Conference in Hamburg from 30 to 31 March 2023

The conference addresses the role succession law played in Muslim communities in the past, how it unfolds today and what it implies for future generations. While family law has received extensive attention in Islamic law scholarship, succession law, often dubbed as the last bastion of the supposed immutability of Islamic law, has not been subject to similar scrutiny. This is surprising, given that rules and practices regarding succession are strongly intertwined with family structures and the economy.

We follow a broad definition of succession law, one encompassing all forms of transfer of property between generations. This also includes phenomena not usually associated with succession law, like family foundations (awqāf) or forms of inter vivos transfer of property. We invite submissions that address the intergenerational transfer of property in various historical and regional contexts. Our aim is to bring together different methodological approaches and theoretical perspectives (especially from law, history, economics, anthropology, Middle Eastern/regional studies, gender studies and sociology).

We are particularly, but not exclusively, interested in:

1. The formation of Islamic succession law.
2. Islamic succession law in the modern nation state.
3. The intergenerational transfer of property inter vivos and mortis causa through wills, contracts and/or donations.
4. Inter-religious succession law.
5. The role of the family waqf.
6. Succession among Muslim minority communities.Paper Submission: Papers should be based on original, unpublished research. We welcome contributions from scholars of all stages of their career. Please send the abstract of your proposed paper (up to 300 words) by 15 September 2022, to Ms Tess Chemnitzer (chemnitzer@mpipriv.de). We will conduct a blind peer review and send out decisions by 1 October 2022. Publication plans and options will be discussed during the conference.Organization: The Succession in Islamic Law-Conference is being organized by the Research Group “Changes in God’s Law – An Inner-Islamic Comparison of Family and Succession Laws” at the Max Planck Institute for Comparative and International Private Law in Hamburg, Germany. The conference will take place in person in Hamburg, 30-31 March 2023. The program includes a keynote lecture by David Powers (Cornell University).

   Funding: We will provide funding for all presenters (travel costs and accommodation).

   Max Planck Working Group “IGTOPI”: After the conference, interested participants will be invited to join the Max Planck Working Group on the Intergenerational Transfer of Property in Islam (IGTOPI), which is currently being set up. The Working Group will host meetings, provide a platform to exchange ideas and offer opportunities to collaborate on future publications to further the study of Islamic succession law.

I.B.Tauris is seeking book proposals for a new academic book series: I.B.Tauris Studies in Medieval and Early Modern Persian Literature.

This series provides a forum for cutting-edge scholarship from established and emerging scholars in the field of Persian literary studies. It publishes monographs that challenge received understandings of the primary source material and offer new ways of approaching both familiar and obscure texts. The series editor and advisory board encourage submissions from authors who adopt a comparative approach to the study of Persian literature that spans genres, periods, regions, and/or languages, however, studies of distinct periods and individual poets (or clusters of poets) will also be considered. The temporal scope of the series is the first millennium of literary production in New Persian, circa 850-1850, encompassing the medieval (or pre-modern) and the early modern periods. The geographical range is the full expanse of the Persianate world, from Anatolia and the Caucasus in the west, through Iran and Afghanistan, to Central and South Asia in the east. Read more

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Workshop at the Centre for Advanced Studies “Multiple Secularities – Beyond the West, Beyond Modernities”, Leipzig University

27 – 29 October 2021

Convenors:
Marian Burchardt and Nur Yasemin Ural (both Leipzig University)

As the intensity of the politics around cultural identity is growing across the world, the notion of heritage-making, or “heritagisation”, has acquired new political urgency. At the same time, these politics have animated far-flung controversies over the religious and secular sources of belonging along with the values of ethnic, religious and racial majorities, minorities and the states that are supposed to represent them. This raises an intriguing set of questions: Under what conditions and with what consequences are certain religious artefacts, rituals and worldviews framed as heritage? Whose religious heritage is considered worthy to be selected, canonised and ennobled as elementary for nations’ collective memory? Who is systematically excluded and left to oblivion in the politics of religious and secular heritage? Which social groups are central to these processes? Read more

Human Rights and Foreign Policy: 7th Joint Human Rights (Virtual) Conference

We are pleased to announce that the seventh joint international conference on human rights, on the theme Human Rights and Foreign Policy, will take place from 14 to 16 June 2020 online (hosted by the Human Rights Consortium, University of London).

