Talk by James D. Frankel

Islam arrived in China during the 7th century as a foreign religion. Yet, once the first Muslims settled permanently there, Islamic religious and cultural traditions were gradually influenced by the norms of Chinese culture and society. This process of naturalization and localization sometimes referred to as “Sinicization”, continued apace for nearly a millennium before historical circumstances accelerated it during the Ming (1368-1644) and Qing (1644-1911) dynasties. The vicissitudes of modern Chinese history have led to varying official governmental and societal attitudes towards Islam and Muslims and concomitant adaptations of identity and expressions of religiosity by Chinese Muslims. Most recently, the government of the People’s Republic of China is pursuing its own policies of decreasing foreign religious influences in the country in the name of combatting “extremism and separatism.” These have included official regulations aimed at “sinicizing” Islam in China, leading Muslims into a new wave of adaptation for their survival.

Talk by Faiz Ahmed

Just as a devastating humanitarian crisis, international isolation, and fraught governing regime mark the country’s present-day realities, recent years have witnessed a series of more optimistic anniversaries in Afghanistan’s modern history. As leading examples, 2019 marked the 100th anniversary of Afghanistan’s independence from the British Empire, and 2023 will mark the centennial of Afghanistan’s first written constitution. Commemorating the roots and legacies of Afghanistan’s independence and first national charter a century ago, Faiz Ahmed unearths a lost history behind the country’s emergence as a fiercely anti-colonial, constitutionally governed, and widely respected “Islamic nation-state” lodged between the late Ottoman Empire, Iran, and British India, the subject of his first book Afghanistan Rising. As the US and other global actors continue to debate the future of relations with and foreign involvement in this pivotal country, this lecture will explore what lessons we can learn from rediscovering Afghanistan’s own legal and constitutional history from Afghan and other perspectives of the region(s) it inhabits.

Talk by Qamar Adamjee

This talk, a research project in its early stages, takes three 18th century Qing-period enameled vessels in the Denver Art Museum collection as a starting point for exploring their function, meaning, and context of use within a Chinese Muslim community. The copper vase, covered box, and incense burner are richly enameled cloisonne ware, a type of luxury goods that became very fashionable in the Qing period (1644-1911). Decorated with floral motifs and bearing pious Arabic inscriptions written in the distinctive Chinese sini script, these three vessels were possibly made as a set, similar to Chinese religious ritual altar sets, but for use in a Muslim context. The socio-political and religious histories of Muslim communities in China have been subjects of scholarship in recent decades, but much more work on the artistic production of (and for) Chinese Muslims remains to be done. Drawing upon the visual information included on these objects and by studying them alongside Qur'an manuscripts, mosques, and shrines, this paper situates the material culture of Sinophone Muslims within the context of Muslim ritual practice as well as within wider frameworks of imperial Chinese art, politics, and popular religion.

For the Islamist-nationalist circles in Turkey, the conquest of Istanbul on May 29, 1453 is a significant triumph inherited from the magnificent times of the Ottoman Empire, and believed to denote the founding moment of the Turkish nation. In this research, the Islamist-nationalist rhetoric of the Ottoman conquest of Istanbul is seen as a manipulated melancholy project of the Islamist-nationalist imagination, which fixes the conquest in (spatial) images of its own “mourning” and produces “lost objects” to use as a tool of political propaganda (although nothing has actually been lost). Architecture as the bearer of clues to the search for lost objects and spatial-political instruments of the conquest rhetoric thus becomes the subject of the research. Hagia Sophia, whose status as a prayer space (mosque) and secular space (museum) has always been the main issue of controversies, is instrumental in thinking of “the lost mosque”. Thus, in this research, the building is brought forward as “the lost object” of the politically manipulated melancholy project of the Islamist-nationalist imagination, and its political misuse as “the lost mosque” becomes the main focus.

Berin F. Gür is professor of Architecture at TED University (TEDU), Ankara, Turkey and a visiting research fellow at the Institute for Comparative Modernities. She has taught architectural design since 1992 and teaches classes on the spatial and formal analysis of buildings and its theory, reading architectural precedents, and topics in contemporary architecture. She has various publications in the international and national journals and books on the processes of architectural design and urban design; architectural design education; architectural criticism; ideologies and architecture, and the production of urban space. She was the head of TEDU Department of Architecture between 2013-2019; and worked as the Vice Dean between 2019-2021.

