Call for Papers: Harvard Islam in Africa Conference, Due June 1st

[Jacob Mundy]

Texts, Knowledge, and Practice: The Meaning of Scholarship in Muslim Africa

Harvard University, 16-18 February 2017

 

 

Conference Convenors: Ousmane Kane, Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Professor of Contemporary Islamic Religion Harvard Divinity School and Professor of Near Eastern Languages and Civilization Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Harvard University

 

Matthew Steele, Ph.D Candidate, Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, Harvard University

 

Sponsored by: Harvard Divinity School, The Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Islamic Studies Program, Center for African Studies, and the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations (NELC)

 

 

Sitting at the intersection of African, Islamic, and Middle Eastern Studies, Islam in Africa has long suffered from a crisis of disciplinary identity.  Neither strictly area nor solely religious studies, Islam in Africa has only recently received attention within the academy.  The shift is overdue.  Africa has influenced scholarship throughout the Islamic World for better than a millennium.  With the spread of Arabic literacy, African scholars developed a rich tradition of debate over orthodoxy and meaning in Islam.  The rise of such a tradition was hardly disconnected from centers of Islamic learning outside of Africa.  From Mecca to Sind, African scholars have played significant roles in the development of virtually every field of Islamic sciences.

 

Islamic scholarship in Africa remains as significant today.  By the end of the twentieth century, thousands of integrated curriculum schools and dozens of modern Islamic universities have redefined Islamic studies across Sub-Saharan Africa.  The spread of communications technology has reshaped Islamic scholarship still further.  New representations of Islamic scholarship have formed across Africa through teaching websites, mp3s, and social media apps.   The emergence of these new spaces, both physical and virtual, holds the potential for recasting notions of class, authority, canon, and orthodoxy common to the study of Islamic scholarship in Africa today. 

 

This conference aims to rethink how such an evolution occurred.   It will be the first of two meetings, both intended to bring together specialists from Western academia and the Islamic World.  Because it takes the definition of scholarship and Muslim Africa in deliberately broad terms, the conference welcomes paper proposals from all disciplines, methodologies, and time periods. 

 

The conference will be divided across two themes. 

 

The first seeks to reconsider pre-modern scholarship in Islamicate Africa.  Of interest is not only the material produced by Islamic scholars, both textual and oral, but also the cultural, political, and epistemological spaces framing their work.  Possible topics include:

 

·      Intellectual History and Movement Across Pre-Modern Africa

·      Law, Legal Literature, and Judicial Practice

·      Archives, Manuscript Culture, and Knowledge Transmission

·      Classical Islamic Education(s) and Canon Formation(s)

·      Commentary, Genre, and Literary Criticism

·      Teaching Texts: Abridgement and Versification

·      `Ajami and Non-Arabic Islamic Scholarship

·      Historiography and Representations of Islamicate Africa

 

The conference’s second theme considers the ways in which Islamic scholarship is experienced in Africa today.  The panels will focus on contemporary knowledge practices, paying close attention to both continuities and ruptures linking modern with pre-modern scholarship in Africa.  Possible topics include:

 

·      Islamic Higher Education: Curricula, Politics, and Shaping Subjectivities

·      ICT and the Reconfiguration of Islamic Knowledge Transmission

·      Digital Humanities and Constituting Islamic African Scholarship

·      Knowledge Practices: Rethinking Traditional/Modern Divides

·      Quranic Study: Language, Community, and Contest

·      Study Circles, Text, and Performance

·      Book Culture and the Making of Islamic Texts in Africa today

·      Aural, Visual, and Experiential Practices of Knowledge Production

 

 

Submission Guidelines

 

Paper proposals should include a 300-word abstract and an updated CV with current institutional affiliation and contact information.  Proposals from advanced graduate students and recent PhD recipients are especially welcomed.  Financial support may be available to defray costs for invited participants. Please submit proposals to the following address: harvard.i...@gmail.com by 1 June 2016.