and place: Aug. 30, 2018 10:00 AM–12:00 PM, Eilert Sundts hus, A-blokka: Auditorium 5
A main attribute of the occupation of the West Bank is control over the movement of people and goods. Palestinians live in a dense, interwoven matrix of structural and bureaucratic forms that regulate and control their mobility with the aim of immobilizing them in ever shrinking spaces. What does immobilization look like in everyday life and how is it negotiated, accommodated, and resisted?
Julie Peteet is Professor of Anthropology and Director of Middle East and Islamic Studies at the University of Louisville. Her research has focused on Palestinian displacement, refugee camps, space and identity, and mobilities and the policy of closure in the West Bank. She has authored three books:Space and Mobility in Palestine; Landscape of Hope and Despair. Palestinian Refugee Camps; andGender in Crisis; Women and the Palestinian Resistance Movement.
The US, Israel, and UNRWA
In this talk, I would discuss the current politics of UNRWA: US funding cuts, Congressional pressure to redefine refugee status, the role that Israeli views may have played in this, and the implications for UNRWA and Palestinian refugees).
Rex Brynen is Professor of Political Science at McGill University. He is author, coauthor, or editor of a dozen books on Middle East politics, including The Palestinian Refugee Problem: The Search for a Resolution (2014), Compensation to Palestinian Refugees and the Search for Palestinian-Israeli Peace (2013), and Palestinian Refugees: Challenges of Repatriation and Development (2007).
If you have any questions concerning the seminar, please contact our CIMS coordinator, Alexandra H. Koritzinsky, either by email: a.h.koritzinsky@ikos.uio.no, or at: (+47) 957 21 103.
Post-Ottoman Space: What Can Ottoman Legacies Tell Us about the Contemporary Middle East and Balkans?
A seminar with Associate Professor Einar Wigen, University of Oslo.
Free admission and open to all.
Time and place: May 4, 2018 12:15 PM–2:00 PM, Eilert Sundts hus Aud. 5
When grouping together polities for contemporary academic study, it is not uncommon to take the preceding empire as its organising principle. Area studies areas are often deemed to be areas by virtue of their common imperial origins. Categorising and grouping together polities in a particular way highlights certain commonalities at the expense of others, and that highlighting can offer valuable insights. Post-Ottoman studies is in some ways an area studies principle that never was. Despite the Ottoman Empire's disappearance a mere century ago, and leaving important political legacies across the political space that it governed, there has been no systematic programme for the study of Ottoman legacies in post-Ottoman space. In this lecture Wigen explores the potential of such a programme.
Einar Wigen is associate professor of Turkish studies at the University of Oslo. His research is primarily at the intersection between international studies, translation, history and legitimacy in Ottoman and Turkish politics. Wigen is author of State of Translation. Turkey in Interlingual Relations (University of Michigan Press, forthcoming 2018) and (w/ Iver B. Neumann) The Steppe Tradition in International Relations. Russians, Turks and European State Building 4000BCE-2018 CE (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming 2018).
If you have any questions concerning the seminar, please contact our CIMS coordinator, Alexandra H. Koritzinsky, either by email: a.h.koritzinsky@ikos.uio.no, or at: (+47) 957 21 103.
The Green Line of the Jerusalem Code: Nineteenth Century Scandinavians in the "Holy Land"
A seminar with Associate Professor Ragnhild Johnsrud Zorgati, University of Oslo.
Free admission and open to all.
Time and place: Apr. 20, 2018 12:15 PM–2:00 PM, Eilert Sundts hus Aud. 5
My lecture explores the increased scientific and political interest that Europeans took in Jerusalem and Palestine in the nineteenth century. I delve into this issue through analyzing the significance of flowers and plants in Scandinavian travelogues and scientific works from the period.
Ragnhild Johnsrud Zorgati is Associate Professor in the Study of Religion at the Department of Culture Studies and Oriental Languages at the University of Oslo.
If you have any questions concerning the seminar, please contact our CIMS coordinator, Alexandra H. Koritzinsky, either by email: a.h.koritzinsky@ikos.uio.no, or at: (+47) 957 21 103.
The Culture of Turkish Politics
A seminar with Professor Jenny White, Stockholm University Institute for Turkish Studies.
Free admission and open to all.
Time and place: Apr. 12, 2018 12:15 PM–2:00 PM, Eilert Sundts hus Aud. 5
Political and economic life in Turkey has long relied on highly personalized networks that redistribute power and resources and allow some parts of the population to rise at the expense of others. Is that era now coming to an end with the installation of a single, autocratic leader?
Jenny White is a social anthropologist and professor at Stockholm University Institute for Turkish Studies. She served as president of the Turkish Studies Association and of the American Anthropological Association Middle East Section. She authored several book about Turkey, including Muslim Nationalism and the New Turks (chosen by Foreign Affairs as one of three best books on the Middle East in 2012),
If you have any questions concerning the seminar, please contact our CIMS coordinator, Alexandra H. Koritzinsky, either by email: a.h.koritzinsky@ikos.uio.no, or at: (+47) 957 21 103.
The Orient and Foucault’s Achilles’ Heel
A seminar with Professor Marnia Lazreg, Hunter College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York.
Free admission and open to all.
Time and place: Apr. 6, 2018 12:15 PM–2:00 PM, Eilert Sundts hus Aud. 5
Foucault thought of the Orient as a “limit” to Western rationality. What did he mean by this? To what extent did this view inflect his experience of non-Western cultures? Using archival research supplemented by interviews with key scholars, this talk traces the genealogy of Foucault’s construction of the Orient as he faced the challenge of the Iranian Revolution and Japanese culture.
Marnia Lazreg is a professor of sociology at Hunter College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York. Her research focuses on gender in the Middle East and North Africa, colonial history, and constructions of cultural otherness in social theory. She is the author, among others, of Foucaults’ Orient: The Conundrum of Cultural Difference, From Tunisia to Japan (Berghahn 2017); Questioning the Veil: Open Letters to Muslim Women (Princeton, 2010); and Torture and the Twilight of Empire: From Algiers to Baghdad (Princeton 2008, 2017).
If you have any questions concerning the seminar, please contact our CIMS coordinator, Alexandra H. Koritzinsky, either by email: a.h.koritzinsky@ikos.uio.no, or at: (+47) 957 21 103.
Gender and Crime in Times of Political Turmoil: How Raya and Sakina Became the Evilest of Egypt
A seminar with Postdoctoral Fellow Elena Chiti, Department of Culture Studies and Oriental Languages, University of Oslo.
Free admission and open to all.
Time and place: Mar. 23, 2018 12:15 PM–2:00 PM, Eilert Sundts hus Aud. 5
In the aftermath of the Great War, Egypt was shaken by massive anti-colonial protests, which also witnessed the participation of women. Their visibility in the public space, in a time of political turmoil, was accompanied by a reflection on their role at home and in the society. This emerges from the analysis of crime accounts, in which mobility, and its stigmatisation, played a significant role. A series of murders, in particular, attracted broad national attention. It involved a gang of men and women, arrested in Alexandria in 1920. The press depicted the women, Raya and Sakina, as the masterminds of the crimes. They soon became - and still are - for the Egyptian public the symbol of women's evilness.
Elena Chiti is a Postdoctoral Fellow at IKOS, University of Oslo. A cultural historian of Egypt, she is interested in fictional and non-fictional crime accounts, as sources to study public morality in its link to nation-building."
If you have any questions concerning the seminar, please contact our CIMS coordinator, Alexandra H. Koritzinsky, either by email: a.h.koritzinsky@ikos.uio.no, or at: (+47) 957 21 103.
The Epic of Gilgamesh: Recovering the Masterpiece of Babylonian Poetry
A seminar with Professor Andrew George, the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London.
Free admission and open to all.
Time and place: Mar. 16, 2018 12:15 PM–2:00 PM, Eilert Sundts hus Aud. 5
The Epic of Gilgamesh is a 4,000-year-old Mesopotamian poem about a hero who embarks on an arduous quest to find the secret of immortality. Preserved on clay tablets in cuneiform script, it is the oldest long narrative poem in human history. This illustrated lecture explores four themes related to this Babylonian masterpiece: the archaeology of the poem's recovery, the reconstruction of its text, the story it tells, and its enduring message about life, death and the human condition.
Andrew George was educated at the University of Birmingham and the Prince of Wales, Darlaston. He is now Professor of Babylonian at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. He is best known for his critical edition and prize-winning translation of the Epic of Gilgamesh.
The lecture will be followed by a panel discussion about the value of longue durée historical studies.
If you have any questions concerning the seminar, please contact our CIMS coordinator, Alexandra H. Koritzinsky, either by email: a.h.koritzinsky@ikos.uio.no, or at: (+47) 957 21 103.
Anti-Sectarianism in the Arab World
A seminar with Professor Ussama Makdisi, Rice University.
Free admission and open to all.
Time and place: Mar. 2, 2018 12:15 PM–2:00 PM, Eilert Sundts hus Aud. 5
This talk provides a historical perspective to the contemporary sectarian tragedy that is unfolding in that part of the world. But it also delves into a complex, and now obscured, modern culture of coexistence in a region rich in religious diversity, but which today encompasses several war-torn countries including Syria, Iraq and Lebanon. In particular, I dispute two narratives that have traditionally dominated the story of diversity in the Middle East.
The first stresses a continuous history of either latent or actual sectarian strife between allegedly antagonistic religious communities; the second idealizes coexistence and communal harmony between Muslims and non-Muslims. Rather than taking sectarianism or coexistence for granted, or assuming either of them to be age-old features of the Middle East, I am interested in historicizing both notions.
Above all, I emphasize how the struggle to define the contours of modern society in the Middle East has been multifaceted and contradictory. It has received its fair share of setbacks, in our own age perhaps more obviously than in others. But as I see it, this struggle has nonetheless raged uninterruptedly for a century. This history deserves an empathetic telling.
Ussama Makdisi is Professor of History and the first holder of the Arab-American Educational Foundation Chair of Arab Studies at Rice University. He is the author of several book, including The Culture of Sectarianism: Community, History, and Violence in Nineteenth-Century Ottoman Lebanon (University of California Press, 2000), and is now working on a manuscript on the origins of sectarianism in the modern Middle East to be published by the University of California Press.
If you have any questions concerning the seminar, please contact our CIMS coordinator, Alexandra H. Koritzinsky, either by email: a.h.koritzinsky@ikos.uio.no, or at: (+47) 957 21 103.
Labelling Syrian Refugees in Lebanon
A seminar with Professor Maja Janmyr, the Norwegian Center for Human Rights, Faculty of Law, University of Oslo.
Free admission and open to all.
Time and place: Jan. 26, 2018 12:15 PM–2:00 PM, Eilert Sundts hus, aud. 5
In this seminar, Maja Janmyr will explore the various legal, bureaucratic and social labels that Syrians in Lebanon are given by humanitarian, state and local government actors. A wide array of labels are imposed; registered refugee, laborer, displaced, foreigner, and more. These labels carry with them implications for what a Syrian may do, and how her presence is understood by others in the community. The labels also influence what type of rights and protections she may have access to. Importantly, the emergence of labels in one arena often influences how and why another set of labels takes shape in another.
Maja Janmyr is Professor of international migration law at the Norwegian Center for Human Rights, Faculty of Law, University of Oslo. Her current research is on refugee rights in the Middle East, with a primary focus on Syrian and Sudanese refugees in Lebanon. She is also conducting research on rights mobilization among Nubians in Egypt.
If you have any questions concerning the seminar, please contact our CIMS coordinator, Alexandra H. Koritzinsky, either by email: a.h.koritzinsky@ikos.uio.no, or at: (+47) 957 21 103.
2017
Investigating the Syrian Uprising from YouTube
A seminar with Dr Cécile Boëx, École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS).
Free admission and open to all.
Time and place: Nov. 24, 2017 10:15 AM–12:00 PM, Eilert Sundts hus, aud. 6
Since 2011, the uprising and then the conflict in Syria generated hundreds of thousands of videos filmed by ordinary protestors, activists or fighters and uploaded on the Internet. How can these anonymous, fragmentary images and sounds become a source of knowledge for social sciences ? I will adress this question from the perspective of the role of videos on the emergence of an unprecedented culture of protest and martyrdom.
Cécile Boëx is a political scientist and a researcher at École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS). Among other topics, Boëx studies cultural production in authoritarian regimes and the use of video as a tool of protest in a Middle Eastern context.
Art and Political Struggle in Tunisia
A seminar with Professor Emeritus Charles Tripp, School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London.
Free admission and open to all.
Time and place: Nov. 22, 2017 10:15 AM–12:00 PM, Eilert Sundts hus, aud. 6 (Blindern)
This talk will explore the ways in which artistic interventions have played a role in Tunisian politics during the years of revolution. Art has been a key method of reclaiming public space, of asserting the rights of citizens, and of challenging established power in Tunisia. As the years since 2011 have shown, this is an ongoing struggle, indicative of the nature of state power and of entrenched social norms, but also representing the emerging potential of the Tunisian public sphere.
About the lecturer
Charles Tripp is Professor Emeritus of Politics with reference to the Middle East, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London and a Fellow of the British Academy. His most recent book is The Power and the People: Paths of Resistance in the Middle East (Cambridge, 2013). He is presently working on a project on the rethinking of republicanism in Tunisia.
Roots of Counter-revolution in Egypt: The Immovable Objects Confronting the January 25th Revolution’s Irresistible Forces
A seminar with Associate Professor Walter Armbrust, University of Oxford.
Free admission and open to all.
Time and place: Nov. 17, 2017 10:15 AM–12:00 PM, Eilert Sundts hus, aud. 6
Early accounts of the January 25th Revolution largely bypassed expressions of opposition to it. Later accounts explained opposition as having arisen through revolutionary politics after 2011. But rejection of the revolution was also manifested in deep-rooted loyalty to Hosny Mubarak and his regime. Such loyalties were crucial to the ultimate defeat of the revolution. His lecture traces continuities in pro-regime sentiments through contention over the status of pro-regime symbols in urban space and in the media.
Dr Walter Armbrust is Associate Professor in Modern Middle Eastern Studies at St Antony's College, University of Oxford. He is a cultural anthropologist, and author of Mass Culture and Modernism in Egypt (1996) and various other works focusing on popular culture, politics and mass media in Egypt.
If you have any questions concerning the seminar, please contact our CIMS coordinator, Alexandra H. Koritzinsky, either by email: a.h.koritzinsky@ikos.uio.no, or at: (+47) 957 21 103.
Cynicism, Hope, and Human Rights in Palestine
A seminar with Dr Lori Allen, School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London.
Free admission and open to all.
Time and place: Nov. 3, 2017 10:15 AM–12:00 PM, Eilert Sundts hus, aud. 6
This talk situates current attempts to intervene on behalf of Palestinian human rights in the history of humanitarian interventions in Palestine and how the international community has tried to justify its involvement. Hope and cynicism have been generated among Palestinians by this endless cycle of unsuccessful endeavours. I suggest that future efforts must be shaped by the goal of structural and political change, and be guided by Palestinians’ own visions for their future polity.
Lori Allen is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Anthropology at SOAS, University of London. Her first book, The Rise and Fall of Human Rights: Cynicism and Politics in Occupied Palestine, (Stanford University Press, 2013) won the Association for Political and Legal Anthropology book prize. Her current project, "Investigating Liberals: The Politics of Investigative Commissions In Palestine", is a historical-ethnographic study of six commissions that went fact-finding in Palestine between 1919 and 2009.
The Tales of the Prophets: Interdependence between Jewish and Muslim Traditions in the Islamic World
A seminar with Associate Professor Marc S. Bernstein, Michigan State University.
Free admission and open to all.
Time and place: Oct. 27, 2017 10:15 AM–12:00 PM, Eilert Sundts hus, aud. 6
“The Tales of the Prophets” are collections of tales about pre-Islamic figures in the Qur’an stemming from Jewish, Christian and Arabian sources that expand upon typically terse scriptural references. A parallel genre arose among the Arabic-speaking Jewish communities in the Islamic world.
In this talk, we will examine the narrative techniques employed in two such Judeo-Arabic texts about Joseph and Moses, showing the range of interdependence between Jewish and Muslim traditions surrounding figures sacred to both.
Marc S. Bernstein is associate professor of Judaic and Islamic Cultures at Michigan State University.
The Role of Greece and Turkey in the European Refugee Crisis
A seminar with Assistant Professor Vemund Aarbakke, Aristotelian University of Thessaloniki.
Free admission and open to all.
Time and place: Oct. 26, 2017 10:15 AM–11:30 AM, Eilert Sundts hus, aud. 5 (Blindern)
Greece and Turkey are situated at a crossroad for migration from the Middle East to Europe. For decades there has been a trickle of migrants following this route. In 2015, however, the trickle turned into a deluge that shook European migration policies. The lecture will treat the handling of this crisis up until the deal with Turkey in March 2016, and subsequent developments.
About the lecturer
Vemund Aarbakke holds an MA in Balkan studies from the University of Copenhagen and a PhD in history from the University of Bergen, Centre for Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies. Since the mid-2000s he is an assistant professor at the Department of Political Science, Aristotle University, Thessaloniki.
Averroes' Legacy and Islamic Modernity in Morocco Today
A seminar with Driss Ksikes, CESEM (research center of HEM Business School), Rabat.
Free admission and open to all.
Time and place: Oct. 20, 2017 10:15 AM–12:00 PM, Eilert Sundts hus, aud. 6
Averroes (Ibn Rushd), as a rational, Aristotelian philosopher (12th C.) from Muslim Spain (Andalusia) has not been rediscovered in Arabic as a genuine thinker till late 19th C. Since then, attempts to read again and push forward his legacy have been hurdled politically and socially in many ways. Through this case, I will analyze the complex status of modernity in my country, while recounting my own experience as a reader and writer.
Driss Ksikes is a Moroccan playwright, novelist and essay writer, co-author of “Le métier d’intellectuel”, for which he has been awarded Grand Atlas Prize in 2015. Researcher in media and culture, he is since 2007 managing Director of the CESEM (HEM’s research center) and editor of Economia, its main review journal.
Book Launch: Jihad and Death
A book launch seminar with Professor Olivier Roy, European University Institute (EUI).
Free admission and open to all.
Time and place: Oct. 13, 2017 10:15 AM–12:00 PM, Eilert Sundts hus, aud. 6
How has ISIS been able to muster support far beyond its initial constituency in the Arab world and attract tens of thousands of foreign volunteers, including converts to Islam, and seemingly countless supporters online? In this compelling intervention into the debate about ISIS’ origins and future prospects, Olivier Roy argues that while terrorism and jihadism are familiar phenomena, the deliberate pursuit of death has produced a new kind of radical violence. In other words, we’re facing not a radicalization of Islam, but the Islamization of radicalism.
