Michael E. Marmura Lecture Series in Arabic Studies

“The Queer Arab Glossary”

When conventional language does not equip us with the tools to speak about ourselves, we create our own. Slang expresses words and feelings that break down boundaries. It is a form of protest and fills in the gaps.

The Queer Arab Glossary is the first published collection of Arabic LGBTQ+ slang. This bold guide captures the lexicon of the queer Arab community in all its differences, quirks and felicities. Featuring fascinating facts and anecdotes, it contains more than 300 terms in both English and Arabic, ranging from the humorous to the harrowing, serious to tongue-in-cheek, pejorative to endearing. Here, leading queer Arab artists, academics, activists and writers offer insightful essays situating this groundbreaking glossary in a modern social and political context.

With beautiful, witty illustrations, The Queer Arab Glossary is a powerful response to pervasive myths and stereotypes around sexuality and an invitation to take a journey into queerness throughout the Arab world.

Marwan Kaabour is a graphic designer, artist and writer. His interdisciplinary practice builds pathways between communication and publication design, curation, pedagogy and political activism. Alongside his independent projects, he works with non-profit institutions, companies and individuals in arts and culture sectors. In 2019, Marwan founded Takweer, an online platform and expanding archive of queer narratives in Arab history and popular culture. His debut book, The Queer Arab Glossary, was published in June 2024.
Marwan moved from his hometown Beirut to London in 2011 to pursue a master's degree in Graphic Design, before joining renowned design agency Barnbrook. He laeter founded his own studio in 2020.

Dina Georgis is Associate Professor in the Women and Gender Studies Institute and the author of The Better Story: Queer Affects from the Middle East (SUNY, 2013). Her work is situated between postcolonial and sexuality studies.

Maya El Helou is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Anthropology in a collaborative program with Sexual Diversity Studies and a comic artist. Her dissertation, a sensory ethnography, tackles queer resistance in Beirut.

Exploring tensions between traditional orientations and modern subjectivities, the pursuit of enchantment, and existing in a disenchanted, secular world, Neo-traditionalism in Islam in the West examines neo-traditionalism, its public pedagogues and their students—seekers of sacred knowledge—in the Euro-American context. These pedagogues, many of whom are white converts to Islam such as Hamza Yusuf, Abdal Hakim Murad, and Umar Faruq Abd-Allah, guide their followers through a paradigmatic critique of modernity. They focus on affirming spirituality, self-purification, and religious orthodoxy and advocate for a traditional metaphysical worldview along with recognition of and deference to spiritual (and political) authorities. This study examines the convergence of Muslim neo-traditionalists with the religious right and culture-war polemicists – on the one hand – and the role they have played alongside policymakers nationally and transnationally. On the national front, they argue for an alliance of conservative believers that provides the same paradigm shared by the so-called ‘moral majority’ and with which Muslims can unapologetically voice their concerns on the dissipation of family values and sexual politics. Globally, they have contributed to forging a vision for a ‘moderate Islam’ after the War on Terror and promoted a counterrevolutionary and statist stance after the Arab Spring.

Walaa Quisay is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in the School of Divinity at the University of Edinburgh. She is the author of Neo-Traditionalism in Islam in the West: Orthodoxy, Spirituality, and Politics and co-author of When Only God can See: The Faith of Muslim Political Prisoners. She worked at numerous academic institutions, including the University of Manchester, the University of Birmingham, and Istanbul Şehir University. In 2019, she received her DPhil from the University of Oxford at the Faculty of Oriental Studies. Her research interests include the anthropology of religion, the study of Muslim political and religious subjectivities, carceral theology, theodicy, and traditionalism and modernism in contemporary Islamic thought.

How to raise a child became a central concern of intellectual debate from Cairo to Beirut over the course of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Intimately linked with discussions around capitalism and democracy, considerations about women, gender, and childrearing emerged as essential to modern social theory. Arab writers, particularly women, made sex, the body, and women's ethical labor central to fending off European imperial advances, instituting representative politics, and managing social order. Labors of Love traces the political power of motherhood and childrearing in Arabic thought. Susanna Ferguson reveals how debates around raising children became foundational to feminist, Islamist, and nationalist politics alike—opening up conversations about civilization, society, freedom, temporality, labor, and democracy. While these debates led to expansions in girls' education and women writers' authority, they also attached the fate of nations to women's unwaged labor in the home. Ferguson thus reveals why women and the family have been stumbling blocks for representative regimes around the world. She shows how Arab women's writing speaks to global questions—the devaluation of social reproduction under capitalism, the stubborn maleness of the liberal subject, and why the naturalization of embodied, binary gender difference has proven so difficult to overcome.

Susanna Ferguson is a historian of women, gender, and intellectual life in the Eastern Mediterranean. Her research focuses on how questions about gender, sex, and science shaped political imaginaries in the 19th- and 20-century Arab world. Her work on gender, science, and education has appeared in Modern Intellectual History, the Journal of Middle East Women's Studies, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East and the Arab Studies Journal. She is a longtime host, former editor-in-chief and now associate producer at the Ottoman History Podcast, where she also co-curates the series on “Women, Gender, and Sex in the Ottoman World.

