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.