Olivier Roy is a French political scientist and professor at the European University Institute (Florence).
Book Launch: Al-Qaida in Afghanistan
A book launch seminar with Dr Anne Stenersen, Norwegian Defence Research Establishment (FFI).
Free admission and open to all.
Time and place: Sep. 29, 2017 10:15 AM–12:00 PM, Eilert Sundts hus, aud. 6
Since 9/11, al-Qaida has become one of the most infamous and widely discussed terrorist organizations in the world. However, little-known are the group's activities within Afghanistan itself, something which Anne Stenersen examines in her new book.
She argues that al-Qaida's actions were not just an ideological expression of religious fanaticism and violent anti-Americanism, but that they were actually far more practical and organised, with a more revolutionary and Middle Eastern-focused agenda than previously thought. Through Stenersen's analysis, we see how al-Qaida employed a dual strategy: with a small section focused on staging international terrorist attacks, but at the same time a larger part dedicated to building a resilient and cohesive organization that would ultimately serve as a vanguard for future Islamist revolutions.
Anne Stenersen is a research fellow at the Norwegian Defence Research Establishment (FFI). With an academic background rooted in Middle Eastern studies, Arabic and Russian, she has conducted research on militant Islamism, with a focus on CBRN (chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear) terrorism, al-Qaeda’s use of the Internet, and the Taliban insurgency. Her newest book is Al-Qaida in Afghanistan (Cambridge University Press, 2017).
The book will be for sale at the event for a discounted price (150 NOK), to be paid in cash or by Vipps.
The Genealogy of Islamic Economics: Tradition, Modernity, and the Moral Self
A seminar with Sami Al-Daghistani, University of Oslo.
Free admission and open to all.
Time and place: Sep. 15, 2017 10:15 AM–12:00 PM, Eilert Sundts hus, aud. 6
The birth of contemporary Islamic economics was colored by the evolution and classification of the modern natural and social sciences, as well as by 19th century socioeconomic and political developments in the Middle East and South Asia, as many Muslim revivalists across the region envisioned an Islamic society with Sharī‘a as a legal paradigm.
Yet, analysing classical Islamic scholarship on economics reveals that economic thought in Islamic tradition is the least concerned with economics and law, in terms of material prosperity, consumption, and the transfer of wealth. Rather, it pertains to much broader human relations and behavioural patterns of spiritual, metaphysical, and moreover, moral qualities that are generated from the moral cosmology of Shari'a.
Sami Al-Daghistani is a Research Fellow at the Department of Culture Studies and Oriental Languages, University of Oslo, and a Research Scholar at the Institute for Religion, Culture, and Public Life at Columbia University. He has achieved a double-PhD in Islamic Studies (degree to be conferred in October 2017) under the mentorship of Maurits Berger (Leiden University), Marco Schöller (WWU Münster) and Wael Hallaq (Columbia University), and has published on Islamic intellectual history, economic thought in Islamic tradition, and legal discourse.
Sami's two monographs Abu Hamid al-Ghazali's Economic Philosophy between Shari'a and Sufism, and The Making of Islamic Economics: Epistemological Inquiry into Islam's Moral Economic Teaching, Legal Discourse, and Islamization Process are forthcoming in 2017.
State Formation, Deformation and Failure in the Arab World
A seminar with Professor Lisa Anderson, Columbia University.
Free admission and open to all. NOTE: This seminar starts at 12:15.
Time and place: Sep. 1, 2017 12:15 PM–2:00 PM, Eilert Sundts hus, aud. 6
The states of the Middle East and North Africa are relatively recent inventions—conventionally dated to the demise of the Ottoman Empire in 1923—and there are many other ways human communities in the region have governed themselves, kept the peace and fostered arts and letters. Today, the modern state seems both triumphant and under siege, challenged by globalization of trade and the mobility of labor, arms and ideas throughout the world. Are there genuine alternatives to the modern state—whether traditional or newly invented--in the region today? What might such “non-state actors” mean for the capacity and longevity of the current states?
Lisa Anderson is Senior Lecturer and Dean Emerita at the Columbia University School of International and Public Affairs. A specialist on politics in the Arab world, she served as provost and then president of the American University in Cairo from 2008 to 2016.
Strategising the Dream: What would it take for the Kurdistan Region of Iraq to become the Republic of Kurdistan?
A seminar with Professor Gareth Stansfield, University of Exeter.
Free admission and open for all.
Time and place: May 12, 2017 10:15 AM–12:00 PM, Eilert Sundts hus, aud.6
With the ongoing Mosul Operation against IS seemingly entering an end-state, pre-Islamic State issues are again reassuming their importance in Iraq. One of the mosts significant of these is the status of the Kurdistan Region. Recognising that their influence will at least change, if not diminish, in a post-Islamic State Iraq, the Kurdish leadership, and particularly the leaders of the KDP, are advocating the holding of a referendum on independence.
This lecture will consider the rationale for this referendum, the domestic politics underpinning it and the regional politics that may, or may not, be acting to constrain it. ‘The day after’ will also be discussed – what do the Kurds intend to do with the result of the referendum? And what needs to happen to ensure that a possible ‘Republic of Kurdistan’ is sustainable politically and economically, as a land-locked state in a region that has, traditionally, not been supportive to Kurdish statements of self-determination?
Gareth Stansfield is Professor of Middle East Politics at the University of Exeter. His research focuses on politics and the political economy of Iraq, the Kurdish regions of the Middle East, dynamics of Gulf/Arabian peninsular security, and questions of post-conflict stabilization and nation/state building.
Arabs, Hebrews, and Europe: An etymological rhapsody
A seminar with Professor Stephan Guth, University of Oslo.
Free admission and open for all.
Time and place: Apr. 28, 2017 10:15 AM–12:00 PM, Eilert Sundts hus, aud.6
Like archaeology, etymology is a «high risk» enterprise—when you start digging you never know what you will unearth from the hidden layers of the soil of history. In regions like the Middle East, the findings easily may become explosives.
This lecture/seminar dares to take a deeper look into the seemingly unsuspicious Arabic root عرب cRB, underlying the «Arabs» (carab) and the notorious icrāb (which makes the Arabs’ language into «real» Arabic). But these are only two out of a dazzling variety of meanings attached to the root. Some people even derive the name «Europe» from cRB, while others connect it to cBR, whence the name «Hebrew» (cibrī)… So, are Arabs, Hebrews, and Europeans all essientially one?
Stephan Guth is professor of Arabic at IKOS since 2007. One of his current research projects is the establishment of an Etymological Dictionary of the Arabic Language.
Scholarly Life in Times of Turmoil: al-Qadi Iyad in twelfth century Ceuta
A seminar with Dr Nora S. Eggen, University of Oslo.
Free admission and open for all.
Time and place: Apr. 21, 2017 10:15 AM–12:00 PM, Eilert Sundts hus, aud.6
The famous North African scholar Iyad ibn Musa (d. 1149) received his training in the classical disciplines of knowledge and worked most of his life as a teacher, writer and judge. He lived to see the Almoravid dynasty grow and flourish, then crumble and fall apart at the hands of the Almohad dynasty, and he was deeply affected by the conflicting theological, ideological and political interests in his time.
Towards the end of his life he wrote a catalogue reviewing his intellectual formation, and in many ways his life. What can this autobiographical account can tell us about the struggles and pleasures of Medieval scholarly life?
Nora S. Eggen is a postdoctoral fellow Institute of Culture Studies and Oriental Languages (IKOS) at the University of Oslo, and holds at PhD in Arabic and Islamic Studies from the same university. Her research interests are intellectual history and translation studies.
The Aftermath of Turkey's Gezi Protests: How political parties respond to social movements
A seminar with Jonas Dræge, European University Institute (EUI), Firenze.
Free admission and open for all.
Time and place: Mar. 31, 2017 10:15 AM–12:00 PM, Eilert Sundts hus, aud.6
The presentation explores the response of Turkish political parties to the 2013 Gezi protests, the biggest wave of protests in Turkey's history. It assesses how the four parliamentary parties in Turkey framed the protests, whether the protests were accompanied by changes in parliamentary interventions and party manifestos, and whether local politicians shifted budget allocations following the events.
Jonas Bergan Dræge is a PhD researcher in political science at the European University Institute. He specialises in political behaviour and contentious politics, with a focus on the Middle East. Draege completed an MPhil with distinction in Modern Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Oxford in 2013, and a BA in Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Oslo in 2010.
Coup Narratives in Turkey
A seminar with Dr. Hakkı Taş, Philipp Schwartz Fellow, University of Bremen.
Free admission and open for all.
Time and place: Mar. 24, 2017 10:15 AM–12:00 PM, Eilert Sundts hus, aud.6
A country which went through all sorts of military interventions in its short history saw another attempt on the bloody night of July 15. Broadcasted live on TV channels and followed instantly on social media, Turks witnessed every minute of the abortive coup. Yet, despite that kind of high exposure, the chain of events on July 15 are still murky. First providing some background on the triangle of Islam, politics, and the military in Turkey, this lecture outlines divergent narratives which highlight some facets of the abortive coup and connect them so as to promote a particular interpretation.
Dr. Hakkı Taş is a research fellow at the Institute for Intercultural and International Studies, University of Bremen. Holding a PhD in Political Science from Bilkent University, Taş has been a visiting researcher at Yale University, American University in Cairo and Swedish Defence University. His research interests include democratization, civil-military relations, and identity politics with a special focus on Turkey and Egypt.
'Deviance' Wears Adidas: When Iran’s government morality meets PLWH (People Living with HIV/AIDS)
A seminar with K. Soraya Batmanghelichi.
Free admission and open for all.
Time and place: Mar. 17, 2017 10:15 AM–12:00 PM, Eilert Sundts hus, aud.6
Inspired by Allan Brandt’s exploration of the social history of AIDS, this lecture is part of a series dedicated to collecting the many diverse stories about sexuality in contemporary Iran, as told by its Tehrani denizens. “‘Deviance’ Wears Adidas” is based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Tehran from 2010-2012, and focuses on a select group of ordinary Iranian women living with HIV whose stories illuminate the chaotic processes of negotiation as well as how to effectively manage desires of motherhood, respectability, and health in an Islamic republic. The lecture will highlight the tensions between medical and moral approaches to HIV/AIDS in Iran, highlighting some of the medical, social, and public health interventions impacting how these women approach spousal intimacy, femininity, faith, and moreover, sexuality.
Dr. Batmanghelichi is a women's activist and feminist scholar. A postdoctoral research fellow at the Institute of Religion, Culture and Public Life at Columbia University, she is also an associate faculty member at the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research. Her research focuses on contemporary women's movements, sexuality, and gendered public space in the modern Middle East.
Unveiling after Veiling: The unveiling of young Egyptian women
A seminar with Asmae Badr Ibrahim, University of Copenhagen.
Free admission and open for all.
Time and place: Mar. 10, 2017 10:15 AM–12:00 PM, Eilert Sundts hus, aud.6
Why are a large number of young Egyptian women unveiling after over a decade of adopting the Islamic veil? “Unveiling after veiling” is a seminar presenting a master´s thesis on the unveiling of both ordinary young women and former members of the Islamic revival movement following the Egyptian 2011-revolution.
Asmae Badr Ibrahim is a recent political science graduate from the University of Copenhagen who has primarily worked on issues related to political islam in the MENA region following the Arab Spring. She has a background in assisting policy research in the Danish Institute for International Studies and teaching at the Danish Defence College. Furthermore she has worked with civil society organizations in Middle East and North Africa.
Translating Indian Muslim Thinkers: Ömer Rıza Doğrul and the forging of a post-pan-islamist republican Islam
A seminar with Professor Nathalie Clayer, École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS).
Free admission and open for all.
Time and place: Mar. 3, 2017 10:15 AM–12:00 PM, Eilert Sundts hus, aud.6
Ömer Rıza was one of the most prolific authors of books on Islamic religion in the new Turkish Republic during the single party period (1923-1945). Crowned by his translation-cum-commentary of the Quran published in 1934, Ömer Rıza’s publications were often inspired by his exhaustive reading of Indian Muslim authors, be they translations or adaptations of them. This is largely the result of circulation between the Ottoman and British empires at the beginning of the 20th century – partly resulting from pan-Islamist endeavours – that shaped Ömer Rıza’s own particular profile and personal networks and affected, in his youth, his worldview and Islamic knowledge.
Nathalie Clayer is professor at the EHESS and a senior research fellow at the CNRS (Paris). Her main research interests are religion, nationalism and state-building process in the Ottoman and post-Ottoman space. Her publications include Aux origines du nationalisme albanais. La naissance d’une nation majoritairement musulmane en Europe (Karthala, 2007), Conflicting Loyalties in the Balkans co-edited with Hannes Grandits and Robert Pichler (Tauris, 2011) and, with Xavier Bougarel, Europe's Balkan Muslims. A New History (Hurst, 2017).
Transforming Femininities in Saudi Arabia: Space, power and 'reform'
A seminar with Amélie Le Renard, The French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) and a member of Centre Maurice Halbwachs.
Free admission and open for all.
Time and place: Mar. 2, 2017 2:15 PM–4:00 PM, Eilert Sundts hus, aud. 6
In the 2000s, the Saudi government has promoted a new role for Saudi women in the framework of its ‘reform’ discourse, aiming to change the image of the nation. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in Riyadh, this presentation discusses young urban Saudi women’s mobile lifestyles and access to various spaces. In particular, it will analyze how their inclusion as professionals in multinationals transforms gender norms, opening career opportunities but also creating new constraints.
Amelie Le Renard is a permanent researcher at CNRS (Paris). She has published A Society of Young Women. Opportunities of Place, Power, and Reform in Saudi Arabia (Stanford University Press, 2014).
The Iraqi Origins of the Islamic State
A seminar with Dr Truls Hallberg Tønnessen, Norwegian Defence Research Establishment (FFI).
Free admission and open for all.
Time and place: Feb. 17, 2017 10:15 AM–12:00 PM, Eilert Sundts hus, aud.6
The predecessor of the group current known as the Islamic State, al-Qaida in Iraq, was founded by foreign veterans from the conflict in Afghanistan. The Islamic State itself has attracted an unprecedented large number of foreign fighters from all over the world and engaged in a campaign of international terrorism. At the same time, the Islamic State has also been described as the heirs of Saddam Hussein and the Ba‘th party.
What are the Iraqi origins of al-Qaida in Iraq, and subsequently the Islamic State? What role did Iraqis play within the organization and to what extent has recent historical trends in Iraq and the Iraqi context influenced and facilitated the rise of al-Qaida in Iraq and its successor, the Islamic State?
Truls Hallberg Tønnessen is a Research Fellow at the Norwegian Defence Research Establishment's (FFI) Terrorism Research Group, and former visiting scholar at Center for Security Studies, Georgetown University (2016). He holds a Phd in history from University of Oslo on the rise of al-Qaida in Iraq. He has published several articles on the conflict in Iraq and Syria.
Religious Belonging in Pakistan: Ritual, language, and the production of ‘minorities’
A seminar with Associate Professor II Paul Rollier, University of Oslo.
Free admission and open for all.
Time and place: Feb. 10, 2017 10:15 AM–12:00 PM, Eilert Sundts hus, aud.6
Sectarian attacks, Islamist militancy and the marginalization of Pakistan’s religious minorities are often understood as proceeding from an undue emphasis on Sunni Islam at the heart of Pakistani nationalism. Mainstream analyses tend to privilege a top-down, security-orientated view of religious formations that conceal much of the everyday processes and reasoning through which ordinary Pakistanis come to think about and perform religious belonging.
Drawing on recent ethnographic fieldwork, Rollier will focus on Pakistan’s two largest ‘minorities’, Shias and Christians, to illustrate how religious identity articulates with ideas of the nation and the region. His analysis foregrounds the ways in which issues of language, such as blasphemy accusations, and public rituals —from Muharram processions to Catholic pilgrimages—have become prominent sites for the negotiation of what it means to be Pakistani.
Paul Rollier is a social anthropologist, assistant professor in South Asian Studies at the University of St. Gallen (Switzerland), and associate professor II at IKOS (UiO). His research focuses on political culture and the anthropology of religion in Pakistan.
The Metamorphosis of the ‘Intellectual’ in Twentieth-Century Egypt
A seminar with Dr Teresa Pepe, University of Oslo.
Free admission and open for all.
Time and place: Feb. 3, 2017 10:15 AM–12:00 PM, Eilert Sundts hus, aud. 6
What is the Arabic term used to indicate the ‘intellectual’? Is it muthaqqaf (lit. ‘cultured’) or mufakkir (thinker)? Can we still use adīb (lit. man of letter) or the more general kātib (writer)? Or should we rather use khabīr (expert)?
Drawing on the method of conceptual history, this lecture highlights how these different words have been used in different periods of time over the twentieth-century to indicate the ‘intellectual’ in the Egyptian cultural field. This change was not a mere linguistic one; rather it marked a profound transformation of the economic, social and conceptual relations in which writers and thinkers stood.
The historical excursus will shed light on how these same concepts indicating the ‘intellectual’ are being re-challenged and re-imagined today in the midst of global and local cultural transformations. Furthermore, the understanding of these concepts from a historical perspective will also help us to understand the post-Arab Spring cultural scene, where “the absence” or “metamorphosis” of the “intellectuals”, and the failure of “high culture” to contribute to political events is often debated.
Teresa Pepe is a post-doctoral fellow at the Institute of Culture Studies and Oriental Languages (IKOS) at the University of Oslo. She holds a PhD in Middle Eastern Studies and Literature from the University of Oslo (2014). She specializes in modern Arabic language and culture, with a particular interest in questions of youth, media transitions, and conceptual transformations.
Unclear Physics: Why Iraq and Libya failed to build nuclear weapons
A seminar with Associate Professor Målfrid Braut-Hegghammer, University of Oslo.
Free admission and open for all.
Time and place: Jan. 27, 2017 10:15 AM–12:00 PM, Eilert Sundts hus, aud.6
Many authoritarian leaders want nuclear weapons, but few manage to acquire them. Autocrats seeking nuclear weapons fail in different ways and to varying degrees—Iraq almost managed it; Libya did not come close.
In this seminar, Målfrid Braut-Hegghammer compares the two failed nuclear weapons programs, arguing that state capacity played a crucial role in the trajectory and outcomes of both projects. This analysis is based on a rich set of new primary sources, collected during years of research in archives, fieldwork across the Middle East, and interviews with scientists and decision makers from both states. The analysis reveals contemporary perspectives from scientists and regime officials on the opportunities and challenges facing each project. Many of the findings challenge the conventional wisdom about clandestine weapons programs in closed authoritarian states, particularly the level of oversight and control by regime officials, and offers novel arguments about their prospects of success or failure.
