Middle Eastern Studies Departmental Seminars 2010-11
In association with the Centre for the Advanced Study of the Arab World (CASAW)
Semester 2
Wednesdays, 4.30-6.00 in the Boardroom (W3.13) unless otherwise stated
**All welcome**
9 February
Dr Lars Berger (Salford)
Opinion or Bias? Anti-Americanisms and the determinants of Muslim support for political violence against the United States
23 February
Dr John Chalcraft (LSE)
Transnational popular politics in the Arab world
9 March
Dr Yair Wallach (Cambridge)
The Lost Jews of Palestine: The Curious Case of Judge Frumkin
23 March
Dr Evaleila Pesaran (Cambridge)
Ahmadinejad and the Economic Policies of Counter-Reform in Iran
6 April
Dr Sami Hermez (Princeton)
Al-Harb Jay-e ("The War is Coming"): Living Everyday in Anticipation of Violence in Lebanon
4 May
Prof. Tim Insoll (Manchester)
Thinking about the archaeology of Islam in Sub-Saharan Africa
Semester 1
6 October
Prof. Colin Imber (Manchester)
How Islamic was Ottoman Law?
20 October
Dr Hendrik Kraetzschmar (Leeds)
Electoral rules, voter mobilisation and the Islamist landslide in the Saudi municipal elections of 2005
8 November
Joint seminar with Social Anthropology (Monday, 4.15-6.00, Arthur Lewis Building, second floor, room 2.016/017
Prof. Marcia Inhorn (Yale)
Reconceiving Middle Eastern Manhood: Islam, Assisted Reproduction, and Emergent Masculinities
24 November
Dr Elizabeth Kassab
What is enlightenment? Arab and postcolonial perspectives
1 December
Mr Robert Irwin (SOAS)
Sinbad the Travelling Salesman, His Ancestors and His Progeny
15 December
Emma Loosely
Zenobia's Last Resting Place? The Byzantine fortress of Zalabiyeh
**this seminar will be held in Room W3.13 (SLLC Boardroom) of the Samuel Alexander Building***
Abstacts
How Islamic was Ottoman Law?
Dr Colin Imber
Since the 1930s mainstream discussion of Ottoman law has emphasised its secular character and located its origins in the Turco-Mongol traditions of Central Asia. More recently, there has been a tendency to treat Ottoman law as Islamic in all its aspects and to view the Ottoman Empire as a model 'Islamic state' or even as an 'Islamic Caliphate'. The paper will challenge both these assumptions and offer a new approach to the question of how Ottoman law was formed and developed.
Colin Imber recently retired from his post as Reader in Turkish Studies at the University of Manchester and is the author of, among other works, The Ottoman Empire, 1300-1650: The Structure of Power and Ebu's-Su'ud: The Islamic Legal Tradition.
Electoral rules, voter mobilisation and the Islamist landslide in the Saudi municipal elections of 2005
Dr Hendrik Kraetzschmar
This paper examines the Saudi voting system and its effects on the first nationwide municipal elections held in the Kingdom in 2005. It argues that, by encouraging electoral mobilisation across districts, the voting system impacted on both the dynamics of the election campaign and its outcome. Drawing on original research conducted in the country, it demonstrates that as designed, the rules of the electoral game (1) made possible the formation of electoral alliances, whose presence on the ground gave the entire campaign a distinctly ideological flavour, and (2) facilitated the remarkable victories of Islamist candidates in municipalities across the Kingdom.
Hendrik Kraetzschmar is Lecturer in Comparative Politics of the Middle East and North Africa at the University of Leeds. He holds a PhD in Middle East Politics from LSE, and has also lectured in Middle East Politics at the American University in Cairo. He is the co-editor of Democracy and Violence: Global Challenges and Local Debates (Routledge, forthcoming), and the coming special issue of the British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, The Dynamics of Reform Coalitions in the Arab World.