In light of geopolitical rebalancing of power, challenges to human rights from a number of quarters, and waning international support for human rights, the role of human rights in foreign policy requires urgent investigation. For human rights to thrive internationally, states need to support them not only domestically but also in their foreign policies, both in their bilateral relations and multilaterally. Yet, there is significant divergence of practice. Clear challenges appear in the policies of traditional supporters of human rights. This includes actions of the Trump administration on multiple fronts, as well as European states and the EU as a whole. European policy on refugees, for example, severely threatens basic international norms. And UK support for Saudi Arabia even as it carries on a murderous war in Yemen highlights hypocrisy.

Whereas a certain set of middle powers have traditionally been supporters of human rights internationally, and have explicitly incorporated human rights into their foreign policies, emerging powers in the developing world represent a much more diverse set of actors and perspectives on human rights and international institutions which, while providing opportunities for new kinds of engagement, also pose significant challenges.

Much of the work on human rights and foreign policy has focused on one state in particular – the United States – although there is increasing focus on the European Union, and there is clearly a need for much broader investigation and analysis, and broad-based comparative studies are scarce. Thus, an overarching question for the conference is: in 2021, what does foreign policy support for human rights look like?

Potential questions to be addressed during the conference include: Read more

A World of Realms: A Long View of Diplomacy and Spatiality in the Premodern Islamic World.

Workshop

University of Antwerp – Belgium, May 20-21, 2021

Keynote speaker: Sanjay Subrahmanyam (UCLA/Collège de France)

Power in History: Centre for Political History invites papers that inquire into the spatial dimensions of diplomacy and their relation to conceptions of territoriality in the larger Islamic world, from the 7^th to the early 19^th century, as part of a two-day interdisciplinary workshop held at the University of Antwerp and hosted by the History Department on May 20-21, 2021.

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Authors are cordially invited to submit scholarly articles concerned with Islamic Studies to the Iranian Journal of Islamic Studies (IJIS), which will officially launch in March 2020. IJIS is a quarterly journal of The University of Religions and Denomination (URD). This journal will also submit applications for Web of Science and Scopes after its two first issues get published.

About the Journal

The Iranian Journal of Islamic Studies is mainly concerned to help promote understanding and dialogue among the Islamic Denominations so as to help prepare the ground for peaceful coexistence and friendship among Muslims all around the world. It will be devoted to the examination of all aspects of Islam and the Islamic world. Special attention will be paid to works on Islamic Jurisprudence (Fiqh), Islamic Theology (Kalam), history of Islam, politics, sociology, international relations, as well as ethics. Mr. Seyyed Abolhasan Navvab is the Editor-in-Chief of the journal. For further information on IJIS, follow this link: http://ri.urd.ac.ir/news?newsCode=951

URD already publishes the journal of Religious Inquiries, which is covered in Web of Science. For more information on this journal, follow this link: http://ri.urd.ac.ir/

For more information on URD follow this link: https://urd.ac.ir/en/index

Manuscripts submitted to this journal will be deemed as they have not been published and are not under consideration for publication elsewhere. The journal welcomes the submission of manuscripts that meet the criteria of scholarly excellence. Our review process allows the authors and researchers an opportunity to use their expertise in a number of significant ways. Please note that IJIS uses Crossref™ to screen papers for unoriginal material. By submitting your paper to this journal you are agreeing to originality checks during the peer-review and production processes.

We are engaged to settle a website to get the articles for blind peer review; yet, until then, this journal accepts articles by direct email. Please send your submission to Ahmad Amid, the Managing Editor; email: urdjournals@gmail.com

Human Rights and Foreign Policy

7th Joint Human Rights Conference
22-24 June 2020
University of London

Organized by:
Human Rights Consortium, University of London
Human Rights Section, International Studies Association (ISA)
Human Rights Section, American Political Science Association (APSA)
Human Rights Research Committee, International Political Science Association (IPSA)
Standing Group on Human Rights and Transitional Justice, European Consortium for Political Research (ECPR)

In light of geopolitical re-balancing of power, challenges to human rights from a number of quarters, and waning international support for human rights, the role of human rights in foreign policy requires urgent investigation. For human rights to thrive internationally, states need to support them not only domestically but also in their foreign policies, both in their bilateral relations and multilaterally. Yet, there is significant divergence of practice. Clear challenges appear in the policies of traditional supporters of human rights. This includes actions of the Trump administration on multiple fronts, as well as European states and the EU as a whole. European policy on refugees, for example, severely threatens basic international norms. And UK support for Saudi Arabia even as it carries on a murderous war in Yemen highlights hypocrisy.