Målfrid Braut-Hegghammer is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Oslo. She received her doctoral degree from London School of Economics in 2009, which received the Michael Nicholson Thesis Prize from BISA in 2010. She recently published Unclear Physics: Why Iraq and Libya failed to build nuclear weapons (Cornell University Press, 2016).
2016
Chaos with a Hidden Script? Making sense of the current situation in the Greater Syria region
A seminar with Professor Bernard Rougier, Sorbonne Paris III University.
Free admission and open for all.
Time and place: Dec. 13, 2016 10:15 AM–12:00 PM, Eilert Sundts hus Aud. 6
The lecture will provide some clues for understanding chaos and violence in the Middle East - by focusing mainly on "Great Syria" (Sham) i.e mosty Syria, Iraq, Lebanon and Palestine. Part of the problem stems from the structural contradiction that haunts Sunni political and religious expressions in the Arab East. This contradiction results from Islamism's ambivalence depending on the milieu of reception – destructuring in Sunni circles, structuring in Shiite circles. In the former, the religious ideology destroyed the legitimacy of civil elites that “do not govern according to the Law of God.” In the latter, it structures a confessional cohesion around a new political leadership (Hezbollah in Lebanon, Shiite militias in Iraq post-2003).
Bernard Rougier is Professor of Arab civilisation and society at Sorbonne Paris III University. He has spent more than fifteen years in the Middle East (Lebanon, Jordan, Egypt, Syria). He published "The Sunni Tragedy in the Middle East" at Princeton University Press in 2015, and "Everyday Jihad' at Harvard Universtiy Press in 2007.
From Qadhafi to Chaos: The Origins, Expansion, Decline, and Rebranding of the Islamic State in Libya
A seminar with Jason Pack, Cambridge University.
Free admission and open for all.
Time and place: Dec. 5, 2016 12:15 PM–2:00 PM, Eilert Sundts hus Aud. 6
Since the ouster of Muammar Qadhafi in 2011, Libya’s statelessness made it the ideal spot for jihadi fighters returning from Syria and Iraq. In 2014, this led initially to the Islamic State’s takeover of the only city in Libya with decades long networks to global jihadism – Derna.
Initially, the links of ISIS in Derna to Mosul and Raqqa were quite loose, but overtime ISIS’s Libya franchise came to imitate many of the key attributes of ISIS’s core in the Levant. Due to ISIS penchant for excessive brutality and extractive governance, it provoked a backlash against its rule in Derna early 2015. Meanwhile, it capitalized on the civic war inside Sirte coopting both Ansar al-Sharia elements there and disgruntled formerly pro-Qadhafi tribes. Drawing on these alliances and brutally suppressing their opponents, groups pledging allegiance ISIS established themselves as the sole power to be reckoned with in Sirte in 2015.
Now, in late 2016, after a fairly successful offensive by Misratan-led militias supported by US airstrikes, Libya is a case study of how jihadi groups can regroup and rebrand themselves when ISIS’s territorial model collapses.
Jason Pack is a Researcher of Middle Eastern History at Cambridge University, President of Libya-Analysis®, and Founder of EyeOnISISinLibya.com. He and the EyeOnISIS team are in the process of authoring the definitive overview of the Islamic State’s activities in Libya for The Brookings Institution. His articles have appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Spectator, Foreign Affairs, Newsweek, and Foreign Policy. One of the few Western experts on Libya's jihadi militias, he has briefed officials at the MoD, DoD, FCO, State Department, NATO, and UN on the threats that the Islamic State's growth in Libya poses to essential Western interests
A New Digital Library on Jihadism: Furthering Jihadism Research through Archiving and Sharing Primary Sources
A seminar with Dr Anne Stenersen (FFI), Dr Thomas Hegghammer (FFI) and professor Brynjar Lia (IKOS).
Free admission and open for all.
Time and place: Nov. 25, 2016 12:15 PM–2:00 PM, Eilert Sundts hus, aud. 6
The Jihadi Document Repository (JDR) is a joint-project between the Department of Culture Studies and Oriental Languages (IKOS) and the Norwegian Research Establishment (FFI) to collect, systematize and publish jihadist primary sources dating back to the 1980s. The JDR online archive was established in 2015, and by the time of writing, it includes more than 2,000 documents, including statements, pamphlets, journals, books, interviews and memoirs. The JDR project responds to the need to create a trusted, open-access corpus of jihadist primary sources in order to facilitate knowledge accumulation and to prevent duplicate data collection
efforts.
At the seminar, Dr Anne Stenersen (FFI), Dr Thomas Hegghammer (FFI) and professor Brynjar Lia (IKOS) will share their thoughts on how the JDR can contribute to research on jihadi movements.
Hacking for the Homeland: Palestinian resistance in the digital era
A seminar with Erik Skare.
Free admission and open for all.
Time and place: Nov. 11, 2016 12:15 PM–2:00 PM, Eilert Sundts hus, aud. 6
An innovative and technology-driven form of dissent has emerged in response to the Israeli occupation of Palestine. Dubbed “electronic jihad,” this approach by groups of Palestinian hackers has made international headlines by breaching the security of websites, such as the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange, Avira, Whatsapp, and BitDefender.Though initially confined to small clandestine groups, interest in hacktivism continues to grow and is being adopted by militant Palestinian parties, including Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, groups which are now incorporating hackers into their ranks.
Erik Skare is a PhD fellow at the University of Oslo with background from UiO and Birzeit University. His current project studies are Hamas' governance in Gaza, and the negotiation and realization of the movement's policies facing Palestinian popular pressure.
Islam after Atheism. Religious reconstruction in Albania
A seminar with Associate Professor Cecilie Endresen, University of Oslo.
Free admission and open for all.
Time and place: Nov. 4, 2016 12:15 PM–2:00 PM, Eilert Sundt hus, aud. 6
What does Islam look like in a country with an Ottoman Islamic and later communist, atheist past? Why are Albanian Muslims so pro-American? How are Sufi-Salafi relations in «the country of dervishes», and what happens when Islam meets nationalism and New Age?
Albania represents a case in point when it comes to Islam, pluralism and secularisation. Europe’s first national state (1912) with a Muslim majority population and a third Christians, also had one of its earliest secular constitutions. Within decades, the country was transformed from Islamic to atheist (1967) when religion was completely banned, shut down, and soon, officially eradicated.
With the legalisation of religion in 1990 and end of isolation, the vernacular traditions, globalisation and foreign mission have shaped the religious revival. Many forms of Islam are accommodationist and ethnocentric, or have a fundamentalist, Salafi leaning. Other types are characterised by an esoteric impulse, such as neo-Sufism and free-floating, Islam-inspired New Age spirituality. This lecture guides you through Albania’s complex Islamic landscape.
Cecilie Endresen is Associate Professor of History of Religions at the University of Oslo, with a specialization in Islam and religious pluralism in Southeast Europe. Her latest book is Is the Albanian’s religion really «Albanianism»? Religion and nation according to Muslim and Christian leaders in Albania (Harrassowitz 2012). The present talk is based on the articles «The nation and the nun: Mother Teresa, Albania’s Muslim Majority and the Secular State» (2015), «A fantastic people and its enemies: an analysis of an emerging Albanian mythology» (in press), and «Faith, Fatherland, or both? Accommodationist and neo-fundamentalist Islamic discourses in Albania» (2015).
Time, Language, Mind and Freedom: The modern Arab intellectual tradition in four words
A seminar with Associate Professor Jens Hanssen, University of Toronto.
Free admission and open for all.
Time and place: Oct. 28, 2016 12:15 PM–2:00 PM, Eilert Sundts hus, aud. 6
What is the relationship between thought and practice in the domains of language, literature and politics? Is thought the only standard by which to measure intellectual history? How did Arab intellectuals change and affect political, social, cultural and economic developments from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries? Using Hourani's Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age, 1798-1939 (Cambridge, 1962) as a starting point, this talk explores key trends and concepts in the development of intellectual history in the modern Arab world.
Jens Hanssen is Associate Professor of Arab Civilization, Middle Eastern and Mediterranean history at the University of Toronto. His present research focuses on the intersections between German, Jewish and Arab intellectual histories and has yielded “Kafka and Arabs”, and “Translating Revolution: Hannah Arendt and Arab Political Culture.” The present talk is taken from his introduction of Arabic Thought Beyond the Liberal Age: Towards an Intellectual History of the Nahda (CUP) co-edited with Max Weiss.
Inscribing Islamic Sharia in Egyptian Marriage and Divorce Law
A seminar with Monika Lindbekk.
Free admission and open for all.
Time and place: Oct. 14, 2016 12:15 PM–2:00 PM, Eilert Sundts hus, aud. 6
In this lecture, Monika Lindbekk is going to discuss significant developments in contemporary Egyptian marriage and divorce law based on rulings from family courts during the period 2008-2013. She argues that among the most important developments in this regard are:
(1) Standardization of the way in which court rulings are written down, something which contributed to normalization of the male-dominated nuclear family.
(2) The significant inclusion of Islamic sources in court rulings. A central question in this regard is how judges without a background in classical Islamic jurisprudence apply the modern law codes derived from shari‘a. She argues that family court judges continuously re-inscribe shari‘a in state law and construe its meaning in a way which differs from classical Islamic jurisprudence (fiqh) in significant respects. She highlight the importance of key contextual factors such as judicial training, pressure, and the influence of computer technology behind these developments.
Monika Lindbekk is a doctoral research fellow at the Institute of Criminology and Sociology of Law, University of Oslo. Her PhD project analyzes contemporary legal development in Egypt with regard to divorce based on rulings from civil courts. She has also worked as an assistant lecturer in political science at the British University in Egypt.
Islamic Television in the Arab World
A seminar with Professor Jakob Skovgaard-Petersen, University of Copenhagen.
Free admission and open for all.
Time and place: Sep. 30, 2016 12:15 PM–2:00 PM, Eilert Sundts hus, aud. 6
Although still by far the most influential media in the Arab World television remains understudied in the scholarship of the Middle East. The studies conducted have mainly focused on one sole channel, Al-Jazeera, and on the genres of news and debate. This lecture will outline the history of Arab television, and the study of it, narrow the focus to the role of Islam on TV, and discuss the special genre of the 30 episode drama, the musalsal.
Jakob Skovgaard-Petersen is Professor of Islamic and Arabic Studies at the University of Copenhagen and the director of the Danish research center Center for den Ny Islamiske Offentlighed. From 2005-2008 he was the director of The Danish Egyptian Dialogue Institute in Cairo and the chair of the board of Nordisk Selskab for Mellemøststudier. He has written extensively on several topics concerning the Middle East, among them: the arab world, Egypt, islam and the media, see list of publications.
Uyghur Tradition of History Writing
A seminar with Professor Abdurishid Yakup, University of the Minorities of China, Beijing.
Free admission and open for all.
Time and place: Sep. 23, 2016 12:15 PM–2:00 PM, Eilert Sundts hus, aud. 6
In this lecture, Professor Yakup shall first place the Uighurs on the linguistic and historical map. Further, he will go through the rich documentation of their history written by the Uighurs themselves. This includes their own description of the introduction of Manichaeism as state religion, political and commercial relation to neighbouring nationalities, conflict between different religions, etc. The analysis will mainly be based on the rich manuscripts kept in the German Turfan collection in Berlin as well new findings in China, which demonstrate the cultural richness of Xinjiang through the ages.
Professor Abdurishid Yakup received his PhD in Central University for Nationalities in Beijing in 1996 and Doctor of Literature from Kyoto University in 2000. Currently he is Research Fellow of Berlin Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities in Germany. Since 2009 he is Changjiang Scholar Distinguished Professor of Ministry of Education of China and since 2013 is Dean of School of Languages and Literature of Chinese Ethnic Minorities, Minzu University of China, Beijing.
The Role and Ideology of Arabic Translation Movements across Time
A seminar with Professor Myriam Salama-Carr, University of Manchester.
Free admission and open for all. NOTE: Aud. 3
Time and place: Sep. 16, 2016 12:15 PM–2:00 PM, Eilert Sundts hus, aud. 3
The presentation will focus on an ongoing research project (2015-2017) aiming at producing an anthology of Arabic discourse on translation, articulated around two iconic periods in the Arabic translation tradition, the Classical Age of Arab Science (9 th -10 th centuries) and the Nahda period, or Arab Renaissance, in the 19 th century. The overview and contextualisation of the project will be followed with a discussion of the methodological and epistemological challenges encountered in the construction of an anthology framed in the disciplinary context of translation studies, and its growing body of historiographical and historical research.
Myriam Salama-Carr is Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for Translation and Intercultural Studies, University of Manchester. Her research focuses on the history of translation, with particular focus on the translation of science and the transmission of knowledge. She is the author of La Traduction à l’époque abasside (Didier Erudition 1990) and the editor of Translating and Interpreting Conflict (Rodopi 2007) and of a special issue of Social Semiotics on Translation and Conflict (2007). She has co-edited a special issue of Forum (2009) on Ideology and Cross-Cultural Encounters, and of The Translator (2011) on Translating Science. She is investigator in a QNRF-funded project on the construction of an anthology of the Arabic Discourse on Translation (2015-2018) and co-editor of a Handbook on Languages at War (Palgrave series on Languages at War) to be published in 2018.
Muted Modernists: The struggle over divine politics in Saudi Arabia
A seminar with Professor Madawi Al-Rasheed, London School of Economics.
Free admission and open for all.
Time and place: Sep. 9, 2016 12:15 PM–2:00 PM, Eilert Sundts hus, aud. 6
Professor Madawi Al-Rasheed introduces her latest book on intellectual development among Saudi Islamists. Ideas about civil and political rights, democracy, justice and careful application of Sharia are currently debated in a very repressive context. The lecture maps the intellectual and political outcome of a new Islamism, that combines longing for Islamic authenticity with modernism.
Madawi Al-Rasheed is Visiting Professor at the Middle East Centre, London School of Economics. She is currently spending one year at Singapore National University, The Middle East Institute. She is the author of several books on Saudi Arabia. See full biography and publications.
The Tribulations of Indonesian Islam: From unity in diversity to polarisation and confrontation
A seminar with Senior Lecturer Dr. Carool Kersten, King's College, London.
Free admission and open for all.
Time and place: Sep. 2, 2016 12:15 PM–2:00 PM, Eilert Sundts hus, aud. 6
Over the centuries what is now Indonesia developed its own Islamic tradition. Generally regarded as pluralist and reflective of the country's national motto 'Unity in Diversity', since the regime change and start of the democratization process in 1999, Indonesia's continuing Islamization process is displaying an increased tendency toward polarization as varying interpretations of Islam confront each other in the public sphere. In this lecture, Dr. Carool Kersten will map these different trends and analyze the dynamics of Islamic discourses in present-day Indonesia.
Dr. Carool Kersten is Senior Lecturer in the Study of Islam and the Muslim World at King's College, London. He is the author and editor of nine books, including "Islam in Indonesia: The Contest for Society, Ideas and Values" and "A History of Islam in Indonesia: Unity in Diversity".
Conspiracy Theories in Turkey: A case in point
A seminar with Professor Christoph Herzog, University of Bamberg.
Free admission and open for all.
Time and place: Aug. 26, 2016 12:15 PM–2:00 PM, Eilert Sundts hus, aud. 6
Conspiracy theories seem to thrive globally. In Turkey they appear to have made it to the mainstream. The lecture, after some remarks on the epistemological problematique of defining conspiracy theory, will offer historical and current examples and propose a preliminary attempt on a classification of two common types of conspiracy theories in Turkey.
Christoph Herzog studied Middle Eastern and European history in Freiburg, Germany and Istanbul. In 1995 he completed his Ph.D. thesis on “Geschichte und Ideologie. Mehmed Murad und Celal Nuri über die historischen Ursachen des osmanischen Niedergangs.” Since 2008 he has been professor of Turcology at the University of Bamberg, Germany.
An Introduction to Judeo-Arabic Bible Translations
A seminar with Arik Sadan, Tel Aviv University.
Free admission and open for all.
Time and place: May 13, 2016 12:15 PM–2:00 PM, Eilert Sundts hus Aud. 4
From the eigth century CE Christians, Jews and Samaritans living under the Muslim rule intensively translated their sacred books into the Arabic language. Thousands of translations were produced either by one of these groups or by several groups in ways of collaboration. One branch of these translations is into Judaeo-Arabic, the language used by the Jews under the Muslim rule. This language was written in Arabic or Hebrew characters, its basic structure resembles the written Arabic language, but it also contains many Hebraisms and deviations from Classical Arabic. This talk aims at giving an introduction to the bible translations made in Judaeo-Arabic, their types and characteristics.
Arik Sadan wrote both his MA and PhD theses under the supervision of Prof. Aryeh Levin, receiver of the Israel Prize for Linguistics (2010). Both theses deal with Arabic grammatical thought in general and the verbal system of Classical Arabic in particular. Having submitted his PhD thesis, Sadan traveled to Paris and Jena, Université Paris 7 and Friedrich-Schiller-Universität respectively, where he spent two years of post-doctoral research. This post-doctoral research project focused on editing and analyzing an ancient treatise in the field of Arabic grammar which deals not only with grammar and syntax but also with Rhetoric and Logic, based on eleven different manuscripts.
In 2012 Sadan published the scientific edition of this work with Harrassowitz Verlag, as well as a revised English version of his PhD thesis with Brill. Sadan’s research fields are Arabic grammatical thought, Arab grammarians, Classical, Modern and Colloquial Arabic linguistics, manuscripts in Arabic grammar and Judaeo-Arabic. He is currently a research fellow in the international project Biblia Arabica (see http://biblia-arabica.com/), which focuses on the bible translations produced under Muslim rule, and also teaches various courses in various academic institutions in the above-mentioned fields.
Who cares about the emigrant? MENA government policies towards departed populations
A seminar with Inga Brandell, Södertörns högskola/UiO.
Free admission and open for all.
Time and place: Apr. 29, 2016 12:15 PM–2:00 PM, Eilert Sundts hus Aud. 5
Who cares about the emigrant? In February 2016 the new Algerian constitution stated that those who run for presidency could have no other citizenship beside the Algerian one. In France, at the same time, the parliament debated a constitutional amendment to lay the ground for withdrawal of French citizenship for convicted of terrorism. It is well known that large numbers of citizens from the MENA countries have settled permanently abroad and many have double citizenships. In many cases their political rights have been extended in recent years. How do governments in the region pursue nation- and state-building policies when they are acting beyond their national sovereignty? With Algeria and Turkey in particular focus, diaspora building and integration in the region is explored and discussed both from a theoretical-historical perspective and within the current process of political and institutional changes.