What is enlightenment? Arab and postcolonial perspectives
Dr Elizabeth Kassab
A close reading of contemporary Arab thought reveals the notable amount of critical effort deployed by Arab intellectuals since the mid twentieth century in dealing with questions of culture and politics. To what extent has this effort produced a process of enlightenment, and in what sense? What have the main themes, promises and challenges of this process been? And how do these compare with such processes elsewhere in the postcolonial world? This talk addresses these questions by focusing on the recent Arab intellectual history from within a large comparative postcolonial approach. It articulates reflections on the intellectual, cultural and political meaning of enlightenment in Arab and postcolonial contexts.
Sinbad the Travelling Salesman, His Ancestors and His Progeny
Robert Irwin
Man-eating ogre! Burial alive! Giant bird! Magnetic mountain! Elephants' graveyard! The Old Man of the Sea! The Valley of Serpents! City of the Apes! Multiple shipwrecks! The marvels of the Orient!
Robert Irwin will discuss the commercial and spiritual background to Sinbad's adventures, before suggesting a possible Sanskrit source for them and then exploring the way those stories have been reworked in both the modern Middle East and the West.
Zenobia's Last Resting Place? The Byzantine Fortress of Zalabiyeh
Emma Loosley
The twin Byzantine fortresses of Halabiyeh and Zalabiyeh were built on the Euphrates in the sixth century CE as a bulwark against the Sassanian Empire. Whilst they are two of the best-known sites in Syria and the focus of a number of romantic stories, both are now threatened by the construction of a dam to create a hydro-electric power plant. In August 2010 a University of Manchester mission began work with the Syrian Department of Antiquities to excavate and salvage as much information as possible before the waters rise and this is a brief account of our findings so far.
Emma Loosley (Art History and Visual Studies) studied at York, the Courtauld Institute and the School of Oriental and African Studies before coming to Manchester in 2004. Her PhD was on the Architecture and Liturgy of the Bema (a nave platform) in C4th-C6th Syrian Churches and her research concentrates on Middle Eastern Christianity, particularly tradition in art and architecture, and Christian-Muslim interaction.
Opinion or Bias? Anti-Americanisms and the determinants of Muslim support for political violence against the United States
Dr Lars Berger
This presentation challenges conventional wisdom by asserting that among Egyptian, Pakistani and Indonesian Muslims support for terrorist violence against civilians in the United States is not linked to controversial U.S. foreign policies toward Israel and Iraq but to the tendency to hold negative views of the United States and its culture, freedom of expression and people. In the context of Muslim views on attacks on U.S. civilians, political considerations come into play only through a lack of confidence in domestic institutions and the notion of a general U.S. hostility to Muslim democracy.
Lars Berger received his Ph.D. in Political Science in 2007 (Friedrich-Schiller University), for which he won the German Middle East Studies Association's annual dissertation prize. He was a British Academy Fellow at the Department of Politics at Newcastle University, before joining Salford University as Lecturer in Politics and Contemporary History of the Middle East in 2007. He has studied widely in the Middle East, including a year at the American University in Cairo and spells at the Moshe Dayan Centre in Tel Aviv and the King Faisal Centre in Riyadh. In 2002-3, he joined the American Political Science Association's Congressional Fellowship Program, gaining unique insights into the foreign-policy making process in the United States. His current research focuses on images of the West and Western policies in Arab public debate.
Transnational popular politics in the Arab world
Dr John Chalcraft (LSE)
John Chalcraft trained at Cambridge, Harvard, Oxford and New York University, from where he received his doctorate in the modern history of the Middle East in 2001. He held a Research Fellowship at Caius (1999-2000) and was Lecturer in Modern Middle Eastern History in the Department of Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies at Edinburgh University from 2000-05. He is currently Reader in the History and Politics of Empire/ Imperialism in the Department of Government at the LSE. He is interested in the popular history of the Middle East, protest movements, transnationalism, migration, labour history, and hegemony, and is the author of The Striking Cabbies of Cairo and Other Stories (SUNY, 2004), The Invisible Cage: Syrian Migrant Workers in Lebanon (Stanford, 2009) and Monarchy, Migration and Hegemony in the Arabian Peninsula (LSE, 2010), and editor of Counterhegemony in the Colony and Postcolony (Palgrave, 2007).