Past Event Category: MES Lecture Series
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Jan 27The Salafi Mystique: The Rise of Gender Segregation in the 20th Century Middle EastIngraham 206
Drawing on two Egyptian Salafi magazines, alongside a variety of pamphlets and popularly-oriented works by Salafi and non-Salafi authors alike, he challenges the view that Salafis’ commitment to gender segregation is both longstanding and well-established. Instead, he shows how this practice arose in the 1970s out of a competition with the secular-nationalist project of State Feminism and the religio-political vision of the Muslim Brotherhood, respectively.
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Nov 11The Ramadan Debates: Science, Time, and Islamic Law in the Early Twentieth CenturyIngraham 206
By foregrounding evidence for how diverse Muslim communities in fact determined when to observe their holidays in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, this talk reinterprets the calendar debates as a matter of competing visions for how to promote a globally uniform Islam.
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Oct 28Desert in the Promised Land: The Politics and Semiotics of Space in Israeli CultureIngraham 206
Yael Zerubavel tells the story of the desert from the early twentieth century to the present, shedding light on romantic-mythical associations, settlement and security concerns, environmental sympathies, and the commodifying tourist gaze.
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Apr 8A Jewish history of Orientalism and its effect on hierarchies in IsraelIngraham 206
Aziza Khazzoom reviews her empirical work to specify the effects of westernization projects on Israeli subjectivity, hierarchies, and past and potential relationship to its Middle Eastern environment.
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Mar 25Abu Salim in Africa: Cinema and the Lebanese Emigrant ExperienceIngraham 206
In this talk, Hayek discusses the role that Lebanese cinema has played in articulating anxieties over emigration by exploring the long history of Lebanese engagement with the African continent.
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Nov 19Prophet al-Khidr, Between (the Qur’anic) Text and (the Mystical) TraditionIngraham 206
This presentation will seek to identify what connects the many sides of this enigmatic figure who is revered in many Muslim cultures around the world.
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Oct 29Stay in Turkey or Continue Toward Europe? Palestinians Displaced from Syria and the Instability of ExileThis presentation will highlight the cultural, political, economic, and physical factors that help explain why some Palestinians displaced by the war in Syria have stayed in Turkey instead of using the country as a transit point to Europe.
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Oct 15A Clash of Civilizations? East-West Migrations, Islamophobia, and the Cosmopolitanism of Mohja Kahf and Marjane SatrapiThe lecture will explore the different responses of diasporic women writers of Muslim backgrounds as they recast East/West binaries in the context of religion and cosmopolitan ideals.
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Sep 24Transitional Justice in Tunisia: The Forgotten VictimsThis lecture addresses the fate of the thousands of so-called indirect victims, i.e. individuals who were persecuted, discriminated and socially excluded because they were related to political detainees.
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Apr 30Islamic reform and print, 1880-1920The merger of the printing and reform movements gave rise to international networks of scholars striving to locate, edit, finance, and print classical works. These networks spanned and connected Europe, Turkey, the Arab lands, and India.