Inga Brandell is a Docent at Uppsala University, Senior Professor at Södertörn University and Professor II at the Department of Political Science, University of Oslo. 2000-02 she worked at the Swedish Institute in Alexandria. She has published on Algerian-French relations after independence, on civil society and labour law reform in Egypt, Algeria and Tunisia, and on border issues in the Middle East as well as numerous other issues related to politics in the region. She has taught Middle Eastern politics at all university levels and from the late 1980s onwards contributed extensively to the media coverage and the public and expert debate in Sweden on the political evolution and on cultural aspects of the region.
Sectarianization and the Syrian Case
A seminar with Raymond Hinnebusch, University of St Andrews.
Free admission and open for all.
Time and place: Apr. 22, 2016 12:15 PM–2:00 PM, Eilert Sundts hus Aud. 4
This seminar engages with the alternative ways of thinking about sectarianism, drawing on the scholarly work on identity and nationalism. Building on that, it provides a framework of analysis that takes account of causal factors, both material and ideational factors, structure and agency and looks at consequences, particularly for state formation and de-formation. The material structure that shapes identity and the functions/forms of sectarianism include modernization, regime power-building practices and inter-state power struggles. Agency refers to the work of “political entrepreneurs efforts to construct identities, including sectarianism. The seminar is based on a paper that tests the utlility of the framework to understand key episodes in the Syrian case.
Prof. Hinnebusch is the director of the Centre for Syrian Studies and a founding member of MECACS. He is professor of International Relations and Middle East Studies at the University of St. Andrews.
Dead bodies and the boundaries of democracy: The PKK and the Turkish state
A seminar with Nerina Weiss, Fafo.
Free admission and open for all.
Time and place: Apr. 15, 2016 12:15 PM–2:00 PM, Eilert Sundts hus Aud. 5
Images of dead bodies, in humiliating positions or even mutilated, have become an everyday occurrence for all who have been following the current violent events in Eastern Turkey. In her talk Nerina Weiss will explore current discussions and reactions to such images of dead bodies. She is especially interested in how (images of) dead bodies feature in the ongoing political struggle over legitimacy between Erdogan’s highly centralized presidential model and the PKK’s Bookchin influenced model of democratic autonomy. She argues that it is through the images that the borders of democracy and civilization are outlined and questioned.
Nerina Weiss is researcher II at Fafo Research Foundation. She holds a PhD in social anthropology from UIO (2012), and has been Marie-Curie IE Fellow at Dignity-Danish Institute Against Torture. Weiss has done fieldwork in Turkey, Cyprus, Austria and in Scandinavia and focuses mainly on political violence, radicalization, gender and migration.
Arab counter-revolution and jihadi expansionism
A seminar with Jean-Pierre Filiu, Sciences Po, Paris.
Free admission and open for all.
Time and place: Apr. 8, 2016 12:15 PM–2:00 PM, Eilert Sundts hus Aud. 5
Alongside intimidation, imprisonment and murder, the Arab counter-revolutionaries released from prison and secretly armed and funded many hardline Islamists, thereby boosting Salafi–Jihadi groups such as Islamic State, in the hope of convincing the Western powers to back their dictatorships. They also succeeded in dividing the opposition forces ranged against them, going so far as to ruthlessly discard politicians and generals from among their own elite in the pursuit of absolute, unfettered, power.
Jean-Pierre Filiu, a historian and an arabist, is professor of Middle East Studies at Sciences Po, Paris School of International Affairs (PSIA). He has held visiting professorships both at Columbia School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA) and at Georgetown School of Foreign Service (SFS).
He served also as an adviser to the Prime Minister (2000-2002), to the Minister of Defense (1991-93), and to the Minister of Interior (1990-91). Prof. Filiu was a career diplomat from 1988 to 2006, following humanitarian missions in Afghanistan (1986) and Lebanon (1983-84). He was assigned to Amman, before becoming Deputy Chief of mission in Damascus and Tunis.
His book Apocalypse in Islam (University of California Press, 2011) was awarded the main prize by the French History Convention. Hurst (London) and Oxford University Press (New York) published his Arab Revolution, ten lessons from the democratic uprising in 2011, Gaza, a History in 2014 ( Palestine Book Award by the Middle East Monitor) and From Deep State to Islamic State : the Arab counter-revolution and its jihadi legacy in 2015. His works and articles about contemporary Islam and the Arab world have been published in a dozen languages. Prof. Filiu also wrote the script of De Beste Fiender, a graphic novel about US in the Middle East, published in Norway by Minuskel.
Linguistic nationalism in Lebanon (1960-2015)
A seminar with Arkadiusz Plonka, Jagiellonian University, Kraków.
Free admission and open for all.
Time and place: Apr. 1, 2016 12:15 PM–2:00 PM, Eilert Sundts hus Aud. 5
Arkadiusz Plonka will focus on linguistic nationalism in Lebanon represented by Maronite, Jesuit, and Shi’ite poets and intellectuals with special attention to the tumultuous and turbulent times (1960-2015), during which significatif attempts to destabilise the diglossic situation in Lebanon took place. One of these attempts has been the linguistic politics undertaken by Amir Hlayyil, a poet from Kfar Shima, in his little known literary periodical /l-’Arzyaada/ (2009-), a unique contemporary newspaper in Lebanon published entirely in Lebanese. The seminar is based mainly on rare materials collected during research in Lebanon.
During the seminar, Arkadiusz Plonka will demonstrate why some eminent authors want to replace Standard Arabic by the Lebanese dialect as the official and national language of Lebanon and substitute the Arabic alphabet by the new Latin script. From a more general perspective, he will also show why Arabic dialectology is crucial to interpreting certain ideological concept and how apparently insignificant philological devices are bound to express some political phenomena in contemporary Lebanon.
Arkadiusz Płonka is an arabist and political scientist. Formerly a researcher at the French Institute for the Near East (IFPO) in Beirut, he is currently Assistant Professor at the Institute of Oriental Studies (University of Kraków, Poland). He wrote his doctorate on sociolinguistics of the Arab world at the Sorbonne. It was published in 2004 by the Geuthner, a Paris publishing house, under the title /L’idée de langue libanaise d’après Sa‘īd ‘Aql/. He has also edited a book on Lebanese poet Maurice ‘Awwād (/Mūrīs ‘Awwād. Translations and Interpretations/), published by Geuthner in 2010.
Sufism on the Defensive: Facing the Challenges of Modernist Islam
A seminar with Ken Garden, Tufts University.
Free admission and open for all. The seminar is organized by Centre for Islamic and Middle East Studies and Centre for the Study of the History of Religions (University of Oslo).
Time and place: Mar. 18, 2016 12:15 PM–2:00 PM, Eilert Sundts hus Aud. 5
Sufism, or “Islamic mysticism” is the most fascinating and appealing facet of the Islamic tradition for many non-Muslim Westerners. Some look to Sufi poets like Rumi for spiritual guidance, while others see in Sufism the promise of a quietist alternative to political Islam. This talk will first explain what Sufism is and then look at its declining status in the modern Muslim world. In the 19th century, most Muslims would have had some connection to Sufi organizations or practices. Today only a small minority does, the result of both Modernist and Islamist critiques.
Ken Garden is an Associate Professor in the Department of Religion at Tufts University in Boston. He is the author of The First Islamic Reviver: Abu Hamid al-Ghazali and his Revival of the Religious Sciences (Oxford, 2014). His present research is on the development of Sufism in the Islamic West in the 12th century. He currently resides in Uppsala, Sweden.
Organizer
Centre for Islamic and Middle East Studies and Centre for the Study of the History of Religions
From Homeland to Self-rule: Approaches to the Palestinian Issue under President Jimmy Carter, 1977-81
A seminar with Jørgen Jensehaugen, NTNU.
Free admission and open for all.
Time and place: Mar. 4, 2016 12:15 PM–2:00 PM, Eilert Sundts hus Aud. 5
Coming to power in 1977, Jimmy Carter aimed to solve the whole Arab-Israeli conflict. He was the first US president to attach primary attention to the Palestinian issue, even calling for a Palestinian “homeland”. By the end of his term Carter had not managed to have direct communications with the PLO, and his once ambitious approach to the Palestinian issue was reduced to trying to secure a limited form of “self-rule” under continued Israeli occupation. This was neither acceptable to the Palestinians, nor were they included in the negotiations.
Jørgen Jensehaugen is a PhD-candidate in history at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU). He has previously been an editor of Babylon – Nordic Journal of Middle East Studies. He has published several articles on the Arab-Israeli conflict.
Online Activism in Egypt and Kuwait: Counter-Publicness and Democratization in Authoritarian Context
A seminar with Jon Nordenson, UiO.
Free admission and open for all.
Time and place: Feb. 19, 2016 12:15 PM–2:00 PM, Eilert Sundts hus Aud. 5
Does the internet facilitate social and political change, or even democratization, in the Middle East, and if so, how? The subject of this talk is the use of online platforms among activists in the Middle East, and the importance of such platforms in effecting change. Based on a detailed, empirical analysis of the day-to-day use of online platforms by activists involved in campaigns in Egypt and Kuwait, I illustrate how and why online platforms are used by activists, which benefits this usage provides, and identifies some crucial features for successful online activism. I argue that both campaigns studied were able to effect change within their context, but also show how authoritarian regimes quite effectively may hinder activism – also online - through repression. I further argue that the main benefit gained by activists from online platforms is the counter-publicness such platforms provide, which enable excluded groups to organize, articulate their demands and fight for these in their national publics.
Jon Nordenson is a PhD candidate at the department of culture studies and oriental languages. The presentation is based on his thesis, entitled "Online Activism in Egypt and Kuwait: Counterpublicness and Democratization in Authoritarian Contexts".
Shiite Clerics and Political Modernization in Iran
A seminar with Mateo M. Farzaneh, Northeastern Illinois University. Free admission and open for all.
Time and place: Feb. 12, 2016 12:15 PM–2:00 PM, Eilert Sundts hus Aud. 5
In this book presentation, Prof. Farzaneh will discuss the role of Islamic jurisprudence on political reform in Iran. Throughout the 1800s, Iran was challenged to politically modernize in order to undo the failed policies of its corrupt/absolutist monarchical system. Introduction of Western-style constitutionalism by secular Iranians brought about the establishment of the Islamic world's first parliament in Iran in 1906.
However, that was the beginning of a long struggle between the proponents and the opponents of rule of law as a new political reality. Mullah Muhammad Kazim Khurasani led a group of high-ranking Iranian Shiite clerics living in Iraq and began a transnational clerical movement in support of constitutionalism with the objective to sever the political influence of Muslim clerics and leaving "modern" politics to the elected parliamentarians. This talk is based on Prof. Farzaneh’s new book, The Iranian Constitutional Revolution and the Clerical Leadership of Khurasani (Syracuse University Press, 2015).
About Mateo Mohammad Farzaneh
An Iranian native, Mateo Mohammad Farzaneh attended high school and college in southern California. After spending seven years in nursing and health care industries, his curiosity led him to pursue a higher education in history and he received his PhD from University of California, Santa Barbara. He is quadrilingual, speaking Persian, English, Spanish, and Arabic. Recipient of a number of prestigious awards and fellowships for his research and teaching, he taught world and Middle Eastern history at Santa Barbara City College and California State Fullerton before joining the history department at Northeastern Illinois University in Chicago in 2010.
Expansion and Contraction of the Iranian Public Sphere
A seminar with Yadullah Shahibzadeh.
Free admission and open for all.
Time and place: Feb. 5, 2016 12:15 PM–2:00 PM, Eilert Sundts hus Aud. 5
In late February, two election will be held in Iran: The parliamentary elections and the elections of the Assembly of Experts with the authority to oust the present leader and appoint a new one. Prodemocracy forces led by the current president and two former presidents disagree with Iran’s Guardian council of the Constitution on the basic requirements of free and fair elections. The disagreement has generated intense public debates and an expanded public sphere. The lecture offers a background history to this expanded public sphere.
Yadullah Shahibzadeh have taught and researched at the University of Oslo and is the author of The Iranian Political Language: From the Nineteenth Century to the Present (Palgrave Macmillan 2015) and the forthcoming book Islamism and Post-Islamism in Iran: An Intellectual History (Palgrave Macmillan April 2016)
Liberation through the Barrel of a Gun? Kurdish Women in the Fight against Daesh
A seminar with Pinar Tank, PRIO.
Free admission and open for all.
Time and place: Jan. 29, 2016 12:15 PM–2:00 PM, Eilert Sundts hus Aud. 5
In the aftermath of the Arab Uprisings, women, who were active during the demonstrations that resulted in the downfall of despotic governments, did not see the fulfillment of their demand for liberation. To the contrary, the rise of religiously conservative parties, further narrowed their opportunities for participation in the public sphere. Regionally, the truism that women were “the losers of the Arab Spring” was clearly justified.
This contrasts with the case of Kurdish women fighting Daesh in Iraq and Syria. Since 2014, international media has reported on Kurdish women defending the northern Syrian enclave of Rojava, framing their engagement through an emancipatory or personal perspective. However, the portrayal of female fighters often ignores a deeper understanding of their ideology and its roots within the Kurdish movement. This presentation traces the historical path of Kurdish female militants from their role in the struggle in Turkey to their present engagement in Syria. How are we to understand their motivation through a reading of the PKK´s ideology?
Dr. Pinar Tank is a senior researcher at the Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO) currently based in Brazil. She has worked at PRIO since 1998 with a particular focus on foreign and security policy issues related to Turkey in particular. She received her Dr.Philos from the University of Oslo in 2009 on the theme of civil-military relations in Turkey (“Turkey´s military elite at a crossroads: Paths to desecuritisation”). Her present focus is on Turkish (and Brazilian) domestic and foreign policy within an emerging powers framework. Pinar Tank has been a research collaborator on the New Middle East project of the Centre for Islamic and Middle East Studies at the University of Oslo since 2012 where she has, among other themes, researched the Kurdish issue. Her M.Phil is from the University of St. Andrews in Scotland in security studies and gender theory.
2015
Qatar and the World Cup: How a football culture was invented to secure the borders of a wealthy mini-state
A seminar with Charlotte Lysa, UiO.
Free admission and open for all.
Time and place: Dec. 4, 2015 10:15 AM–12:00 PM, Eilert Sundts hus Aud. 5
When FIFA in 2010 unexpectedly announced Qatar as the host nation of the World Cup football in 2022, the world's attention immediately turned towards the small desert state. The authoritarian emirate was one of the most unlikely host countries for the huge event, and the bid for the World Cup seemed almost as a publicity stunt. Looking closer on the state of football in Qatar reveals the huge effort that the ruling al-Thani family has put in to marketing itself as a football-nation; starting up the ambitious Aspire Academy to develop talents, founding two national leagues, starting up several football teams and buying international stars for both local teams and the national team. In addition they developed a plan for hosting the World Cup that can only be described as extremely ambitious. To understand this excessive effort it is useful to analyze in a broader historical and political context. Qatar is a small state, scarcely populated and with enormous natural resources, bordering larger and much stronger powers. Can the reason lie in the al-Thani family's need to legitimate its rule, and secure its territorial and economic interests and thus the survival of the Qatari state?
Charlotte Lysa recently finished her MA at the University of Oslo at the Department of Culture and Oriental Languages, and the 4th of December she starts her PhD-thesis at the same Department.
Peripheral Nationhood: Nationalism and Identity among Mizrahim on the Israeli border with Lebanon
A seminar with Dr. Cathrine Thorleifsson, UiO.
Free admission and open for all.
Time and place: Nov. 27, 2015 10:15 AM–12:00 PM, Eilert Sundts hus Aud. 5
Kiryat Shmona, located near the Israeli-Lebanese border, often makes the news whenever there is an outbreak of violence between the two countries. In Israel s northernmost city, the residents are mostly Mizrahim, that is, Jews decending from Arab and Muslim lands. Cathrine Thorleifsson uses the dynamics at play along this border to develop wider conclusions about the nature of nationalism, identity, ethnicity and xenophobia in Israel, and the ways in which these shift over time and are manipulated in different ways for various ends. She explores the idea of being on the periphery of nationhood: examining the identity-forming and negotiating processes of these Mizrahim who do not neatly dove-tail with the predominantly Ashkenazi concept of what it means to be Israeli.
Cathrine Moe Thorleifsson is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Oslo.
The Question of the Universial in the Tunisian Revolution
Is there any « Tunisian » paradigm? Is there any specific Tunisian way of carrying out the social revolution? A revolution without any leader? Peaceful? The question in other words is: « is there still any universalistic dimension in the Tunisian Revolution? »
A seminar with Dr. Jocelyne Dakhlia, Centre de recherches historieques, EHESS, Paris.
Free admission and open for all.
Time and place: Nov. 20, 2015 10:15 AM–12:00 PM, Eilert Sundts hus Aud. 5
The Tunisian revolution was puzzling to observers because it did not conform to any model and because its claims were immediately universal. It invoked political rights conceived and proclaimed as universal: notably the equality of rights, the right to dignity, to a dignified life, and therefore the right to work.
As we all know, this unexpected event inspired the Arab Spring, a succession of uprisings that unfortunately led to civils wars in Libya and Syria. It also had a strong impact on countries that did not experience a Revolution. Apart form the Arab World a growing number of commentators, political scientists, and sociologists link the Tunisian revolution to a lot of recent movements of protests throughout the World : the Occupy Wall Street Mouvement, The Indignados in Spain and similar movements in Greece, Israel, Turkey (in Taksim), in Quebec, with the Maple Spring, or in Senegal… The new pattern is a kind of spontaneous democracy, refusing any institutional leadership whatsoever, whether by political parties, churches, or unions…
Is there any « Tunisian » paradigm, then? Is there any specific Tunisian way of carrying out the social revolution? A revolution without any leader? Peaceful? The question in other words is: « is there still any universalistic dimension in the Tunisian Revolution? »
About Jocelyne Dakhlia
Jocelyne Dakhlia is an Historian and Director of Study at the EHESS, Center for Historical Research. After having studied the issue of collective memory in the Maghreb region, she has undertaken extensive research on the political models of Mediterranean Islam. She is currently developing the third part of this research which is focusing on the Sultanic Harem and the question of despotism. The Mediterranean level of her historical reflection has conducted her to work on the question of languages in the Mediterranean taking lingua franca as a starting point, as well as directing two edited volumes on the History of Muslims in Europe and the modalities of contact between Europe and Islam in the Mediterranean.
Exception and Expertise: How Turkish Lawyers Shaped and Were Shaped by State Power
A seminar with Dr. Joakim Parslow, UiO.