Her time at Cornell and the ICM will be spent working on her current book project, Conquest and Melancholy: The Islamist-nationalist Rhetoric of the Conquest of Istanbul and the Manipulation of Architecture. The book brings together two seemingly irrelevant terms: “conquest” associated with glory and victory, and “melancholy” associated with mourning and grief. Togetherness of conquest and melancholy in this book advocates re-conceptualization of melancholy as a manipulated project. And the following questions are formulated: How is the Istanbul’s conquest represented in the Islamist-nationalist imagination? What are the melancholy objects or, in other words, “the lost objects” of the Islamist-nationalist rhetoric of conquest? What are the spatial political instruments of the conquest rhetoric?

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There is a serious lacuna in Islamic medical ethics in considering the category of gender, especially in the consciousness that gender, maleness, femaleness, or non-binary status, affects how patients receive medical counsel and medical care, and interact with religious authorities. This lack of attention to gender is also true for specifically so-called “women’s health” topics such as assisted reproductive technologies or abortion. In this talk Dr. Zahra Ayubi will analyze the limitations of fiqh (Islamic jurisprudence) based medical ethics in addressing gender concerns in such topics. She will do a close reading of jurisprudential opinions (fatwas) and the queries that originate them and also present research from interviews that demonstrate a mismatch between the issues important to the questioners and jurists (muftis). Ultimately, as a scholar of religion taking a feminist standpoint, she will argue that a gender contentious epistemology in Islamic medical ethics is impossible to achieve without centering women’s experiences and interpretive authority.

Masks are required to attend.

Zahra Ayubi is a scholar of women and gender in premodern and modern Islamic ethics. She specializes in feminist philosophy of Islam and has published on gendered concepts of ethics, justice, and religious authority, and on Muslim feminist thought and American Muslim women's experiences. Her first book, Gendered Morality: Classical Islamic Ethics of the Self, Family, and Society (Columbia, 2019) rethinks the tradition of Islamic philosophical ethics from a feminist critical perspective. Developing a lens for a feminist philosophy of Islam, Ayubi analyzes constructions of masculinity, femininity, and gender relations in classic works of philosophical ethics by Abu Hamid Muhammad al-Ghazali, Nasir-ad Din Tusi, and Jalal ad-Din Davani. She interrogates how these thinkers conceive of the ethical human being as an elite male within a hierarchical cosmology built on the exclusion of women and nonelites. She calls for a philosophical turn in the study of gender in Islam based on resources for gender equality that are unlocked by feminist engagement with the Islamic ethical tradition.

Sponsored by the Religious Studies Program as part of the New Directions in Religious Studies Lecture Series. With support from Cornell's Feminist, Gender & Sexuality Studies Program, Comparative Muslim Societies Program, and Department of Science & Technology Studies.

One year ago, on August 15, 2021, the Taliban entered the Arg (Presidential palace) in Kabul, completing their astonishingly rapid takeover of Afghanistan. At the end of that same month, US forces completed withdrawal from Afghanistan – marking an end to the longest war in American history. One year later, our speakers reflect on Afghanistan’s recent history, life under the Taliban regime, and what we might expect in the near future as the Taliban engages with the international community. We welcome attendees to join us for a fireside conversation about this critical geopolitical topic.

Speakers

Zinab Zhra Attai, Reppy Institute Director’s Fellow, Ph.D. student in Comparative Politics, Cornell University

Sharif Hozoori, Visiting Scholar, South Asia Program & IIE-SRF Fellow

Maryam Amini, Global Development, Cornell CALS

Moderator

Sabrina Karim, Hardis Family Assistant Professor for Teaching Excellence, Associate Director, Reppy Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies

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Presented by the Reppy Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies. Co-sponsored by the South Asia Program and the Gender and Security Sector Lab.

ICM FALL 2022 LECTURE SERIES

Khalid Mustafa Medani is associate professor of political science and Islamic Studies and Chair of the African Studies Program at McGill University. He received a B.A. from Brown University, an M.A. from Georgetown University, and an M.A. and Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of California, Berkeley. His most recent book, Black Markets and Militants: Informal Networks in the Middle East and Africa (Cambridge UP, 2021) examines the relationship among economic globalization, informal financial, housing and labour markets, and the emergence and evolution of Islamist and ethnic politics in Sudan, Egypt and Somalia.

The annual International Fair showcases Cornell's global opportunities for undergraduate and graduate students. Explore the fair and find out about international majors and minors, language study, study abroad, funding opportunities, global internships, and more.

The International Fair is sponsored by the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies, the Office of Global Learning (both part of Global Cornell), and Cornell's Language Resource Center.