Michael E. Marmura Lecture Series in Arabic Studies

In this graduate masterclass, contemporary Egyptian artist Huda Lutfi will share her experiences of creating her recent installation Inside the Black Enclosure for the inaugural Islamic Arts Biennale which was held from January 23–May 23, 2023 in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia.

Lutfi will speak about the history of pilgrimage at Mecca, the importance of the kiswa covering of the ka’ba, the craftspeople involved in its making over history, and how it all connects to her recent installation. She will also discuss her artistic practice and career and problematize the notion of an Islamic Arts Biennale as part of her talk, which will also include videos of her work.

Politics has at least two faces in Ali’s works. While his characters are in a constant search to prove their humanity, politics often appears as a barrier in that search. Why does their salvation seem to fall beyond politics? Yet another face is the politics of literature: Kurdish language has lived on the margins of the more dominant languages in the Middle East for centuries. In this context, lliterary translation could be seen as an effort to put the Kurds, the largest minority group without their own nation state, on the cultural map of the world.

In this conversation, we will probe questions such as: Where do the politics of publishing and those of the Middle East collide? Is literary translation a means to put the Kurds, the largest minority group without their own nation state, on the world’s cultural map? What unique challenges do translators of Kurdish texts face?

Bachtyar Ali is one of the most prominent contemporary intellectuals from Iraqi Kurdistan. The Last Pomegranate Tree (Archipelago Books, 2023), one of his most famous novels, was just translated into English by translator and Kurdish affairs analyst Kareem Abdulrahman. It tells the story of Muzafar-i-Subhdan, a Kurdish Peshmerga fighter in Iraq desperately searching for his son after being held in a desert prison for 21 years.

Fırat Bozçalı is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Toronto. His research concentrates on political and legal anthropology with a special focus on smuggling economies, human rights advocacy, and Kurdish politics in Turkey.
Jeannie Miller is an Associate Professor of medieval Arabic literature in the Department of Near and Middle Eastern Civilizations.

Sohaira Siddiqui is an Associate Professor of Theology at Georgetown University in Qatar. Her work focuses on the relationship between law, theology and political thought in classical Islam; Islamic law during British colonization; Islamic law in contemporary Muslim societies; and secularism and modernity in relation to Muslims in the West.

She is the author of Law and Politics Under the 'Abbasids: An Intellectual Portrait of al-Juwayni (Cambridge University Press, 2019) and Locating the Shari'a: Legal Fluidity in Theory, History and Practice (Brill, 2019). Her next book, Contesting Islamic Law in Colonial India, will be published in Fall 2024, followed by her second edited volume, The Cambridge Companion to Islamic Law, in Spring 2025.

Julia Elyachar is Associate Professor at Princeton University in the Department of Anthropology and the Institute for International and Regional Studies. Co-editor of Cultural Anthropology and member of the editorial collective of Comparative Studies in South Asia, Africa, and Middle Eastern Studies, Elyachar was previously Associate Professor of Anthropology and Economics at UC Irvine, and director of the Center for Global Peace and Conflict Studies. Among her books are On the Semi-Civilized: Channels of Mobility and Finance in Cairo and Beyond (forthcoming); the co-edited Thinking Infrastructures (2019); and forthcoming Turkish and Arabic translations of her award-winning book, Markets of Dispossession: NGOs, Economic Development, and the State in Cairo (2005). She is the author of numerous articles published in, among others, Cultural Anthropology, American Anthropologist, American Ethnologist, The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, and Comparative Studies in Society and History.

Despite the achievements in writing a non-Eurocentric world history of decolonization, current scholarship has difficulty situating the Lausanne Treaty of July 1923 into the political transformation of the world in the last one hundred years from the world of empires to its current partition into nation states. The recognition of a sovereign Turkish State at the Lausanne Treaty was hailed by contemporary observers in Asia and Africa as the victory of an Eastern/Muslim nation against Western colonialism. Yet, the Treaty also formalized the legal recognition of the colonization of Arab provinces of the Ottoman Empire, namely Palestine, Syria, and Iraq, by the British and French empires. Abolishment of the Ottoman Caliphate by the Turkish parliament in March 1924, just seven months after the Lausanne Treaty, further complicates the narratives. While Turkish nationalist historiography marks this as a completion of the Republican revolution, it led to the erasure of a Pan-Islamic political symbol for a globalist world making visions across Asia and Africa aiming to critique and reform the unequal racialized imperial world order. This presentation will explore the contradictions of the 1923 and 1924 moments in the broader context of the role of nonEuropean empires and pan-nationalism in the global history of decolonization. This event is Co-sponsored by the Seminar in Ottoman and Turkish Studies.