Free admission and open for all.
Time and place: Nov. 13, 2015 10:15 AM–12:00 PM, Eilert Sundts hus Aud. 5
Can authoritarian jurisprudence be politically independent? In the 1930s, Turkey's single-party regime placed its formative legal thinkers in the difficult position of having to provide legal doctrines that were, on the one hand, subservient to state leaders, and on the other hand, representative of the new Republic’s identity as a Western country with independent courts, administrators, and academia. The solutions they proposed, I argue, tells us much about the political role of the Turkish legal system since World War Two.
Joakim Parslow holds a PhD in Near and Middle Eastern Studies from the University of Washington. He also has a Cand.mag. in Political Science and Turkish and an MA in Turkish Studies from the University of Oslo.
Business and Politics in the Gulf Monarchies. An Unbalanced Oligarchic Pact
A seminar with Dr. Marc Valeri, University of Exceter.
Free admission and open for all.
Time and place: Nov. 6, 2015 10:15 AM–12:00 PM, Eilert Sundts hus Aud. 5
In the six states of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), the business communities have an earlier history of political influence, playing a decisive role in supporting the established socio-political order and shaping political legitimacy, alongside their related economic role. However the involvement of ruling families in the economy has substantially grown recently; this has gone concomitantly with a reduced capacity of the business elite to influence political decisions. Given the historical role of this oligarchic pact in perpetuating the status quo, the unprecedented intrusion of ruling family members in the private sector is likely to have major implications for the whole rentier social contract in these states.
About Marc Valeri
Marc Valeri is Senior Lecturer in Political Economy of the Middle East, and Director of the Centre for Gulf Studies at the University of Exeter. His research interests include the social, political, and economic transformations in the Gulf monarchies. He also studies the issues of stability and consolidation of authoritarianism in the Middle East, and more broadly the question of legitimacy in authoritarian and non-democratic regimes. He is the Principal Investigator of a three-year ESRC-funded research project on state-business relations in the Gulf monarchies (www.gulfstatebusiness.net). His recent English publications include Oman. Politics and Society in the Qaboos State (Hurst/Oxford University Press, 2009); and Business Politics in the Middle East (Hurst/Oxford University Press, 2013) with Steffen Hertog and Giacomo Luciani.
Twenty Years of Crocodile Tears: The international Treatment of the Palestinian Refugee Issue, 1948-1968
A seminar with Dr. Marte Heian-Engdal, UiO.
Free admission and open for all.
Time and place: Oct. 30, 2015 10:15 AM–12:00 PM, Eilert Sundts hus Aud. 5
Almost 70 years after they first fled their homes and villages, Palestinian refugees remain at the core of the Arab-Israeli conflict, but today a solution to their struggles seem more distant than ever. In this talk, Marte Heian-Engdal will discuss how the refugee problem was treated initially, in the period 1948-1967:
- What efforts were there to find a solution?
- What, if any, were the general trends and tendencies in thinking about the problem?
- Who were the key actors involved in these efforts?
- And, importantly, why were none of them successful?
Marte Heian-Engdal is an associate professor at Department of Achaeology, Conservation, and History, and defended recently her Phd-thesis: Twenty Years of Crocodile Tears: The International Treatment of the Palestinian Refugee Issue, 1948-1968
Revisiting the Early History of al-Qaida in Afghanistan
A seminar with Dr. Anne Stenersen, Norwegian Defence Research Establishment (FFI).
Free admission and open for all.
Time and place: Oct. 23, 2015 10:15 AM–12:00 PM, Eilert Sundts hus Aud. 5
Al-Qaida was founded in Peshawar, Pakistan in August 1988, by a small group of Arab veterans of the Afghan-Soviet war. Al-Qaida fought in Afghanistan in two periods – in 1988-1992 for Afghan mujahidin parties, and in 1997-2001 for the Taliban. In the Taliban period, al-Qaida was allowed to expand and prosper under the protection of the Taliban regime. The period culminated with the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington on 11 September 2001 and subsequent U.S.-led invasion of Afghanistan.
The history of al-Qaida in Afghanistan contains many paradoxes:
- Why did Osama bin Laden – a man with no military experience – pioneer the establishment of an all-Arab fighting unit in Afghanistan in 1987?
- Why did al-Qaida expand their training camp infrastructure in Afghanistan in 1992, shortly before leaving for Sudan?
- Why did al-Qaida spend considerable resources fighting on the Taliban’s frontlines, even after bin Laden declared war on the United States in 1998?
These are some of the questions discussed in this seminar, which is based on Anne Stenersen’s forthcoming book, The History of al-Qaida in Afghanistan (Cambridge, forthcoming 2016). By examining new and rare primary sources about al-Qaida, the book sheds light on the early history of al-Qaida, and challenges some common assumptions about the world’s deadliest terrorist network.
Anne Stenersen is a research fellow at FFI’s Terrorism Research Group. Her academic background is rooted in Middle Eastern studies, Arabic and Russian, she has conducted research on militant Islamism, with a focus on CBRN (chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear) terrorism, al-Qaeda’s use of the Internet, and the Taliban insurgency.
Anti-orthodox Currents in the Contemporary Egyptian Islam: The Religious Aspects of the Debate
A seminar with Dr Wael Philip Gallab, University of Oslo
Free admission and open for all.
Time and place: Oct. 16, 2015 10:15 AM–12:00 PM, Eilert Sundts hus Aud. 5
My research is concerned with the role of different types of religious dissent in shaping the process and momentum of Islamic reform in Egypt, more specifically in the period between 1980 and 2010.
In this talk I will briefly chart the three main currents in today’s Egyptian anti-orthodox thought by looking into the works of several public intellectuals and authors on issues relevant to theological and exegetical reform. These currents are:
- Historical Contextualism,
- Radical Critique
- Qur'anism)
While the intellectuals at issue differ radically in their approaches, they all share the implicit conviction that the reigning orthodox (traditionalist) framework of fiqh is incapable of delivering Islam from what they see as its modern crisis. In the presentation I will shed light on their different proposed paths of reform and alternatives to the orthodox paradigm.
Among the authors whose works will be presented are Muhammad Saʿīd ʿAshmāwī, Naṣr Abū Zayd, Khalīl ʿAbd al-Karīm, Sayyid al-Qimanī, and Aḥmad Ṣubḥī Manṣūr.
The Arab Spring: A Digital Dystopia
A seminar with Dr. Yves Gonzales-Quijana, Université Lumière Lyon 2.
Time and place: Sep. 25, 2015 10:15 AM–12:00 PM, Eilert Sundts hus Aud. 5
More than four years after the first demonstrations in Tunisia in December 2010, time seems ripe for an assessment of the present situation in the Arab world. After countless comments about the “Arab Spring,” today we hear as many statements about an “Arab Winter” or, at least, an “Arab Autumn.”
The present situation is characterized by a high degree of complexity, and any analysis has to take into consideration a large variety of relevant aspects. Any attempt at an evaluation could benefit from a more cautious approach also when it comes to a specific question concerning the so-called Arab Spring, namely the role of the Internet and social media in the Arab uprisings.
The evaluation of the “impact” of IT on the Arab revolutions has followed a similar pattern here: after considerable praise in the beginning, there is today a general trend towards a negative assessment of the role played by the digital technologies after the toppling of presidents Ben Ali in Tunisia and Mubarak in Egypt. While there certainly is some truth in such statements, a different approach may be more fruitful.
Yves Gonzales-Quijano is a researcher and lecturer at Université Lumière Lyon 2 in France.
Sharia in Islamic Law: Some Thoughts on the Development of a Concept
A seminar with Dr. Christian Müller, Directeur de recherche at the CNRS (Paris)
Time and place: Sep. 18, 2015 10:15 AM–12:00 PM, Eilert Sundts hus Aud. 5
My talk reconstructs the historical evolution of the concept Sharia, a key-concept in the Islamic civilization, and attempts to go beyond the highly politicized meaning of the same concept in contemporary texts. I will address a number of issues that might be summarized in the following questions :
- How the Muslim jurists used the Qur’ānic reference to God’s sharia in order to formulate the notion of a Sacred law (end of 8th century)?
- How they enhanced, by means of legal hermeneutics, the notion of “divinely normative path” towards Prophetic Sunna (10th century)?
Additionally, I will describe the way all sacred hermeneutical “fundamentals” became the basis of divinely inspired Shariatic law-rulings (11th century) and thus gave raise to what I call a Shariatic Legal Frame.
Finally, I will examine how the jurists and the judges understood the notion of “Shariatic law”; for that, I will juxtapose juridical discourse and evidence from legal documents in order to illustrate and analyze the equation of the jurists’ law and “sharia” since the 13th century onwards.
Potted Plants Only? The Re-emergence of Christian Minorities on the Arab Peninsula
A seminar with Dr Berit Thorbjørnsrud, University of Oslo.
Time and place: Sep. 11, 2015 10:15 AM–12:00 PM, Eilert Sundts hus Aud. 5
After more than 1200 years of absence Christianity is apparently once again blossoming at the Arab Peninsula. This triggers the question whether Christianity is there to stay. According to a local priest Christianity was until recently like a potted plant without the possibility of growth. Lately it has been lifted out of the pot and planted firmly in the soil. However, can Christianity take root when its followers are work migrants without permanent residency? And what kind of room for manoeuvre do the Christians really have?
Revisiting the Palestinian Question: Two Decades after Oslo
A seminar with Dr Jamil Hilal, Birzeit University. Open for all.
Time and place: Sep. 4, 2015 10:15 AM–12:00 PM, Auditorium 5, Eilert Sundts hus
The 1967 occupied Palestinian territories have undergone three major types of development since the Oslo agreement between the Palestinian Liberation
Organization and Israel was signed in 1993 and the Palestinian Authority was established in 1994.
These developments have brought far-reaching structural changes in Palestinian politics and society. They have rendered Palestinian communities – inside historic Palestine and outside - very vulnerable, and made collective action against collective colonial repression (including a Third intifada) more difficult.
The three developments are identified as: the emergence of a political discourse that evicts Palestinians from history and geography and denies them a national identity; the escalation of collective repression, and settler-colonization; and the localization of Palestinian politics and the atomization of Palestinian society (in the West Bank and Gaza Strip and probably elsewhere) under the impact of settler-colonialism and neo-liberalism.
Professor Jamil Hilal is a sociologist at Birzeit University and a senior research fellow at the Palestinian Institution for the Study of Democracy (Muwatin) in Ramallah.
Political Implications of Changes in Social Organization in Gaza
A seminar with Khaled Safi. Open for all.
Time and place: Aug. 28, 2015 10:00 AM–12:00 PM, Auditorium 5, Eilert Sundts hus
This study aims to put light on the social life at Gaza Strip under the shadow of the siege and division. It argues that the changes happened in the social relations inside the family, the attempts of Islamization of the society.
The study also deals with the changes that happened in the daily life of the people because of the continuous interruption of the electricity and the shortage of gas and kerosene. The study also examines the women’s situation. It explains also the housing situation which was severely affected by the siege.
The time frame of the study starts in January 2006 when the legislation elections took place and continues until 2014. The study will be concentrated on Gaza Strip. It uses many approaches, such as the historical, descriptive analytical, and oral history approches. It depends on many resources, such as: the reports of human rights organizations, and local and international organizations. It obtains also newspapers, magazines, internet networks and the observations of the researcher as eyewitness. Finally, the research concludes many results and recommendations.
Khaled Safi is an Associate Professor of History at al-Aqsa University, Gaza.
Female citizenship and the franchise in Kuwait after 2005
A seminar with Rania Maktabi, University Of Oslo. Open for all.
Time and place: Aug. 21, 2015 10:00 AM–12:00 PM, Auditorium 5, Eilert Sundts hus
Kuwaiti women gained the right to vote and to be elected to the 50-member National Assembly on an equal footing with men on 16 May 2005. This year marks the tenth anniversary of Kuwaiti women’s suffrage.
Kuwaiti women’s enfranchisement provides fresh theoretical and analytical insights into how the extension of political rights impacts on state and society in a fairly conservative albeit politically dynamic Gulf society.
Based on fieldwork in Kuwait in March 2015, the lecture touches on three main aspects that shed light on the position of Kuwaiti women after a decade of political rights: first, the presence of the first four-ever elected female MPs at the Kuwaiti parliament between 2009 – 2011; secondly, the response of Islamists towards Kuwaiti women’s enfranchisement; and thirdly, the dramatic rise of female lawyers as potential agents of reform for strengthened female civic rights within state laws.
The native Jews of Egypt: Exploring Karaite adaptations of Muslim folktales
A seminar with Olav Gjertsen Ørum, University of Oslo
Time and place: June 5, 2015 12:15 PM–2:00 PM, Universitetet i Oslo, Eilert Sundts hus Aud. 5
Jews have dwelt in Egypt since biblical times, and have been living among Muslims since the time of the Arab conquest. In the following centuries, Jewish immigrants who came from abroad, seeking refuge or simply a better life, enlarged the already existing Jewish community, and came to be a part of the primarily Muslim society in Egypt as well. The consequential interchange of Judeo-Islamic (and Christian) thoughts and traditions facilitated cultural pluralism and a strong interreligious awareness in the region that would last until the late-modern period.
This seminar discusses the stories featured in a number of manuscripts written by the native Karaite Jews in 19th-century Cairo, which are adaptations of well-known Islamic folktales containing references to Biblical and Quranic narratives. They are fascinating examples of cultural borrowing between Judaism and Islam through history, as Jewish texts take their form from the Islamic story-telling tradition, which in turn are tales whose earliest sources trace back to the Jewish bible.
Olav Gjertsen Ørum er stipendiat ved IKOS og hvor prosjektet hans handler om skriftlig og muntlig judeoarabisk i Kairo på 1800- og 1900-tallet. En lingvistisk studie av de innfødte jødene i Ḥāret el-Yahūd
Organizer
The Centre for Islamic and Middle East Studies and The New Middle East: Emerging Political and Ideological Trends
The Modern Arabic Bible and the Story of Arabic Language Standardization
A seminar with Dr Rana Hisham Issa, University of Oslo.
Time and place: May 29, 2015 12:15 PM–2:00 PM, Universitetet i Oslo, Eilert Sundts hus Aud. 5
What is the relationship of the Arabic Bible to the modernization of the Arabic language? Could the Christians who have been described by historical linguistics to have been weak in the classical rules of the language become the beacons of its modernity in the nineteenth century? This lecture will examine this question and other issues related to the translation of the Bible in the nineteenth century as the prism through which to understand sectarian and cultural relations in the age of Arab modernity, or what is also known as the Arab nahḍah.
Through tracing a trajectory of Arabic Bibles from 1671, to start with one of the earliest continuous Bible texts to have been printed in Arabic, this lecture will show how the language of modern Arabic Bibles evolved under pressure from print technology since early modernity. Through select linguistic and historical examples, this lecture will show how the evolutions of language mediated the relationship of Oriental Christians to one another and to Muslims in the Levant. By turning to the language of the Bible for historical clues, this lecture will showcase philology as a means to understand the position and circulation of foundational texts based on the kind of language ideologies that are displayed in the text.
Organizer
The Centre for Islamic and Middle East Studies and The New Middle East: Emerging Political and Ideological Trends
The Karamanlis: Turkish-speaking Greeks or Christian Turks?
A seminar with Bernt Brendemoen, University of Oslo
Time and place: May 8, 2015 12:00 PM–2:00 PM, Universitetet i Oslo, Eilert Sundts hus Aud. 5
Karamanli is the designation of Turkish-speaking Greek-Orthodox groups in Istanbul and Anatolia. They have got their name after mediaeval Turkish principality of Karaman, comprising e.g. Cappadocia, which had been a center for Christianity since the early Middle Ages. However, Turkish-speaking Christians were also found in other parts of Anatolia, and also in Istanbul from the 16th century onwards. They had a rich literature in Turkish written with Greek letters. The Greeks usually claim that the Karamanlis were Greeks who lost their Greek mother tongue because of the impact of Turkish, while the Turks claim that they were ethical Turks who converted to Christianity. This became a crucial question in the beginning of the 20th century, when a group of them formed a Turkish orthodox patriarchate by themselves.
Bernt Brendemoen is a professor of Turkish language and literature. His main interests are dialectology and the history of the Turkish language, and also language and culture encounters in Anatolia and the Middle East.
Organizer
The Centre for Islamic and Middle East Studies and The New Middle East: Emerging Political and Ideological Trends
Neither visitors, nor colonial victims: Muslims in interwar Europe
A seminar with Dr. Amr Ryad, Utrecht University.
Time and place: Apr. 24, 2015 12:00 PM–2:00 PM, Universitetet i Oslo, Eilert Sundts hus Aud. 5
The lecture will highlight the political, religious and intellectual activities of Muslims as engaged actors in the European and international space. The focus of the lecture is on the encounters and experiences of Muslim actors after WWI from within. And the argument is that Muslims in interwar Europe were not only part of colonial Middle Eastern history, but were also entangled with European trans-cultural history as well. More historical reflection on Islam in Europe can put the present “fear” for the Islamization of the West into perspective.
Umar Ryad is currently associate professor of Islamic Studies at the University of Utrecht. He has been working as assistant professor of Islamic Studies, Leiden University Institute for the Study of Religions (2008-2014). He studied at the Faculty of Languages and Translation, Al-Azhar University in Cairo (BA Islamic Studies in English, 1998) and obtained his MA degree in Islamic Studies (cum laude) from Leiden University (2001), where he also received his PhD degree in June 2008 with the thesis Islamic Reformism and Christianity: A Critical Study of the Works of Muhammad Rashid Rida and His Associates (1898-1935)(Brill, 2009). Ryad's current research focuses on the modern Islamic intellectual and religious history, dynamics of the networks of Islamic reformist and pan-Islamist movements, Muslim polemics on Christianity, the history of Christian missions in the modern Muslim World, and transnational Islam in interwar Europe. He is currently leading the ERC Starting Grant project: "Neither visitors nor colonial victims: Muslims in interwar Europe."
Organizer
The Centre for Islamic and Middle East Studies and The New Middle East: Emerging Political and Ideological Trends
Why Democratization Failed in Egypt after 2011
A seminar with Emad Shahin, American University in Cairo
Time and place: Apr. 17, 2015 12:00 PM–2:00 PM, Universitetet i Oslo, Eilert Sundts hus Aud. 5
Egypt has gone through two failed transitions since 2011, and it is not yet certain whether the current phase will end in a new revolutionary wave or crash all aspirations for building a truly democratic system. Regardless of the outcome, the past four years of incomplete successes and failed aspirations require a re-examination of basic relationships that shape the political and social dynamics of the country. At the top of these are State-Society relations; civil-military relations; and civil-civil relations. The need to fully understand the recurring patterns of continuity and change cannot be more urgent to be able to learn from the mistakes of the past and move on toward a new future.
