Sommersemester 2019
Die Vorträge finden neu dienstags um 18.15 Uhr (statt wie bisher um 19.15 Uhr) im Hörsaal M 014 Universitätshauptgebäude Geschwister-Scholl-Platz 1 statt.
07. 05. 2019
Mohamed Elshahed (The British Museum, London)
Modern Egypt: Architecture, Design, Material Culture
This lecture takes the 1919 Revolution in Egypt as a starting point to charting the history of modern design in twentieth century Egypt, focusing on architecture and material culture. From the 1920s Egypt experienced turbulent politics, the rise of new classes and the expansion of industry. During this time the country's modernization was crystallized in a wide array of objects and buildings which translate, capture and reflect conflicted notions of modernity and identity. Presented as a survey, the talk will shed light on 20th-century architecture and design in Egypt, highlighting several projects led by the speaker, including the Modern Egypt Project at the British Museum, and design exhibitions such as Cairo Now! and Modernist Indignation, as well as introducing the upcoming book, Cairo Since 1900.
Mohamed El Shahed. Trained as an architect at the New Jersey Institute of Technology before joining the Aga Khan Program for Islamic Art and Architecture at MIT and completing his PhD at NYU's Department of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies, Elshahed's multidisciplinary scholarship and practice focus on the history of modernism in Egypt through architecture, images, and objects. As the Modern Egypt Project curator at the British Museum he built a new collection of material culture from the past century in Egypt to be part of the museum's permanent collection. He is the curator of Egypt's medal winning pavilion "Modernist Indignation" at the 2018 London Design Biennale and the author of the forthcoming book (June 2019) Cairo Since 1900: An Architectural Guide, published by the American University in Cairo Press.
21. 05. 2019
Frédéric Bauden (Universität Liège)
Brokering power in Mecca: Rasulid-Mamluk diplomatic exchanges about the Meccan Sharifate
If the control of Mecca (and of the Hijaz in general) represented for the Mamluks a source of legitimation (notably by guaranteeing the yearly organization of the pilgrimage), it appears that their grip on the Holy City was characterized as seasonal. Once the pilgrimage ended, the Sharifs enjoyed political autonomy. In the early ninth/fifteenth c., the Sharif Ḥasan b. ʿAjlān (r. 797–826/1395–1423) was an emblematic example of the power that his family availed itself of. Ḥasan particularly took advantage of the increase in trade between the Indian Ocean and the Mediterranean Sea that passed through the Hijaz to extend his power over the whole region. His exactions from pilgrims and merchants deeply annoyed both the Mamluk and the Rasulid sultans who tried to affect the situation by manipulating the local politics in Mecca.
Over the last decade, John Meloy and Eric Vallet have addressed numerous issues linked to Ḥasan’s reign, respectively from the point of view of the Mamluks and the Rasulids. Their studies were largely based on literary sources, with a limited use of documents. In this paper, I propose to tackle the events that took place between the years 816–20/1413–7, a period during which Ḥasan was briefly replaced by his nephew Rumaytha (818/1416), through the lens of documents. Apart from copies of letters preserved in Ibn Ḥijja’s Qahwat al-inshāʾ, I will also consider a unique Rasulid original letter dated 817/1415 reused as scrap paper by al-Maqrīzī. These documents offer a different insight into the way both sultans tried to face the threat posed by Ḥasan by means of diplomacy.
28. 05. 2019
Nil Palabiyik (LMU, München)
Empires of Knowledge: How Ottoman Scholarship Shaped Oriental Studies in Early Modern Europe
Seventeenth-century Europe saw an unprecedented level of linguistic and scholarly activity not only in Arabic but also in Turkish and Persian. The engagement with languages of the East and works written in them came in many different forms including the study of religious, scientific, literary and philosophical texts, and the printing of the first dictionaries, grammars and phrasebooks of these languages.
The lecture will explore how the flow of information from Middle East to Western Europe worked by considering the crucial role Ottoman Turkish dictionaries, commentaries, glossaries and translations played in the rise of Oriental studies in Europe. I argue that early modern Orientalism was not an independent European deciphering of the East without recourse to the vast reserves of Ottoman scholarship as often maintained. On the contrary, it was, to a large extent, shaped by contemporary Ottoman learned practices and the reference tools used in the Ottoman Empire.
04. 06. 2019
Thomas Kremer (Katholische Universität Eichstätt-Ingolstadt)
Die formative Kraft der Christen im Orient. Kulturprägende Impulse seit dem Beginn des 20. Jahrhunderts
„Arabisch, aber nicht muslimisch“ ist eine der Selbstdefinitionen vieler Christen im Nahen Osten. Von der spezifischen Ausprägung einer christlich-arabischen Kultur herrscht in westlichen Gesellschaften selbst bei denen oft nur eine vage Vorstellung, die sich durchaus bewusst sind, dass die Gleichsetzung von Arabertum und Islam zu kurz greift. Die Kunde vom Christlichen Orient erschließt neben vielfältigen philologischen und theologischen Erkenntnissen auch einen Einblick in die weitreichende kulturschaffende Kraft orientalischen Christentums. Diese reicht bis tief in die vorislamische Periode zurück, und sie differenziert sich aus in einer Vielfalt von Kirchen mit unterschiedlichen Riten und Traditionen, von denen sich manche als Araber verstehen, andere als Angehörige benachbarter, oft sehr eigenständig profilierter Volksgruppen, wie etwa die an so vielen Orten gegenwärtigen Armenier.
