Research workshop
Co-hosted by the Aga Khan University, Institute for the Study of Muslim Civilisations and SOAS, University of London
23 and 24 October 2020
Aga Khan Centre, London & Online
This annual exploratory and informal workshop offers the opportunity to reflect on history writing in Arabic. We encourage contributions focused on methodologies, research agendas, and case studies that investigate history writing in the Middle East and North Africa in any period from the seventh century to the present.
We are interested in papers that consider the practical and conceptual challenges of working on history writing in the region. Papers might elucidate the following sorts of questions:
Through what practices of writing or otherwise encoding the past and of remembering and forgetting, have different groups in the Middle East and North Africa viewed their pasts? At different times and places, how have the significant contours, events and actors in their histories been seen? Was the significant past the same for court historians as for literary historians; for bureaucrats as for the military; for Sufis as for Muslim lawyers and Traditionists?
How did non-Muslims and Muslims, men and women, adherents of different sectarian or juristic traditions, or speakers of different languages, within societies that became “Islamic” imagine the shape and meaning of their specific societies’ own pasts, and their relation to the universal history of the Islamic community?
How have urban and rural people, workers and peasants, the religiously educated and the technocratic elite, developed different ways of writing, remembering, or commemorating particular events in, or the broad sweep of, local, national, or “Islamic” history?
In what ways do educational institutions, museums, media organizations and proponents of heritage use history writing in Arabic to shape loyalties and senses of belonging in the Middle East, North Africa, and Europe?
Contributions are invited from scholars at all career levels, addressing any period and any part of the Middle East and North Africa, broadly defined.
This year we anticipate running the workshop from the Aga Khan Centre in London, with social distancing. We expect a significant online component.
The following colleagues will chair panels and serve as respondents to panels:
Julia Bray, University of Oxford
Fozia Bora, University of Leeds
Jaakko Hämeen-Anttila, University of Edinburgh
Konrad Hirschler, Freie Universität Berlin
Marie Legendre, University of Edinburgh
Andrew Marsham, University of Cambridge
Harry Munt, University of York
Arabic Pasts is co-organized by Hugh Kennedy (SOAS), James McDougall (Oxford), and Sarah Bowen Savant (AKU-ISMC).
Please submit an abstract of 300 words or less by 26 June to ArabicPastsConf@aku.edu. There is a small budget to provide some travel assistance for scholars outside of London.