About Emad Shahin
Emad Shahin is a visiting professor of political science at the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University and the editor-in-chief of The Oxford Encyclopedia of Islam and Politics. He is professor of public policy, the American University in Cairo (on leave). His areas of interest include Comparative Politics, Islam and Politics, Political Economy of the Middle East, and Democracy and Political Reform in Muslim societies. Shahin holds a Ph.D. (1989) from the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, M.A. (1983) and BA (1980) from the American University in Cairo. A prolific author, Shahin authored, co-authored and co-edited six books and has more than 50 scholarly publications including journal articles, book chapters and encyclopedia entries. His publications include Political Ascent: Contemporary Islamic Movements in North Africa; co-editorship with Nathan Brown of The Struggle over Democracy in the Middle East and North Africa; and co-authorship of Islam and Democracy (in Arabic). He is the editor-in-chief of The Oxford Encyclopedia of Islam and Politics and co-editor with John L. Esposito of The Oxford Handbook of Islam and Politics.
Coffee/tea and light snacks will be served from 13.30. Welcome!
The right to the city, urbanism and local initiatives in post-2011 Cairo
A seminar with Prof. Diane Singerman, American University.
Time and place: Apr. 10, 2015 12:15 PM–2:00 PM, Eilert Sunds hus A, Aud. 4
Municipal level or local politics is the weakest link among already weak representative and deliberative institutions in the Arab world. This talk will concentrate on current and potential strategies to democratize municipal and regional politics after the uprising in Egypt that politicized urban space and made successful demands for regime change, yet failed to break the hegemonic practices of authoritarianism and neoliberalism. Examining the pre-2011 ‘local administration’ system and several cases of post-2011 community initiatives, this talk will delineate the fears, vulnerabilities, and administrative debates surrounding the extremely formidable struggle to democratize local politics. It will suggest that mobilizing local demands for the basket of rights encompassed in the notion of the right to the city may be a useful strategy to strengthen government accountability, responsiveness, and build a more inclusive sense of the public interest.
Prof. Singerman is the Co-Director of TADAMUN: The Cairo Urban Solidarity Initiatve which raises questions about social justice and the built environment and the current paradigm of urban development in Cairo. Egypt’s highly centralized state leaves the municipal level of governance very weak and poorly-resourced. State employees, un-elected district heads, and un-elected governors manage urban areas with very little citizen participation. Dilapidated housing, inequitable public services, pollution, traffic jams, diminishing public open space and green space, are challenges facing Cairo. Overcoming such challenges not only requires new public policies and professional expertise, but the involvement of city residents in local government. TADAMUN analyzes and documents successful citizen initiatives and Egyptian urban development projects to offer workable alternatives to policy-makers, academics, and interested civil society and urbanist circles.
About Diane Singerman
Diane Singerman is an Associate Professor in the Department of Government, School of Public Affairs at American University. She received her B.A., M.A., and PhD from Princeton University and did graduate work at the American University in Cairo. Among her publications are: Avenues of Participation: Family, Politics, and Networks in Urban Quarters of Cairo (1995), Cairo Contested: Governance, Urban Space, and Global Modernity, (ed., 2009), Cairo Cosmopolitan: Politics, Culture, and Urban Space in the New Globalized Middle East (co-edt. with Paul Amar 2006), and Development, Change, and Gender in Cairo: A View from the Household (co-edited with Homa Hoodfar, 1996). Her research interests lie within comparative politics, gender and politics in Egypt and the Middle East, informal politics, political participation, urbanism, youth, globalization, and social movements.
She is currently Co-Director of a project called “Tadamun: The Cairo Urban Solidarity Initiative” in Cairo, Egypt. Tadamun is working to reform prevailing urban development practices and local governance in Egypt to be inclusive, transparent, and equitable and to forge a direct link in the public consciousness between urban and environmental rights with democracy and citizenship. Through our field work and research, we are building knowledge of the informal settlements and community networks in Cairo, the interplay between formal and informal governance systems that often shape these areas, as well as community-driven initiatives to consolidate power in the post-Revolution environment and leverage government resources.
Organizer
Centre for Islamic and Middle East Studies and Norwegian Peacebuilding Resource Centre (NOREF)
The Third Branch of Islam: The Ibadis and Ibadi Law
A seminar with Knut Vikør, University of Bergen
Time and place: Mar. 20, 2015 12:15 PM–2:00 PM, Universitetet i Oslo, Eilert Sundts hus Aud. 5
Besides the Sunni and the Shi’a, there exists an almost forgotten, third major branch of Islam, the Ibadis. Focused in Oman and the Maghreb, they believe that the best Muslim, whatever his background, should be elected to the head of the community. In this seminar, we will trace their history and the basic tenets of their belief. They have their own school of law, but how different is it from Sunni Law?
Knut Vikør is a professor of Middle East studies and the Muslim African history at the University of Bergen. He has worked on topics like the history of Sahara, Sufi religious orders in the 19th century, and the history of Islamic law. Vikør has written, among others, «Ei verd bygd på islam», «Mellom Gud og stat: Ei historie om islamsk lov», and «Maghreb - Nordafrika etter 1800»
Coffee/tea and light snacks will be served from 13.30. Welcome!
Organizer
The Centre for Islamic and Middle East Studies and The New Middle East: Emerging Political and Ideological Trends
EU Aid Policies and Local Perceptions: The Case of Israel and Palestine
A seminar with Beata Paragi, Fafo
Time and place: Mar. 13, 2015 12:15 PM–2:00 PM, Universitetet i Oslo, Eilert Sundts hus Aud. 5
Western countries have been supporting the idea of the two-state solution by pouring billions of dollars to the region. But does this money make any difference? Are the actors, Israelis and Palestinians, closer to the solution than they were decades ago? And how do local people think about the two-state solution, the role of the donors and the official aid objectives? The presentation will address these questions in light of the recent changes in the Middle East.
Beata Paragi is an EU Marie Curie fellow at Fafo and an assistant professor at the Corvinus University of Budapest. She graduated as an economist (2003) and holds a PhD in international relations (2008) from the Corvinus University of Budapest (former Karl Marx University of Economics). Since these years she has been a visiting researcher at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel as well as at Fafo AIS. Her main fields of interest, in terms of research and teaching alike, cover the Israeli-Palestinian relations and international development cooperation. She co-authored the first book on international development published in Hungarian (Nemzetkozi fejlesztesi segélyezes, Budapest: Tett Consult, 2007, with Balazs Szent-Ivanyi and Sara Vari) among others.
Coffee/tea and light snacks will be served from 13.30. Welcome!
Organizer
The Centre for Islamic and Middle East Studies and The New Middle East: Emerging Political and Ideological Trends
Maneuvering authority: The Sunni Friday sermon in the Syrian crisis
A seminar with Frida Austvoll Nome, Norwegian Institute of International Affairs (NUPI).
Time and place: Mar. 6, 2015 12:15 PM–2:00 PM, Universitetet i Oslo, Eilert Sundts hus Aud. 5
It is often said that Ulama who are part of the religious establishments in the Middle East are quietist when faced with oppression, or that they are regime allies acting in their own interest. In this seminar Frida Autvoll Nome will address the public role of establishment scholars during crisis, and ask what authority they produce from the pulpit. With Syria as case, Frida Autvoll Nome will explore the discursive struggles of Damascene ulama during the rise of public protests in 2011.
Frida Nome is a researcher at the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs (NUPI) and a phd-fellow at the Religious Studies department of the Norwegian School of Theology (MF). Formerly a diplomat, she has worked on the Middle East for many years, and has a particular interest for Syria and Egypt. Her research interests are at the intersection of religion, politics and language.
Coffee/tea and light snacks will be served from 13.30. Welcome!
Organizer
The Centre for Islamic and Middle East Studies and The New Middle East: Emerging Political and Ideological Trends
Salafi Trends in Yemen after 2011
A seminar with Laurent Bonnefoy, Centre d'Etudes et de Recherches Internationales (CERI)
Time and place: Feb. 27, 2015 12:15 PM–2:00 PM, Universitetet i Oslo, Eilert Sundts hus Aud. 5
The diversity of the Salafis spectrum in Yemen has been affected in a variety of ways by the revolutionary uprising of 2011. Politicization trends have been prominent with the emergence of the first Salafi party, the Rashad Union, which actively took part in the institutional transition process. Resilience of quietist circles, which were once dominant, has also been manifest and taken unexpected paths. For their part, Jihadi Salafi have too adapted to the new context and have been shaped by new competition with the organisation of the Islamic State. Laurent Bonnefoy's presentation will analyze and contextualize these trends that are recomposing Salafism and Yemeni politics.
Laurent Bonnefoy is a CNRS researcher at Sciences Po Paris (Centre d'études et de recherches internationales). He is deputy principal investigator of the When Authoritarianism Fails in the Arab World (WAFAW) programme, supported by the European Research Council. A specialist of Islamism in the Arabian Peninsula, he is the author of Salafism in Yemen. Transnationalism and Religious Identity (Hurst, 2011) and has co-edited Jeunesses arabes. Du Maroc au Yémen : loisirs, cultures et politiques.
Organizer
The Centre for Islamic and Middle East Studies and The New Middle East: Emerging Political and Ideological Trends
Abdallah Azzam and the Rise of the Muslim Foreign Fighter Phenomenon
A seminar with Thomas Hegghammer, the Norwegian Defence Research Establishment (FFI).
Time and place: Feb. 20, 2015 12:15 PM–2:00 PM, Universitetet i Oslo, Eilert Sundts hus Aud. 5
Abdallah Azzam (1941-1989) is a pivotal figure in the history of militant Islamism. He played a crucial role in the Arab mobilisation to the 1980s war in Afghanistan and left a vast ideological production which continues to inspire militants today. But how did Azzam, a Palestinian, end up in Afghanistan and what made his writings so influential? This lecture will retrace Azzam's biography and ideological evolution and argue that his influence stems from his articulation of a new foreign fighter doctrine at a time when pan-Islamism was on the rise in the Muslim world. The findings are based on extensive primary source research and fieldwork in Palestine, Jordan, and Pakistan.
Thomas Hegghammer is director of terrorism research at the Norwegian Defence Research Establishment (FFI) and a specialist on violent Islamist groups. He is the author of Jihad in Saudi Arabia (2010) and many other books and articles on jihadism. He is currently completing a biography of Abdallah Azzam for Cambridge University Press.
Coffee/tea and light snacks will be served from 13.30. Welcome!
This seminar was supposed to take place Friday the 30th of January. However, due to unforeseen circumstances, this seminar is postponed until the 20th of February.
Organizer
The Centre for Islamic and Middle East Studies and The New Middle East; Emerging political and ideological trends
Testimonies of Terror: Talking about Sexual Assaults on an Egyptian Talk Show
A seminar with Mona Abdel Fadil, University of Oslo
Time and place: Feb. 13, 2015 12:15 PM–2:00 PM, Universitetet i Oslo, Eilert Sundts hus Aud. 5
This CIMS Seminar with Mona Abdel-Fadil deals with how a popular Egyptian talk-show discussed mob attacks and violent sexual assaults on female protesters in Tahrir square. The seminar will feature an analysis of a particular episode, which includes several sexual assault testimonials. The seminar will focus on the framing of the attacks, the content of the testimonials, the dramaturgy, and the different roles played by the show host and the participants. Last but not least, all these components will be discussed against a wider cultural context of ‘the shame and blame game’.
Please note that this seminar contains material that the audience may find disturbing. Actual testimonials from survivors of violence will be discussed in detail. The descriptions of assaults are graphic.
Mona Abdel-Fadil is an Egyptian-Norwegian social scientist and holds a PhD from the University of Oslo. Abdel-Fadil’s research interests include: media and religion, anthropology of the Middle East, contemporary Islam, and political transitions in connection with the ‘Arab Spring’. Mona Abdel-Fadil is currently a postdoctoral researcher on the project: Engaging with Conflicts in Mediatized Religious Environments: A Comparative Scandinavian Study, at the Department of Media and Communication, University of Oslo.
Abdel-Fadil’s publications include Sowing the Seeds of The Message: Islamist Women Activists Before, During, and After the Egyptian Revolution (2014), Islam offline—living ‘The message’ behind the screens (2012), and The Islam-Online Crisis: A Battle of Wasatiyya vs. Salafi Ideologies? (2011). Mona Abdel-Fadil is a regular contributor to the academic blog ‘The New Middle East Blog’ (http://newmeast.wordpress.com) and is the Coordinator of the Nordic Network on Media and Religion.
Organizer
The Centre for Islamic and Middle East Studies and The New Middle East: Emerging Political and Ideological Trends
The Road to al-Sisi: The Power Struggle in Egypt 2011-13
A seminar with Bjørn Olav Utvik, University of Oslo
Time and place: Feb. 6, 2015 12:15 PM–2:00 PM, Universitetet i Oslo, Eilert Sundts hus Aud. 5
According to one narrative at the time the military took power in Egypt on 3 July 2013 to rid the country of a Muslim Brother president who had misused his democratic mandate to arrogate to himself autocratic powers. But what had really been at stake in the power struggle between Islamists, secularists and the deep state that characterised the period from the fall of Mubarak to the ousting of Mursi? It will be shown that the problems had little to do with President Mursi being anything close to an Islamising dictator. Rather the lack of mutual trust between Islamist and secularists created an ideal situation for those aiming to roll back the fledgling post-revolutionary democratic reforms.
Bjørn Olav Utvik is Professor in Middle East History and Director of the Centre for Islamic and Middle East Studies at the University of Oslo. His main research interest has been political Islam, with a special focus on Egypt and Iran. He is the author of The Pious Road to Development: Islamist Economics in Egypt (2006), Islamismen (2011, in Norwegian) and Oil States in the New Middle East: Uprisings & Stability (with Kjetil Selvik, eds., forthcoming 2015).
Coffee/tea and light snacks will be served from 13.30. Welcome!
Organizer
The Centre for Islamic and Middle East Studies and The New Middle East; Emerging political and ideological trends
The Gulf States and the Struggle for the ‘Post Arab Spring’
A seminar with Kristian Coates Ulrichsen, M.Phil PhD Fellow for the Middle East Rice University's Baker Institute
Time and place: Jan. 23, 2015 12:15 PM–2:00 PM, Universitetet i Oslo, Eilert Sundts hus Aud. 5
The rise of the Gulf States as assertive and even interventionist actors poses new challenges for policy-making in the Middle East and North Africa as the region emerges unsteadily from the Arab Spring. Chief among them is the growing evidence that Gulf officials are prepared to ‘go it alone’ and act unilaterally or, at best, as a loose regional bloc to secure their interests in transition states. Such actions raise questions for the broader international community of how to align Gulf States’ support in the short-term with moves toward sustainable development and political inclusiveness in the longer-run. Yet, the examples of post-Mubarak Egypt and Syria during the civil war suggest that Gulf power players are less inclined to listen to what they perceive as increasingly discredited Western-centric approaches that have, in their view, exacerbated instability in transition states since 2011.
This presentation examines why the Gulf States have aligned their growing capabilities (in the political, economic, and security arenas) with a far more expansive policy intent in which aid and assistance indelibly is linked to particular political currents rather than being tied to outcomes such as reforms to governance or improvements in transparency. It also documents the practical and policy implications for international stakeholders in engaging with a muscular Gulf across the Middle East and North Africa, and ends by considering what impact any sustained period of lower oil prices and revenues will have on the Gulf States’ regional policies.
Kristian Coates Ulrichsen, Ph.D., is the Baker Institute fellow for the Middle East. Working across the disciplines of political science, international relations and international political economy, his research examines the changing position of Persian Gulf states in the global order, as well as the emergence of longer-term, nonmilitary challenges to regional security. Previously, he worked as senior Gulf analyst at the Gulf Center for Strategic Studies and as co-director of the Kuwait Programme on Development, Governance and Globalisation in the Gulf States at the London School of Economics (LSE). He is a visiting fellow at the LSE Middle East Centre and an associate fellow at Chatham House in the United Kingdom.
Coffee/tea and light snacks will be served from 13.30. Welcome!
Organizer
The Centre for Islamic and Middle East Studies and The New Middle East; Emerging political and ideological trends
2014
Jews in South Lebanon, Shi'a in North Palestine: Pilgrimage and Religious Identity during the Mandate Period
Speaker: Toufoul Abou-Hodeib, University of Oslo. The state borders introduced into the Levant after World War I cut across social, commercial and religious networks, among them pilgrimage.
Time and place: Feb. 21, 2014 11:15 AM–1:00 PM, UiO, Eilert Sundts Hus, Auditorium 5
But pilgrimage continued during the interwar period, transformed by the complexities of state relations under the French (Syria and Lebanon) and British (Palestine and Jordan) mandates in the region.
This seminar looks at pilgrimage to shrines of religious figures on both sides of the border between Lebanon and Palestine in the interwar period, looking at the paradoxical effect Mandate policies had on religious identity. By bringing in various religious groups, the seminar highlights a multi-religious history of the region and the effect of state borders on an important aspect of everyday life, namely religious practices.
Toufoul Abou-Hodeib is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Department of Culture Studies and Oriental Languages at the University of Oslo. She has taught at the University of Chicago, the University of Oxford, and the American University of Beirut, and her articles have appeared in the International Journal of Middle East Studies, History Compass, and the International Journal of Maritime History. Her research and writing focus on social history, material culture, and the relationship between history and memory in the modern Levant.
This seminar is open to everyone.
Coffee/tea and light snacks will be served from 12.30. Welcome!
Islamism vs. Secularism? Rethinking Tunisia's Revolution Three Years On
Speaker: Monica Marks, University of Oxford. This seminar is open to everyone. More information to follow.
Time and place: Feb. 28, 2014 11:15 AM–1:00 PM, UiO, Eilert Sundts Hus, Auditorium 5
Egypt: Freedom and Justice to the Bedouins in Sinai?
In this seminar, Heidi Breen will talk about her master thesis called “Freedom and Justice to the Bedouins in Sinai?”
Time and place: Mar. 7, 2014 11:15 AM–1:00 PM, UiO, Eilert Sundts Hus, Auditorium 5
Much research has been devoted to analysing the Muslim Brotherhood’s ideology, and many have speculated on what kind of policy the organization would lead if it came to power. Breen’s thesis looks at the Freedom and Justice Party, which has its roots in the Muslim Brotherhood, and the party’s approach towards the radicalization of Sinai and especially their approach to the Bedouins. The perpetrators of the various violent attacks in Sinai are described as being predominantly Bedouins. While in government, president Morsi, a member of the FJP, was accused of being a “Mubarak with beard”. The study aims to answer the question of whether and how the Freedom and Justice Party’s planed policy towards the Bedouin minority, during its time in government, was new or a continuation of the Mubarak regimes policy.