Prof. Dr. Thomas Kremer vertritt an der KU Eichstätt-Ingolstadt das Fach „Theologie des Christlichen Ostens“. In seinem Vortrag beleuchtet er am Beispiel verschiedener Aspekte in unterschiedlichen Ländern die facettenreiche kulturprägende Kraft des orientalischen Christentums. Dabei konzentriert sich der Vortrag auf die Rolle der Christen im Orient vom Beginn des 20. Jahrhunderts bis in die Gegenwart. Kremer ist davon überzeugt: Ohne die formative Kraft orientalischer Christen hätte der Nahe Osten ganz wesentlich ein anderes Gesicht.
18. 06. 2019
Sophie Wagenhofer (De Gruyter Verlag, Berlin)
Das Jüdische Museum in Casablanca – Identitätspolitische Aushandlungsprozesse in Marokko and beyond
1997 wurde in Casablanca das erste jüdische Museum in einem mehrheitlich arabisch-muslimischen Land eröffnet. Was zunächst wie ein harmloses und wahllos zusammengewürfeltes Sammelsurium ethnographischer Artefakte scheint, entpuppt sich bei genauerer Untersuchung als sehr politischer Ort. Das Ausstellungsnarrativ schließt an unterschiedliche Diskurse an: zum einen wird marokkanisches Judentum als Teil marokkanischer Nationalität und Identität verortet, zum anderen fordert die Ausstellung dominierende Narrative jüdischer Historiographie und jüdischen Selbstverständnisses heraus.
25. 06. 2019
Ahab Bdaiwi (Universität Leiden) FÄLLT AUS
Humans Eat Humans: Discussions on Philosophical Cannibalism in Medieval Iran
02. 07. 2019
Edmund Herzig (Universität Oxford)
Early Modern Empire and Commercial Success: the Case of the Safavid Julfa Armenian Merchants
Zusammenfassung folgt in Kürze.
09. 07. 2019 FÄLLT AUS
Gülhan Balsoy (Universität Istanbul Bilgi)
Demographic Anxieties, Pronatalism and Difference in the Ottoman Empire
Historians of the late Ottoman Empire have started reconsidering the imperial past in the light of the recent studies on colonialism. Recent work has examined how difference was created as a tool of Ottoman governance especially during the during the Hamidian and Second Constitutional periods. Yet such work mainly concentrated on the discursive aspects of the creation of difference and work on the institutions and mechanisms creating difference still waits to be done. Moreover, the question of the gendered aspects of colonial governance remains almost totally unexamined in the Ottoman context. This caveat is not a minor but rather a major one since recent studies on colonialism have aptly demonstrated that control and regulation of sexual encounters and reproduction was an integral part of the colonial project. Such works strongly demonstrated that encouraging certain types of sexual behaviors and restricting others were central to the functioning of the imperial governance rather than an additive to it. In this presentation, reconsidering my previous work of the politicization of reproduction in nineteenth century Ottoman empire, I will try to explore themes of sexuality, reproduction and colonialism. In order to elaborate the broader imperial context, I will question how sexuality, marriage, and reproduction was arranged and managed in the Ottoman case. I will investigate how the management of sexual relations marked the difference between Ottoman elites and the local populations. Through this discussion, I hope to contribute to the wider investigation whether we could consider the Ottoman empire a “colonial” power or not.
16. 07. 2019
Tarik Sabry (Universität London)
Ethnography As Dream: Time and Cultural Salafism in a small Atlas Mountain Village
This presentation grapples with a difficult question: how can I, as an ethnographer who is interested in the philosophical notion of ‘cultural time’, detach the obstinate, ghostly trace of the aporetic from my encounter with my Moroccan Middle Atlas interlocutors? What I am refering to here is not a ‘schizogenic’ (Fabian 1983) use of time, [where Others never appear as immediate partners in a cultural exchange], but to the impossibility of thinking through time afresh or from a non-hermeneutic field. Cultural time -- a term I borrow from the Moroccan philosopher Mohammed Abed Al-Jabri, already presupposes a relationship between culture and temporality, and that is certainly not a beginning, but a beginning in thinking that has already begun. This is exactly why I use the idea or description ‘ethnography as dream’. It is a dream since I have no control over my dream: dreams are exactly those uncontrollable/unreadable séances that transgress and trouble all temporal and spatial borders. I show using ethnographic research conducted with people Living in a small Berber village in Morocco how, for the villagers, cultural time is the product of complex ‘intra-actions’ between different times: Roman, Jewish, feudal, French, colonial, Arab, Muslim, Salafist, as well as mediated cultural times of the Other. I show how these cultural times mount each other mnemonically without ruptural cancellations. I also use evidence from fieldwork to show how time comes into and through other times, a constant morphing, into a poly- temporality where to think about time is at any given moment, and always, a mnemonic temporal act.
Tarik Sabry is a reader in Media and Communication Theory at the University of Westminster, where he is also coordinator of the Global Media Research Network. Sabry is author of Cultural Encounters in the Arab World: On Media, the Modern and the Everyday (IB Tauris 2010), Children and Screen Media in Changing Arab Contexts with Nisrine Mansour (Palgrave 2019); editor of Arab Cultural Studies: Mapping the Field (IB Tauris 2012) and co-editor with Layal Ftouni of Arab Subcultures: Transformations in Theory and Practice (2017) and Culture, Time and Publics in the Arab World (IB Tauris 2019) with Joe F. Khalil. He is also co-founder and co-editor of the Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication. Sabry’s research interests lie at intersections between media, cultural studies and philosophy, audiences, popular culture and intellectual Arab history.
In Zusammenarbeit mit der Gesellschaft der Freunde Islamischer Kunst und Kultur e.V. und der Deutsch-Türkischen Gesellschaft Bayern e.V.