Middle Eastern Studies Lectures

Permanent URI for this communityhttps://hdl.handle.net/2152/24561

Browse

Browsing Middle Eastern Studies Lectures by Issue Date

Filter results by year or month
Now showing 1 - 3 of 3
  • No Thumbnail Available
    Item
    Leaving Iberia: A Mufti, His Fatwa, and the Islamic Obligation to Emigrate
    (2014-04-11) Hendrickson, Jocelyn
    During the fall of al-Andalus (known to Christians as the reconquista) some of the first substantial Muslim populations came under permanent non-Muslim rule. For centuries, Muslims had lived alongside Jews and Christians who accepted a subordinate, dhimmī status. Christian conquest inverted this hierarchy and thus presented novel and difficult questions for Muslim jurists. Could Muslims accept minority status under Christian rule, or must they emigrate to Muslim-ruled territory? Scholars interested in Islamic legal responses to Christian conquest have devoted generous attention to the legal opinions (fatwās) of one jurist in particular, Fez’s chief muftī Ahmad al-Wansharīsī (died 1508). In this talk, I explore multiple ways o reading al-Wansharīsī’s infamous fatwās obligating Iberian Muslims to leave their conquered homelands. Did these texts speed the “downfall of Spanish Islam”? Do they represent Islamic law at its medieval worst, strict and inhumane? Or were they a thinly veiled commentary on the lesser-known Reconquest, the expansion of Portugal into Morocco? Are the questions posed to al-Wansharīsī “true” stories? This talk critiques the perceived exceptionalism of the Iberian Muslim predicament, takes a fresh look at Muslim-Christian relations in North Africa, and considersfatwās as narratives of indigenous resistance and political critique.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    The Way I See It: Reflections of an Arab-American Journalist on the Middle East, Media and the State of Journalism
    (2014-04-24) Mohyeldin, Ayman
    Ayman Mohyeldin is a Foreign Correspondent for NBC News based in Cairo. Prior to joining NBC, Ayman was a correspondent for Al Jazeera English based in Cairo where he was at the epicenter of Arab uprisings covering the revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt. From May 2008 until May 2010, Ayman was the only foreign broadcast journalist based in the Gaza Strip. During the 2008/2009 War on Gaza, he was the only American journalist reporting live from Gaza. In 2011, Time Magazine named Ayman as one of the 100 Most Influential People in the World. For his reporting, Ayman has won a Peabody Award, the UK’s Cutting Edge Media Award and Argentina’s prestigious Perfil International Press Freedom Award. He has received multiple Emmy nominations throughout his career. Ayman was born in Cairo, Egypt but grew up in between the US and the Middle East.
  • No Thumbnail Available
    Item
    Poets and Teachers in Hades: The Katabasis as Authorial Satire
    (2014-04-29) Nilsson, Ingela
    This lecture will focus on the underworld as a place where one may encounter authors and intellectuals of the past or the present; a platform where their issues may be displayed and discussed. These discussions may function as comical, critical, or subversive approaches towards power structures. Nilsson argues that this characteristic may be seen in early modern and modern European versions of the katabasis motif, but also in Greek models of late antiquity and in Byzantium. Special focus will be placed on twelfth-century Byzantium and the anonymous dialogue Timarion.