Structured as five microhistories c. 632-705, this book offers a counternarrative for the formation of Islamic architecture and the Islamic state. It adopts a novel periodization informed by moments of historical violence and anxiety around caliphal identities in flux, animating histories of the minbar, throne, and maqsura as a principal nexus for navigating this anxiety. It expands outward to re-assess the mosque and palace with a focus on the Qubbat al-Khadraʾ and the Dar al-Imara in Kufa. It culminates in a reading of the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem as a site where eschatological anxieties and political survival converge

Heba Mostafa is Associate Professor of Islamic art and architecture at the Department of Art History at the University of Toronto, St. George and Senior Fellow at Massey College. She received her doctorate from Cambridge University’s Department of Architecture in 2012 and holds degrees in architecture and the history of Islamic architecture from Cairo University and the American University in Cairo. Her research explores the formation of Islamic architecture through the lens of early Islamic sectarianism and governance, addressing the mediation of political conflict and confessional division through architecture at the intersection of politics and the sacred. She focuses on Islam’s interface with late antiquity, Christianity and Judaism through commemorative architecture, pilgrimage, and ritual practice, with a particular focus on Jerusalem and Cairo. Her current project explores nature veneration practices in Medieval Cairo, with a focus on the Nilometer at al-Rawda Island, bringing into conversation the mediatory role of nature in reconciling the religious, spiritual, and scientific contexts in Medieval Islam.

The 'Evidentialist Objection' maintains that there simply is not sufficient evidence to justify belief in God. Of course, the objection can be extended to a whole host of religious beliefs. The problem is not new, and in its extended form, namely, justifying religious beliefs more generally, it was as much at issue in the medieval Islamic world as it is among contemporary philosophers of religion today. The presentation considers this medieval Islamic manifestation of the Evidentialist Objection, its context, and Abū Ḥāmid al-Ghazālī’s response. That response, however, can only be appreciated by considering Ghazālī's travel from skepticism to certainty and a rethinking of what count as ‘properly basic’ beliefs, a position that resonates well with the recent reformed epistemology of certain contemporary philosophers of religion.

Jon McGinnis is Professor of classical and medieval philosophy at the University of Toronto. One of his more recent research interest is in theories of the justification of belief among medieval Islamicate philosophers and theologians. In addition to numerous articles, he is the author of Avicenna (OUP 2010), translator and editor of Avicenna’s Physics from his encyclopedic work, The Healing (Brigham Young University Press, 2009) and co-translator with David C. Reisman of Classical Arabic Philosophy, An Anthology of Sources (Hackett Publishing Co., 2007).

A perception that Christianity is under attack has animated contemporary American political culture, driving domestic policies that advance Christian political power and foreign policies to protect Christians globally. In this talk, I specifically map how conservative American Christians appropriate the suffering of Christians in the Middle East to claim that Christians everywhere, including in the United States, are persecuted. Drawing on the literature of global memory cultures, I argue that the localization of Christian persecution is facilitated by conservative American Christians who act as members of transnational memory networks, transmitting images and memories of Christian persecution from the Middle East to the United States. In doing so, they transform nation-specific experiences of suffering to a universal injury of Christian persecution, expanding the category of victim to include all Christians everywhere.

Miray Philips is an Assistant Professor in Sociology at the University of Toronto. Her work focuses on the transnational politics, meaning, and memory of violence and suffering between the United States and the Middle East. Her current book project explores conflictual representations of religious difference in the context of the global war on terror. Empirically, it examines claims-making by various transnational actors on behalf of Christians in the Middle East, and specifically Copts in Egypt. Her collaborative projects investigate knowledge production and collective memories of mass violence, specifically in Syria. Her research is published in scholarly journals such as the American Journal of Cultural Sociology, Memory Studies, and the Minnesota Journal of International Law. Miray Philips also engages in public-facing work and currently sits on the Board of Advisors of the Tahrir Institute for Middle East Policy.

In this talks, Ayoub examines the key figures, institutions, and networks involved in the intellectual history and intellectual formation of the field of Arabic literature in English translation. She foregrounds a dense array of translators, publishers, and writers to explore the evolution of post-war Arabic-to-English literary translation and the interplay between some of Arabic literature’s foremost English translators and government, academic, and publishing institutions. She asks: How do translators rely on paratexts (introductions, forewords, afterwords, prefaces) to navigate the Orientalist legacies and political agendas that shape Arabic literature’s westward movement into the Anglophone world?

Dima Ayoub is Associate Professor of Arabic and Chair of the Arabic Department at Middlebury College where she was also the C.V. Starr Junior Faculty Fellow in International Studies and former director of the Middle East studies program. Her book manuscript Paratext and Power: Modern Arabic Literature in Translation examines the key figures, institutions, and networks involved in the intellectual history and intellectual formation of the field of Arabic literature in English translation. Parallel to her book project, Professor Ayoub is currently developing a digital archive of paratexts in modern Arabic literature in English, French, German and Spanish translation. Her most recent publications appeared in Critical Inquiry, Los Angeles Review of Books, Journal of Translation Studies, the Journal of Arabic Literature and Middle Eastern Literatures and in the edited collection, Multilingual Literature as World Literature (Bloomsbury).

Zulfiqar Hirji is an Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at York University and York Massey Fellow. His current research focusses on Muslim materialities of coastal East Africa and the Indian Ocean. His published works include Approaches to the Qur’an in sub-Saharan Africa (2019), “A Corpus of Illuminated Qur’ans from Coastal East Africa,” in the Journal of Islamic Manuscripts (2023), and “Dispersal, Decolonization, and Dominance: African Muslim Objects from the Sultanate of Witu (1858-1923),” in Decolonizing Islamic Art in Africa: New Approaches to Muslim Expressive Cultures (2024).

Abstract: This talk discusses an extraordinary corpus of illuminated Qur’ans from East Africa’s Lamu archipelago. Produced between the 18th and 19th centuries, these little-known manuscripts represent a high point in coastal East Africa’s histories of Swahili Muslim manuscript production and Arabic writing. They have distinctive visual features, and add an important component to the history of Islamic manuscript production in Africa.