The COVID-19 crisis has impacted the immigration system and the people attempting to navigate it in significant ways. Immigrants already in the U.S. who think they may have the coronavirus are afraid to go to hospitals for testing or treatment, fearing the threat of INS agents. Noncitizens in immigration detention centers are getting sick and dying because of the cramped and unsanitary conditions. Meanwhile, those seeking to enter the U.S. face heightened barriers: The federal government has temporarily suspended new immigrant visas and imposed travel restrictions on travelers from China and other countries. Most State Department embassies are closed, making it impossible for people to get visas or for employers to bring in needed workers.

Join Cornell Law School professors Stephen Yale-Loehr and Jaclyn Kelley-Widmer, along with student attorney Camilah Hamideh, for a discussion on how the immigration system is functioning in the wake of the pandemic, including ways to advocate for those tangled in its red tape.

This event is co-sponsored by eCornell, the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies, and Migrations: A Global Grand Challenge.

PENDING: Attendees may be eligible to receive 1 NY CLE credit in the area of Professional Practice. This program is appropriate for both transitional and non-transitional attorneys.

Learn more about the speakers and register now: https://www.ecornell.com/keynotes/overview/K073020a/

Our CMS seminar today will be led by the curator of the Middle Eastern Collection in Olin Library, who will be hosting us to see precious objects in the library's collection about Islam. We have many world-class books, some of them centuries old, which show the history and evolution of Islam over a long period, and across many cultures. This is a wonderful opportunity to see some of the treasures of Cornell’s collection that are rarely seen, and which span centuries of time and thousands of miles of geography in Islamic lands, from Morocco to Indonesia.

‘Our parents couldn’t teach us what Islam actually is!’ This assertion, made by a 24-year-old youth, epitomizes the critical stance of second-generation Italian-Bangladeshis towards the religiosity of first-generation migrants. Based on ethnographic research within the Bangladeshi community in Rome, this presentation illustrates the apparently oxymoronic characteristics of a discourse of Muslim-ness which, despite stressing the importance of a return to the primary sources of Islam, combines this revivalist attitude with a peculiar emphasis on ‘integration’, and with modernist positions. In fact, for these youths, the religion practiced by the adults is both ‘impure’, i.e. an Islam too much influenced by the ‘Bangladeshi culture’, and ‘not integrated’ in the European context, i.e. an Islam incapable of offering to the Italian society a modern, and reassuring, image of Muslim people, and consequently unable to cope with a growing Islamophobia. I will show how this counter-intuitive combination is not only inspired by the teachings of Tariq Ramadan, and by his idea of a ‘European Islam’, but first and foremost it is grounded in the concrete life conditions of Muslim youths who are both well-integrated in the Italian society and animated by religious zeal. In this way, I seek to shed light on the mutual entanglement of religious stances and life experiences, and to highlight the limits of what Samuli Schielke calls ‘exceptionalist’ and ‘literalist’ approaches to the study of religion.

At the turn of the twentieth century, thousands of Central Asians made the annual pilgrimage to Mecca. Traveling long distances, many lived for extended periods in Ottoman cities dotting the routes. Though technically foreigners, these hajjis often blurred the lines between pilgrims and migrants. Not quite Ottoman, and not quite foreign, Central Asians became the sultan's spiritual subjects. Their status was continually negotiated by Ottoman statesmen as attempts to exclude foreign Muslim nationals from the body politic were compromised by a changing international legal order and the caliphate's ecumenical claims. Spiritual Subjects examines the paradoxes of nationality reform and pan-Islamic politics in late Ottoman history. Lâle Can unravels how imperial belonging was wrapped up in deeply symbolic religious rites, as well as prosaic acts and experiences that paved the way to integration into Ottoman communities. A complex system of belonging emerged—one where it was possible for a Muslim to be both, by law, a foreigner and a subject of the Ottoman sultan-caliph. This panoramic story informs broader transregional and global developments during the steamship era, with important implications for how we make sense of subject-hood in the last Muslim empire and the legacy of religion in the Turkish Republic.

As both Muslim and Western governments increasingly seek the help of so-called “moderate” Muslim leaders, we still know little about why some of them are better able to mitigate the growth of militant Islamist groups. This paper explores some of the conditions that make successful “moderate” mobilization possible. Examining the case of contemporary Java, Indonesia, it argues that, beyond ideology, the landscape of Islamic institutions and networks in which Muslim leaders take part either facilitate or hinder “moderate” mobilization. Precisely, it shows that strong inter-ulama networks and institutions tend to mitigate the risk and cushion the cost of moderate mobilization. This paper draws on a newly compiled dataset about Java’s 15,000 Islamic schools and 30,000 Muslim clerics and 13 months of fieldwork in East, Central, and West Java.

Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan (1817-1898) was a major Muslim figure in nineteenth century colonial India whose critical work on religion, education, archaeology and science influenced generations. While his work is viewed as an effort to bring Muslims out of their isolation, seek modern western education, his writings addressed key issues of faith, identity and knowledge. In a speech delivered in 1884, Khan said, "Today we are, as before, in need of modern 'ilm-al-kalam', by which we should either refute the doctrines of the modern sciences or undermine their foundations, or show that they are in conformity with the articles of Islamic faith.” My talk will focus on Khan’s calls for only ijtehad (re-interpretation) and seeking a new conceptual framework to review the Sharia. His work remains relevant in the 21st century for not just South Asian Muslims but for the Muslim world at large.