The Possibilities of a Digital Life in Islamic Studies “Activism, Advocacy, and Scholarship on Islam in the Digital Realm” (Boston University, September 16-17, 2016) Kristian Petersen | December 1, 2016 Critical Approaches AboutCritical Approaches Engagement via digital media and technologies has transformed how scholars and activists do what they do. Digital platforms and tools have opened up new horizons for doing work – producing, analyzing, archiving, communicating – but also pose new challenges that need to be addressed when working in digital environments... Read the rest of this entry
Convivencia Contested Al-Andalus between Historical Memory and Modern Politics Samuel C. Barry | November 10, 2016 Critical Approaches, Images & Intersections AboutCritical Approaches AboutImages & Intersections Beginning in the year 711 CE, Muslim armies based in North Africa took control of the vast majority of the Iberian peninsula, supplanting the Christian, Germanic Visigoths, who had themselves assumed power in the region in the wake of the fall of the Western Roman Empire. The Muslims named the land al-Andalus, and for the next five centuries, Islamic religious and legal discourse and Arabic cultural and intellectual trends were preeminent on the peninsula. By the middle of the thirteenth century, however, Christian armies had regained control of most of what is now modern Spain and Portugal... Read the rest of this entry
The Holy between the Imaginary and the Real Jerusalem 1000-1400 at The Metropolitan Museum of Art Ilex Foundation | October 5, 2016 Images & Intersections / Visual Culture AboutImages & Intersections How do you represent a city that is and is not there? This has been the question for Jews since the days of the first destruction of the city in 586 BCE. It was the question for Emperor Constantine and his mother Helena, who ventured to retrieve a city that Emperor Hadrian had condemned to oblivion. A few centuries later, as Muslim tradition asserts, the conquering caliph ʿUmar b. al-Khaṭṭāb entered the city looking for the “holy house,” bayt al-maqdis, as the Arabs called the city. What he was shown by Bishop Sophronius was a glorious Roman shrine to the resurrection; what he was shown by his Jewish native informants was the ruins of the original Temple, now a dung heap... Read the rest of this entry