Nisrin Elamin is currently an Assistant Professor of Anthropology and African Studies at the University of Toronto. She received her Ph.D. in Anthropology from Stanford University in 2020. She is currently writing a book tentatively titled: Stratified Enclosures: Land, Capital and Empire-making in central Sudan which focuses on Saudi and Emirati land grabs and community resistance to land dispossession in the Gezira region of Sudan. In addition to scholarly articles, Nisrin has also published several op-eds for Al Jazeera, the Washington Post, Okay Africa and the Egypt Independent. Before pursuing her Ph.D., Nisrin spent over a decade working as an educator, community organizer and researcher in the US and Tanzania.

The literature on the grammar of Classical Arabic describes intricate patterns of realization of the glottal stop, represented in the Arabic alphabet by the hamza diacritic. In his Al-Kita:b, the grammarian Sibawayh (d. between 793-796) dedicates an entire section to describing the patterns attested in the different dialects of Classical Arabic, spoken in the Arabian Peninsula. Many of these patterns are also attested in Modern Standard Arabic whose grammar bears significant resemblance to that of Classical Arabic. Most contemporary spoken dialects preserve the glottal stop in their phonemic inventories, and a cursory look at these dialects reveals equally interesting realization patterns. The small body of literature on this subject reports a general weakening and, in some contexts, a total loss of the glottal stop. However, systematic descriptive studies and explanations of these phenomena are simply lacking. In this talk, I address this limitation. I identify some of these patterns and offer an explanation as to why and how they have come to exist.

Abdel-Khalig Ali is an Associate Professor of Arabic Language and Linguistics in the department of Near and Middle Eastern Civilizations at University of Toronto. He is a phonologist specializing in contemporary dialects of Arabic, particularly those spoken in Sudan. His research spans the areas of prosodic phonology and metrical structure, the interaction between phonology and morphology, the interaction between phonology and syntax, and the emergence of certain morphophonological features in contemporary spoken dialects of Arabic.

Naṣīr al-Dīn Ṭūsī (d. 1274) stands out among major figures in medieval Arabic and Persian philosophy for giving special prominence to practical philosophy and philosophical ethics in his writings. While some of this emphasis may be explained by historical contingencies in his life and events surrounding the writing of his ethical treatises, this talk explores how Ṭūsī's philosophical views on the nature of perfection contribute to this shift in attitude towards ethics as a philosophical discipline. To achieve this, I contrast Ṭūsī’s conception of absolute perfection with the Avicennian perspective. Like Avicenna, Ṭūsī is an intellectualist about absolute perfection, conceiving it in terms of intellectual perfection. However, while Avicenna sees absolute perfection primarily as perfecting the theoretical intellect, Ṭūsī argues that absolute perfection should be understood as a unity of perfected theoretical and practical intellects. In other words, for Ṭūsī, the perfection of the practical intellect is not merely instrumentally valuable in service to the theoretical intellect; rather, it constitutes an essential part of absolute intellectual perfection. To conclude, I step back and reflect on the philosophical challenges and promises of trying to make sense of human perfection in terms of godlike absolute perfection. 

Reza Hadisi is an Assistant Professor in Philosophy and the Center for Medieval Studies. His research focuses on the overlap of ethics and epistemology in the history of philosophy. He has previously worked on Kant’s theory of epistemic normativity, and he is currently working on a project about moral perfectionism and moral knowledge in medieval Arabic and Persian philosophy.

How do the literatures and cultures of oppressed societies survive and flourish in spite of the overdetermining conditions of precarity and injustice of which they are a product and against which they protest? Might the symptom of oppression become simultaneously the agent of its critique? In Melancholy Acts, Nouri Gana addresses these questions through a series of wide-ranging engagements with Arab thought, literature, and film in the aftermath of the 1948 dispossession of Palestinians and the 1967 military defeat of Arab armies. He tracks the melancholy politics that inform the literary and cultural projects of a multitude of Arab novelists (Ghassan Kanafani and Naguib Mahfouz); poets and playwrights (Mahmoud Darwish, Nizar Qabbani, and Saadallah Wannous); filmmakers (Nouri Bouzid, Moufida Tlatli, Youssef Chahine, and Hany Abu Assad); alongside the work of Arab and non-Arab intellectuals.

Nouri Gana is Professor of Comparative Literature & Near Eastern Languages and Cultures at the University of California in Los Angeles (UCLA). In addition to Melancholy Acts: Defeat and Cultural Critique in the Arab World (Fordham University Press, 2023), he is the author of Signifying Loss: Toward a Poetics of Narrative Mourning (Bucknell UP, 2011/paperback 2015), and the editor of The Making of the Tunisian Revolution: Contexts, Architects, Prospects as well as The Edinburgh Companion to the Arab Novel in English (Edinburgh UP, 2013).