Tea, coffee and light refreshments will be served between 12.30 - 13.00.
Bridging the Divide: Ideologically Independent Unionism in Egypt
A seminar with Kristian Takvam Kindt, researcher at Fafo Institute for Applied International Studies.
Time and place: Apr. 11, 2014 11:15 AM–1:00 PM, UiO, Eilert Sundts Hus, Auditorium 5
In this seminar, Kristian Takvam Kindt will talk about his master thesis called “Unintentional democrats: Independent unions in post-Mubarak Egypt”.
The Egyptian labor movement is one of the most active forces of Egyptian civil society today.
Since the revolution in 2011, over 1,000 new unions have been founded and 3,000 strikes have taken place. In this presentation, Kristian Takvam Kindt asks whether these strikes and unions are a constructive force for democratization in Egypt?
Based on his MA-thesis and follow up-reserach in march 2014 he investigates how the new independent trade union movement impact the political process. He challenges the position that trade unions must have a structural outlook or an explicitly political agenda to be a contructive player in democratic processes.
The Egyptian unions explicitly distances themselves from politics, but this act enables them to contribute to democratization in a constructive way.
What has "påske" to do with Arabic eloquence?
A few stories around Arabic words and their history. A seminar with Prof. Stephan Guth, University of Oslo.
Time and place: Apr. 25, 2014 11:15 AM–1:00 PM, UiO, Eilert Sundts Hus, Auditorium 5
Although one of the major languages of the world, Arabic does not have an etymological dictionary yet. This lecture presents a project that aims to lay the foundations for remedying this lack. Taking Norwegian påske as its starting point, it traces some Easter-related terms back to their Semitic origins to then set off for an excursion into the ‘wide oceans’ of Arabic vocabulary and its history. From the samples presented it will become clear which destinations already can be reached safely so far (and with the help of which equipment), but also where the dangers of shipwrecking lie.
Coffee/tea and light snacks will be served from 12.30 - 13.00
Welcome!
May God Help her
How do Christians, Sunni and Shi´a Communities in Lebanon Interpret the Challenge of Violence against Women? A seminar with Anne Hege Grung, University of Oslo.
Time and place: May 9, 2014 11:15 AM–1:00 PM, UiO, Eilert Sundts Hus, Auditorium 5
The Arab Spring and the Contested Future of Islamic Feminism
A seminar with Mervat Hatem, Howard University, Washington. This seminar is open to everyone.
Time and place: May 16, 2014 11:15 AM–1:00 PM, UiO, Eilert Sundts Hus, Auditorium 5
Mervat Hatem is Professor of Political Science at Howard University in Washington DC. She was president of the Middle East Studies Association in 2008. Hatem has published more than 50 journal articles and book chapters on gender and politics, in the Middle East and in North America.
Muhammad through Western eyes: personifying Islam in European discourse
A seminar with professor John Tolan, the University of Nantes (France)
Time and place: May 16, 2014 1:00 PM–2:00 PM, Eilert Sundts hus Aud. 5
John Tolan is professor of Medieval History at the University of Nantes (France) and member of the Academia Europaea. He is author of numerous articles and books in medieval history and cultural studies, including Petrus Alfonsi and his Medieval Readers (1993) Saracens: Islam in the Medieval European Imagination (2002), Sons of Ishmael: Muslims through European Eyes in the Middle Ages (2008), Saint Francis and the Sultan: The Curious History of a Christian-Muslim Encounter (2009), and (with Gilles Veinstein and Henry Laurens) Europe and the Islamic World (2012).
He currently is director of a major project funded by the European Research Council, “RELMIN: The legal status of religious minorities in the Euro-Mediterranean world (5th-15th centuries)”
When shari‘a meets revolution: The rise of revolutionary Salafism in Egypt
A seminar with Stéphane Lacroix.
Time and place: May 23, 2014 11:15 AM–1:00 PM, UiO, Eilert Sundts Hus, Auditorium 5
This presentation will deal with the post-25 January 2011 rise of an Egyptian “revolutionary Salafi” movement, whose discourse attempts to blend shari’a with revolution.
United around the charismatic figure of Hazem Salah Abu Isma‘il, revolutionary Salafis represented from mid-2011 to mid-2012 the main of threat to the Muslim Brotherhood’s and Hizb al-Nur’s hegemony over political Islam, demonstrating an ability to mobilize tens of thousands in the streets.
What can explain this “revolutionary Salafi moment”? And what happened to revolutionary Salafis before and after the military coup against Mohamed Morsi?
Salafis at War in Syria: Logics of Fragmentation and Realignment
A seminar with Dr Thomas Pierret, Lecturer in Contemporary Islam at the University of Edinburgh, Department of Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies.
Time and place: Aug. 29, 2014 12:15 PM–2:00 PM, Aud. 4, Eilert Sundts Hus
External Salafi involvement in a conflict through funding and foreign fighters has been a recurring pattern of Muslim politics since the Afghan war in the 1980s. However, the Syrian crisis has brought about a largely unprecedented situation, namely, the fact that competition among Salafi support networks of conflicting political orientations - Jihadis, political/Haraki, and quietist - has profoundly affected the structure of the insurgency as a whole. In this talk, Thomas Pierret presents the different nexuses of local military commanders, foreign private networks of support, and state sponsors, that stand behind the main Syrian insurgent coalitions of Salafi obedience. The aim here is not only to map the forces at play, but also to highlight the highly flexible character of these groups' strategies and identities in the face of rapidly evolving circumstances.
Dr Thomas Pierret is Lecturer in Contemporary Islam at the University of Edinburgh, Department of Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies. He earned his PhD in Political sciences at Sciences Po Paris and the University of Louvain, and he occupied postdoctoral positions at Princeton University and the Zentrum Moderner Orient, Berlin. He is the author of Religion and State in Syria. The Sunni Ulama from Coup to Revolution (Cambridge University Press, 2013). He has published extensively on the current Syrian conflict. He has also advised governments and international organisations on that issue.
Contesting Religious Authority among Jordanian Salafis
A seminar with Dr Joas Wagemakers: "Contesting Religious Authority among Jordanian Salafis"
Time and place: Sep. 5, 2014 12:15 PM–2:00 PM, Eilert Sundts hus Auditorium 5
This seminar deals with the debates related to religious authority among quietist and Jihadi-Salafis in Jordan. The very few publications on this subject focus on the theological accusations of doctrinal extremism between the different actors in these debates. More specifically, a frequent accusation levelled against those scholars considered too moderate is that they are "neo-Murji'a", while those ideologues deemed too radical are often labelled "neo-Khawarij". Both terms refer to political and theological trends in early Islam and their invocation in modern-day debates serves to delegitimise opponents by sticking undesirable labels on them. This talk shows, however, that beneath this theological mudslinging, there are other and much more mundane reasons why Salafis in Jordan are contesting religious authority.
Joas Wagemakers is an assistant professor and a post-doctoral research fellow of Islamic Studies at Radboud University in Nijmegen, the Netherlands. He has published widely in international peer-reviewed journals and edited volumes on Salafism and Islamism, particularly on the ideological aspects of these phenomena. His current research focuses on quietist Salafism and the Muslim Brotherhood in Jordan, for which he has done extensive fieldwork. Wagemakers' recent publications include Salafism: Utopian Ideals in a Stubborn Reality (Almere: Parthenon, 2014; in Dutch, co-authored with Martijn de Koning and Carmen Becker) and A Quietist Jihadi: The Ideology and Influence of Abu Muhammad al-Maqdisi (Cambridge, etc.: Cambridge University Press, 2012). He also co-edits ZemZem, a Dutch-language journal on the Middle East, North Africa and Islam, and regularly blogs at Jihadica.com, a weblog on issues related to global jihad.
Coffee/tea and light refreshments will be served from 13.30 - 14.00. Welcome!
Organizer
The New Middle East; Emerging Political and Ideological Trends and The Center for Islamic and Middle East Studies
Sponge Bob in Cairo: Language and Criticism in New Egyptian Print Media
A seminar with Jacob Høigilt, PRIO.
Time and place: Sep. 12, 2014 12:15 PM–2:00 PM, Eilert Sundts hus Aud. 5
This talk is based on ongoing research into the content and language of glossy youth magazines and comics for grown-ups in Egypt. A combination of two features stands out in these publications: a willingness to take on controversial social and political issues, and a tendency to doso in the vernacular (ᶜāmmiyya) code to a great extent. Through a number of examples and illustrations Høigilt shows what kind of content and language is found in these publications, and what the implications are for both social relations and the Arabic language system.
Jacob Høigilt is a senior researcher at the Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO). His work concentrates on Islamism, sociolinguistics, and grassroots political activism, with a focus on Palestine and Egypt. Among his latest publications are "Prophets in Their Own Country? Hizb al-Tahrir in the Palestinian Context" (Politics, Religion and Society, forthcoming 2014) and (with Frida Nome) "Egyptian Salafism in Revolution" (Journal of Islamic Studies, Spring 2014).
Coffee/tea and light snacks will be served from 13.30. Welcome!
From Rurality to Modernity: Language Issues in 21st Century Morocco
A seminar with Catherine Miller, IREMAM
Time and place: Sep. 19, 2014 12:15 PM–2:00 PM, Eilert Sundts Hus aud. 5
Morocco is known to be a multilingual country. Up to the late 1990s, the language situation in Morocco was mostly described in a rather static way. French and standard Arabic were considered the ´high´ languages used in writings, education and official/formal domains. Berber (Amazigh) and Moroccan Arabic vernaculars were considered ´low languages´used as spoken languages only.
The 1990s and 2000s witnessed important changes in both languages uses, languages status and languages representations. The most impressive change being the promotion of Amazigh from an oppressed language to an official one in the 2011 constitution as well as the increasing use of Moroccan Arabic in various domains.
In this talk, Catherine Miller will assess and compare the objectives, arguments and actors of the two movements acting for the promotion of Amazigh and Moroccan Arabic. What do they have in common, what distinguishe them, what are their main achievements and weakness? How far can the Moroccan situation be compared with other Middle Eastern countries?
About Catherine Miller
Catherine Miller is Senior fellow researcher in the Institute of Middle Eastern and Muslim Studies (IREMAM) at University of Aix-Marseille. Specialized in Arabic sociolinguistics, she has done extensive field research in Sudan, Egypt and Morocco on language contact, language change, linguistic policies and Arabic dialectology.
She has written, edited or co-edited 10 books and published several papers. Her last publications include Montserat Bénitez, Catherine Miller, Jan Jaap de Ruiter, et Youssef Tameur (eds) 2013 Evolutions des pratiques et des représentations langagières dans le Maroc du XXIème siècle, Paris, L’Harmattan
Coffee/tea and light snacks will be served from 13.30. Welcome!
Assad's Jihadist Allies
Who are those “Shi’a Jihadists”? Why do they fight to defend the Assad regime? What are the ideological and political justifications for their fight? How does Iran recruit them? And what are the consequences of their “presence in Syria”?
Time and place: Sep. 24, 2015 12:30 PM–2:00 PM, Universitetet i Oslo, Eilert Sundts hus, A-blokka: Auditorium 5
While Media and western observers have mainly focused on the Sunni Jihadists moving to Syria to fight Assad or to join the “Islamic State” and fight Syrian opposition factions, other Jihadists – Shi’a ones – have been deploying in larger numbers in the country to defend Assad and “protect” his regime.
Whether from Iraq, from Afghanistan and Pakistan, or from the well-trained and equipped Hezbollah of Lebanon, the Shi’a fighters were mobilized by Iran’s Revolutionary Guards and sent to fight in most strategic battles around Damascus the capital, in Deraa in the South and in Aleppo in the North.
Who are those “Shi’a Jihadists”? Why do they fight to defend the Assad regime? What are the ideological and political justifications for their fight? How does Iran recruit them? And What are the consequences of their “presence in Syria”?
Ziad Majed is an associate professor of Middle East Studies and Comparative Politics at the American University of Paris. He is the author of “Syria, the orphaned revolution” (2013 in Arabic and 2014 in French).
The lecture is hosted by Syrian Peace Action Center (SPACE) in cooperation with Centre for Islamic and Middle East Studies (CIMS).
Organizer
The Syrian Peace Action Centre (SPACE) and Centre for Islamic and Middle East Studies
Can Jihadists Become Pragmatists?
A seminar with Erling Lorentzen Sogge, University of Oslo
Time and place: Sep. 26, 2014 12:15 PM–2:00 PM, Eilert Sundts hus, aud. 5
The Palestinian Jihadi-Salafi militia Usbat al-Ansar was for years locked in a violent turf war against Fatah and the PLO in refugee camp Ain al-Hilwe in southern Lebanon. Whereas the group still commits to the principles of militant jihad and the struggle for a global caliphate, it now cooperates alongside the nationalist Palestinian factions in organizing the internal political and military functions of what is the largest refugee camp in the country.
When Fatah and Hamas formed a joint security force with Usbat al-Ansar in 2014, inhabitants of Ain al-Hilwe claimed the presence of the Jihadi-Salafis in question would inhibit the growth of extremism in the camp. How should we understand this development?
This seminar aims to shed new light on the evolution of militant Islamism in the Palestinian diaspora of Lebanon.
Erling Lorentzen Sogge completed his master thesis "The Local Politics of Global Jihad: The Evolution of Militant Jihadism in Ain al- Hilwe" at the University of Oslo in the spring of 2014. Each semester the Centre for Islamic and Middle East Studies (CIMS) in cooperation with The New Middle East; Emerging Political and Ideological Trends (NewME) invites one or two exceptional master students to present his or her work on a Friday seminar. By doing this CIMS and NewME wish to both strengthen a broader understanding of the area in question and to inspire other students.
Coffee/tea and light snacks will be served from 13.30. Welcome!
Organizer
The New Middle East; Emerging Political and Ideological Trends and The Centre for Islamic and Middle East Studies
The Muslim Brotherhood: Evolution of an Islamist Movement
A seminar with Carrie Rosefsky Wickham, Emory University
Time and place: Oct. 10, 2014 12:15 PM–2:00 PM, Eilert Sundts Hus Aud. 4
In the wake of the Arab Spring, Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt reached the heights of state power, but its triumph was short-lived. Since the military intervention of July 2013, the Brotherhood has found itself once again a target of state repression. What does the Brotherhood stand for, and how have its goals and strategies changed over time? Tracing the Brotherhood’s evolution from 1928 to the present, Wickham demonstrates that it has gravitated toward global themes of freedom and democracy without fully abandoning illiberal concepts of Shari’a carried over from the past. Yet what Shari’a rule would mean in practice and how it should be pursued have become hotly contested within the Brotherhood itself. And the collapse of Egypt’s brief experiment in Islamist governance has prompted a new wave of learning in Brotherhood circles, raising the prospects of deeper movement change in the future.
About Carrie Rosefsky Wickham
Carrie Rosefsky Wickham is a Professor of Political Science at Emory University. Her research investigates the dynamics of social movements and contentious politics in authoritarian settings, with a regional focus on the Middle East. She is the author of Mobilizing Islam: Religion, Activism and Political Change in Egypt (Columbia University Press, 2002), and The Muslim Brotherhood: Evolution of an Islamist Movement (Princeton University Press, 2013). Her articles have appeared in a variety of academic journals. Wickham has presented her research findings at many universities in the United States, Canada and Europe, as well as to the State Department, the National Intelligence Council, the National Security Council, the Supreme NATO Command, and staff members in the U.S. Congress.
Organizer
Centre for Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies and The New Middle East; Emerging political and ideological trends
President Erdogan: A More Powerful Man?
A seminar with Einar Wigen, University of Oslo
Time and place: Oct. 17, 2014 12:15 PM–2:00 PM, Universitetet i Oslo, Eilert Sundts hus Aud. 5
When Recep Tayyip Erdoğan won the presidential election on 10 August this year, he refused to be called the twelfth president of the Turkish Republic. Instead, he insisted that he was the first president of 'New Turkey'. By doing so, he makes explicit his own claim to being a müceddid - a renewer of the faith and of an Islamic just order in Turkey. Party posters around İstanbul also declares him to be 'the hope of humanity and the leader of the Ummah'. He has consolidated power in a way that no Turkish leader after Atatürk has succeeded in doing. Meanwhile, it seems uncertain what his supposedly new, just order is.
About Einar Wigen
Einar Wigen holds a PhD in Turkish studies from the University of Oslo, Norway, where he now works as lecturer in Middle East/Turkish studies. His dissertation is on the importance of translation for international relations, and specifically the relationship between Turkey and European states. As well as being trained as an Ottomanist, he holds an MA in political science from the University of Oslo, and one in peace and conflict studies from EPU, Austria. Wigen’s publications include ‘The Importance of the Eurasian Steppe to the Study of International Relations’ in Journal of International Relations and Development, coauthored with Iver B. Neumann (2013), and ‘Ottoman Concepts of Empire’ in Contributions to the History of Concepts (2013).
Coffee/tea and light snacks will be served from 13.30. Welcome!
The Arab Uprisings and the Crisis of Civil-Military Relations
A seminar with Omar Ashour, University of Exeter
Time and place: Oct. 24, 2014 12:15 PM–2:00 PM, Universitetet i Oslo, Eilert Sundts hus Aud. 5
Arab militaries have been one of the most dominant internal political actors in the region since the March 1949 military coup in Syria. The Arab-majority uprisings threatened such dominance between 2010 and 2012. However, most of the uprisings failed to balance civil-military relations as well as to initiate successful security sector reform processes. What are the reasons behind such failure? This question and related issues will be discussed by Dr. Omar Ashour.
About Dr. Omar Ashour
Dr. Omar Ashour is a Senior Lecturer in Security Studies at the University of Exeter and Non-Resident Fellow at the Brookings Institution. He is the author of The De-Radicalization of Jihadists: Transforming Armed Islamist Movements, the first book on comparative transitions from armed to unarmed activism by several Islamists organizations. His more recent publications include Brookings-Stanford Papers on security sector reform in Egypt and Libyan Islamists transformations in the aftermath of Qaddafi’s era. Dr. Ashour's research focuses on asymmetric conflict, Islamist movements, security sector reform, and civil-military relations. He previously served as a consultant for the United Nations on security sector reform, counter-terrorism and de-radicalization issues. Dr. Ashour is a regular contributor to media outlets including the BBC, al‐Jazeera, Sky News, CNN, al‐Arabiya, Fox News and others. His op-eds are published in Foreign Policy, The Guardian, The Independent, al-Jazeera.net, CNN.com, Project Syndicate and other media outlets. His forthcoming Brookings Paper is entitled “Salute and Slaughter: Islamist-Military Relations in Egypt.”
Coffee/tea and light snacks will be served from 13.30. Welcome!
Armies and Militias in Syria and Iraq
A seminar with Kjetil Selvik, University of Bergen
Time and place: Oct. 31, 2014 12:15 PM–2:00 PM, Universitetet i Oslo, Eilert Sundts hus Aud. 5
Control over the means of violence is fragmenting in many Middle Eastern countries. Syria and Iraq have experienced a massive informalisation of military structures and operations. What drives the rise of militias and paramilitary groups and what are its consequences? The talk discusses the ongoing civil wars against a reading of the army’s pre-conflict political role.
Kjetil Selvik is researcher at the Chr. Michelsen Institute (CMI) and Adjunct Professor at the Department of Comparative Politics, University of Bergen. He holds a PhD in political science from L’Institut d’Etudes Politiques in Paris and specializes in the comparative politics of Iran and the Arab world.
Coffee/tea and light snacks will be served from 13.30. Welcome!
Organizer
The Centre for Islamic and Middle East Studies and The New Middle East; Emerging political and ideological trends
Writing the Self in Arabic Literature: From print to digital
A seminar with Teresa Pepe, University of Oslo
Time and place: Nov. 7, 2014 12:15 PM–2:00 PM, Universitetet i Oslo, Eilert Sundts hus Aud. 4
In the wake of the popular Egyptian uprisings, many young Egyptians resorted to blogging as a means of self-expression and literary creativity. Their autofictional accounts distributed on the web give us a glimpse into the daily lives, feelings and aspirations of the Egyptian youth that has pushed the country towards a revolution. These narratives are also indicative of significant aesthetic and political developments taking place in Arabic literature and culture.
Teresa Pepe has studied blogs as latest forms of autobiographical writing unique to the web. Her literary analysis is carried against the backdrop of the testimonies offered by the people behind the screen. In this lecture she analyzes blogs in the light of previous forms of autobiographical writing in modern Arabic literature and discusses the original features that self-presentation has developed on the Internet.
Teresa Pepe holds a PhD in Middle Eastern Studies and Literature from the University of Oslo. She has spent several years in Egypt to conduct research on modern and contemporary Arabic literature and on the impact of the Internet on Arab societies. Her research interests include modern and contemporary Arabic literature, youth activism, digital culture and the Arab Renaissance. She has published preliminary results of her research in the articles “Turning Blogs into Books” in the academic journal Oriente Moderno (2011), “Autofiction on Screen” in the Journal of New Media in MENA (2012) and “Egyptian Personal Blogs and the Arabic Notion of ʾAdab” (2012) in Letterature d’Oriente e d’Occidente.
Comparing Palestinian and Syrian Revolutionary Experiences
A seminar with Yezid Sayigh, Carnegie Middle East Center, Beirut
Time and place: Nov. 14, 2014 12:15 PM–2:00 PM, Universitetet i Oslo, Eilert Sundts hus Aud. 5
This seminar will discuss the evolution of the Syrian revolutionary uprising since 2011, and especially the adoption of armed struggle against the Assad regime as a central feature. This allows a comparison with the Palestinian experience, in which organized military action was the basis for mass mobilization and acquiring political autonomy, and provided a discursive framework for building national identity. The talk will focus on three key factors: the creation and role of leadership; forms and modes of organization; and the expectations and perceptions of the participants engaging in the revolutionary process.
Yezid Sayigh is a senior associate at the Carnegie Middle East Center in Beirut, where his work focuses on the Syrian crisis, the political role of Arab armies, security sector transformation in Arab transitions, the reinvention of authoritarianism, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and peace process.
Previously, Sayigh was professor of Middle East studies at King’s College London. From 1994–2003, he served as assistant director of studies at the Centre of International Studies, Cambridge. Sayigh is the author of numerous publications, including most recently The Syrian Opposition’s Leadership Problem (April 2013); Above the State: The Officers’ Republic in Egypt (August 2012); “We serve the people”: Hamas policing in Gaza (2011); and Policing the People, Building the State: Authoritarian transformation in the West Bank and Gaza (2011).
Coffee/tea and light snacks will be served from 13.30. Welcome!
Conflict in Syria and Civil War Dynamics in Tripoli, Lebanon
A seminar with Tine Gade, University of Oslo and SciencesPo Paris
Time and place: Nov. 21, 2014 12:15 PM–2:00 PM, Universitetet i Oslo, Eilert Sundts hus Aud. 5
City of North Lebanon with 320,300 inhabitants, Tripoli is one of the so-called “sensitive” zones where the Syrian war threatens to spread into Lebanon. Conflicts between Alawis and Sunnis in the city have been frequent ever since 2008. Tripoli's Islamist scene is particularly rich; different Islamist groups are funded by sources as diverse as Iran, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and actors close to the global Jihad movement. The relationship between Islamists in Tripoli and the Lebanese army (LAF) deteriorated after the beginning of the Syrian crisis (2011). Late October this year, 41 died in Tripoli after four-day clashes pitted some of Tripoli's armed Salafi groups who had declared sympathy with Jabhat al-Nusra against the LAF. This presentation seeks to explain the background for the conflicts and divisions present in Tripoli today. The way in which Saad Hariri's Future current failed in establishing a political leadership in Tripoli which could last over time reflected a wider crisis of political sunnism in the entire Levant, where the Sunni community is no longer politically united but split between the secular middle class, the bourgeois Islamists and the Salafi urban poor.
Tine Gade is a lecturer in Midde East Studies at the University of Oslo and a PhD candidate at SciencesPo Paris . Her dissertation, submitted in 2014, analyses the crisis of political leadership in Tripoli, Lebanon, in the 1967-2013 period. Gade was laureate of the Michel Seurat Prize in 2012, granted by the French CNRS. She taught at SciencesPo between 2008 and 2013 and has carried out extensive fieldwork in Lebanon and Syria.
Coffee/tea and light snacks will be served from 13.30. Welcome!
Dilemmas of Attachment: Identity and Belonging among Palestinian Christians
A seminar with Bård Kårtveit, University of Oslo
Time and place: Dec. 5, 2014 12:00 PM–2:00 PM, Universitetet i Oslo, Eilert Sundts hus Aud. 5
Christian Palestinians constitute one of the oldest Christian communities in the world, and their presence in Palestine dates back to early Christianity. In modern times, they have played a central part in shaping a Palestinian national identity, and they have enjoyed a political and cultural influence in Palestine that far exceeds their numbers. However, due to more than a hundred years of large-scale emigration, their presence in Palestine has diminished, and they now make up around one percent of the population in the West Bank and Gaza. Based on extensive fieldwork among Christians in the West Bank, this presentation will look at what is driving this emigration today, how local Christians see their own place within a Palestinian national community, and in what ways they are affected by, and respond to Israel's ongoing occupation.
Bård Kårtveit is based at IKOS, UiO, and currently working a three year post.doc project entitled 'Being a Coptic Man', about masculinity and family relations among Egyptian Copts. Completed a Master degree in Social Anthropology at the University of Bergen in 2003, with a study on Palestinian return-migration from the USA to the West Bank during the 'Oslo-years'. Between 2006 and 2010 he was a PhD Scholar at the University of Bergen, where he worked on a project focusing on identity, belonging and emigration among Christian Palestinians. Since completing his thesis, he has taught Middle Eastern Studies at IKOS, and coordinated a research project on civil-military relations in the Middle East and Latin America, based at Chr. Michelsen Institute in Bergen.
Coffee/tea and light snacks will be served from 13.30. Welcome!
‘Doing the Past’ in the 1453 Panorama Museum and in Taksim Gezi Park: understanding heritage complexity in modern Turkey
A seminar with Gönül Bozoğlu, University of York
Time and place: Dec. 12, 2014 12:15 PM–2:00 PM, Universitetet i Oslo, Eilert Sundts hus Aud. 5
In this seminar Gönül Bozoğlu will present her paper on an ongoing research on the relationships between history and politics in present-day Turkey. It focuses primarily on historical representations in museums, but she also looks more widely at uses of the past in contemporary political discourse and events. To introduce the museological aspect of her work she will present displays from one of her main research sites: the 1453 Panorama Museum in Istanbul. This is a spectacular, immersive experience of the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople in 1453 that is strongly associated with the political discourse of the ruling Justice and Development (AKP) party.
Gönül Bozoğlu will then discuss comparable uses of the past in a different arena: the civic space of Taksim-Gezi and the protests that took place there in 2013. Bozoğlu argues that history (or histories) are brought into play in political discourse and representations in various ways and through various channels. The paper argues that manifestations of historical nostalgia need to be understood as an important part of cultural, social and party politics.
Gönül Bozoğlu is a PhD candidate in the Sociology department at the University of York, UK. She has a background in Art History, Archaeology and Museum Studies and has worked in museums and archaeological excavations in Turkey, the Arabian Gulf and the UK. Her research explores the politics of history in modern-day Turkey. Gönül Bozoğlu is interested in the ways in which different socio-political groups align themselves with different histories such as Republican and Ottoman histories. Her main focus is on representations and visitor experiences of history in museums and heritage sites. However, she is also interested in manifestations of historical nostalgia in film, TV, material culture and new urban and architectural developments.
State Formations in the Arab East: Lines in the Sand or Solid Foundations?
A seminar with Nils A. Butenschøn, University of Oslo
Time and place: Nov. 28, 2014 12:15 PM–2:00 PM, Universitetet i Oslo, Eilert Sundts hus Aud. 5
The Arab uprisings since late 2010 introduced a new political era in the region, challenging the political order of both individual states and the regional system to its core. The uprisings represent a 'critical juncture' in contemporary Arab history. The outcome in terms of a new equilibrium of powers has yet to emerge and is very uncertain. We will focus particularly on the Levant and the paradoxical resilience of state formation in this part of the region. The colonial partition of this sub-region into separate states almost a century ago is normally considered as 'artificial' and hated by Arab nationalists and Islamists alike. It still persists today, but will it survive the combined effects of foreign interventions, sectarian warfare, and the Arab uprisings?
Nils A. Butenschøn is professor of political science and previous Director (until 2014) at the Norwegian Centre for Human Rights, Faculty of Law, University of Oslo. He has been involved in Middle Eastern studies at the University of Oslo since the mid-1980's and was Visiting Professor at the Centre for Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies, Durham University 1993-94. His recent research interest includes citizenship, ethnic conflict and state formation in the Middle East.
Coffee/tea and light snacks will be served from 13.30. Welcome!
2013
The Struggle for authority: Jihadi-Salafism in Saudi Arabia
A seminar with Saud al-Sahran, Senior Research Fellow at the King Faisal Center for Research and Islamic Studies, Riyad.
Time and place: May 3, 2013 11:15 AM–1:00 PM, Eilert Sundts hus Aud. 6
How are the Jihadi-Salafism's shaykhs trying to prove their legitimacy, and how does their attempts to challenge other "religious" authorities such as the King, the official 'ulama and the Sahwah leaders, play out?
Organizer
Center for Islamic and Middle Est Studies at the University of Oslo
Sunni street mobilization in Bahrain; why did they wake up and what are the consequences?
A seminar with Tora Systad Tyssen, University of Oslo
Time and place: May 24, 2013 11:15 AM–1:00 PM, Eilert Sundts hus Aud. 6
In the wake of the Shia dominated 14.February 2011 uprising in Bahrain, several Sunni groups mobilized in the streets of the capital Manama. Not only did these groups demand a stronger state reaction against the uprising and stricter security measures like in similar situations previously, but this time they also demanded political reform. For one of the Sunni groups which organized itself, Sahwat al-Fateh, framing was an essential part of its mobilization, and it built its political identity on drawing a line between itself and the government. With this as a point of departure, I will discuss Sunni mobilization and which consequences this might have for Bahrain as a rentier state.
Light refreshments will be served 12.30 - 13.00
Organizer
The Center for Islamic and Middle East Studies, The New Middle East; Emerging Political and Ideological Trends and The Gulf Research Unit
Trials of Arab Modernity: Literary Affects and the New Political
A seminar with Tarek al-Ariss, Assistant Professor of Middle Eastern Studies and Comparative Literature at The University of Texas at Austin.
Time and place: Sep. 13, 2013 11:15 AM–1:00 PM, Eilert Sundts hus Aud. 6
Tarek al-Ariss is the author of Trials of Arab Modernity: Literary Affects and the New Political (Fordham UP, 2013) and editor of The Arab Renaissance: Literature, Culture, Media (MLA Book Series, Texts and Translations, forthcoming 2014).
Focusing on the body as a site of rupture and signification, Trials of Arab Modernity: Literary Affects and the New Political shifts the paradigm for the study of modernity in the Arab context from questions of representation and cultural exchange to an engagement with a genealogy of symptoms and affects. It traces a series of experiences and encounters arising from leaving home, aversion to food, disorientation, anxiety attacks, and physical collapse embodied in travelogues, novels, poetic fragments, and anecdotes from the nineteenth-century to the present.
The book reframes Arab modernity [ḥadātha] as a somatic condition, which takes shape through accidents and events [aḥdāth] arising in and between Europe and the Arab world, the literary text and political discourse. Emerging from this context, this talk focuses on Ahmed Faris al-Shidyaq's encounter with British food and customs during his stay in England in the mid-nineteenth century. Al-Shidyaq (1804-1886), an exiled intellectual from Mount Lebanon, modernizer of Arabic language, fiction writer and satirist, deconstructs in his work the discourse on civilization as he encounters it in England.
He exposes civilization's inconsistencies, inherent contradictions, and its violent production through the binaries of race, class, dress, and eating habits. The body of al-Shidyaq is staged in the text as a site of ingestion and expulsion, incorporation and rejection of European food, practices, and ideological models.
In describing his visceral reactions to British culinary practices weakening and poisoning him, causing him to faint and collapse, al-Shidyaq exposes civilization's violence to the body as being epistemological, cultural, and political, delivering in this way one of the earlier and most radical Arab critiques of colonialism in the modern age.
Organizer
The Center for Islamic and Middle East Studies
Researching Apostasy – An Explorative Overview
A seminar with professor Göran Larsson, University of Gothenburg and University of Oslo
Time and place: Sep. 20, 2013 11:15 AM–1:00 PM, Eilert Sundts hus Aud. 6
The seminar will focus on why it is important for academic scholars of religious studies to study apostasy and people leaving Islam. How is the question of apostasy discussed by scholars and what kinds of problems and possibilities do such a study entails? The seminar will deal with classification and research theories and methods and the starting point of the talk is based on a Swedish research project – "Leaving Islam" – funded by the Swedish Research Council.
Göran Larsson is a professor of religious studies at the Department of Literature, History of Ideas and Religion at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden and also an associate professor at the Department of Culture Studies and Oriental Languages at the University of Oslo. While his research is primarily focused on Islam and Muslims in Europe, he has also written about Islamic theology, Quranic studies and issues related to religion and the media. Apart from his academic work, Larsson also has functioned as secretary to the Ministry of Education's 2008-2009 inquiry into the training of Imams in Sweden.
Organizer
Center for Islamic and Middle Est Studies at the University of Oslo
The Future of Political Islam after the Arab Spring: A Historical Perspective
A seminar with Dr. Umar Ryad, Assistant Professor at the University of Leiden
Time and place: Oct. 18, 2013 11:15 AM–1:00 PM, Eilert Sundts hus Aud. 6
The rise and fall of political Islamism in the Muslim world after the so-called Arab Spring raises many questions regarding the future of political Islam and its appeal to the masses. A historical re-reading of the development of the political-religious discourse of Muslim activism may offer interesting answers to the question how Islamist movements organised themselves as a considerable force in the region. How do Islamist movements include the vocabularies of democracy in their religious discourse? Can we say anything regarding the future of political Islam as a democratic force in the region?
About Umar Ryad
Umar Ryad is assistant professor for the study of Islam in the modern world at the Leiden University Institute for the Study of Religions. He studied at al-Azhar University in Cairo (BA Islamic Studies in English, 1998) and obtained his MA degree in Islamic Studies (cum laude) from Leiden University (2001), where he also received his PhD.
His book Islamic Reformism and Christianity: A Critical Study of the Works of Muhammad Rashid Rida and his Associates (1898-1935) (Leiden: Brill 2009), focuses on the interaction between Islam and Christianity in the early twentieth century as reflected in the writings of the Muslim scholar Sheikh Muhammad Rashid Rida (1865-1935).
His current research focuses on the dynamics of the networks of Islamic reformist and pan-Islamist movements, Muslim polemics on Christianity, the history of Christian missions in the modern Muslim World, and transnational Islam in interwar Europe. He has recently received an ERC Starting Grant (2014-2019) for the study of Muslim Networks in Interwar Europe and European Trans-cultural History.
Organizer
The Center for Islamic and Middle East Studies
#EndSH - Activism, the Internet, and the Fight against Sexual Harassment in Post-revolution Egypt
A seminar with Jon Nordenson, University of Oslo.
Time and place: Nov 15, 2013 11:15 AM - 01:00 PM, Eilert Sundts hus Auditorium 6
Jon Nordenson is a PhD fellow at the University of Oslo, and his research focuses on the use of internet and political activism in Egypt and Kuwait. He has previously worked as a research assistant and lecturer in Arabic at the University of Oslo.
Tunisia Three Years Later: Democracy, Yes! But What about Pluralism?
A seminar by Ragnhild Johnsrud Zorgati, an Associate Professor in History of Religions at the University of Oslo.
Time and place: Nov. 22, 2013 11:15 AM–1:00 PM, Eilert Sundts hus Aud. 6
After the fall of the Ben Ali regime, the challenges of political, religious and cultural pluralism have taken centre stage in the Tunisian political landscape. How to deal with pluralism when one is accustomed to over 50 years of one party rule? To what extent is acceptance of difference a prerequisite for a well-functioning democracy? Within the framework of these questions, I will comment on significant events that have occurred in Tunisia during the last year.
About Ragnhild Johnsrud Zorgati
Ragnhild Johnsrud Zorgati is Associate Professor in the History of Religions at the University of Oslo. Her research explores different aspects of cultural encounters between Christian and Islamic civilizations. She is the author of Pluralism in the Middle Ages: Hybrid Identities, Conversion and Mixed Marriages in Medieval Iberia and is currently working on women as religious and political actors in Scandinavia and North-Africa in the late 19th century.
Organizer
Center for Islamic and Middle Est Studies at the University of Oslo and The New Middle East: Emerging political and ideological trends