Whereas a certain set of middle powers have traditionally been supporters of human rights internationally, and have explicitly incorporated human rights into their foreign policies, emerging powers in the developing world represent a much more diverse set of actors and perspectives on human rights and international institutions which, while providing opportunities for new kinds of engagement, also pose significant challenges.

Much of the work on human rights and foreign policy has focused on one state in particular – the United States – although there is increasing focus on the European Union, and there is clearly a need for much broader investigation and analysis, and broad-based comparative studies are scarce. Thus, an overarching question for the conference is: in 2020, what does foreign policy support for human rights look like?

Potential questions to be addressed during the conference include:

Are the traditional supporters of human rights internationally changing their support?
What opportunities and challenges does the emergence of new regional and global powers provide?
What are the internal and external processes which drive state support (or not) for human rights internationally?
What theoretical approaches best explain human rights foreign policies?
How do material and ideational factors influence and shape human rights foreign policies?
What role do emerging powers play in driving (or constraining) human rights internationally, and what are the similarities and differences between their positions?
How do we situate international organization actors like the European Union or the African Union which have some state-like characteristics internationally – or at least have such ambitions?
What role might sub-state political actors play in supporting human rights internationally?
How do transnational civil society networks affect state human rights foreign policies?
Are there divergences between states’ bilateral and multilateral human rights policies?
Can we identify a state of the art in empirical research on human rights-related foreign policy?

This is the 7^th in a series of joint human rights conferences sponsored by the human sections of several international professional organizations, this time co-organised with, and hosted by, the Human Rights Consortium, University of London. The formal call for papers/panels will be released in August, with the submission deadline in November. In the meantime, subscribe to the official twitter feed of the conference  (@hrjc2020) and the Human Rights Consortium twitter feed (@HRC_News) for updates.

The Association for Middle East Women’s Studies (AMEWS) is pleased to invite submissions of abstracts for an international conference on gender and women’s studies in the Middle East in the second week of March 2021 in Beirut, Lebanon, in partnership with local universities (American University of Beirut and Lebanese American University).  This is the first AMEWS conference in the Middle East.  The conference engages scholars from multiple locations in and outside of the region, on the cutting-edge topics propelling research on gender and women’s studies in the Middle East  and with populations in the diaspora. The call is open to the broad range of topics on gender and women’s studies in the social sciences and humanities: politics, economics, history, sexuality, culture, arts, digital humanities and so forth. The abstracts will be reviewed and thematically organized.  There may be invited speakers and sessions.  AMEWS expects to be able to fund the travel, accommodations and catering for the majority of the participants, with funding priority going to those residing in the Middle East.  Several products are planned, including publications and engagements with NGO’s and other local organizations committed to gender issues.  For more information about AMEWS, see: http://amews.org/  and The Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies,https://www.dukeupress.edu/Societies/journal-of-middle-east-womens-studies.  If you are interested in participating, please send an abstract (250 words) on a topic of your interest – include in the abstract why you believe this is a pressing topic.

Abstract template:
Name:
Discipline:
Affiliation :
Email:
Snail Mail:
Title of paper :
Abstract of 250 words.

Please send your abstracts to Angie Abdelmonem :angie.abdelmonem@asu.edu
The deadline for sending abstracts is  October 30, 2019.

Planning Committee: Fatima Sadiqi, Chair; Hanadi Al-Samman, Angie Abdelmonem, Louise Cainkar, Amaney Jamal, Suad Joseph

The intellectual history of Sufism is intertwined with that of philosophy in the Islamic world. This conference will explore and re-examine the relationship between Sufism and philosophy.

From the mystical strains in the writings of Avicenna and Ibn Ṭufayl to the philosophical Sufism of Ibn ʿArabī’s school, the encounter between Islamic mysticism and philosophy has produced a rich nexus of mutual influence and rapprochement, as well as polemical engagement and debate.

Despite the extent and significance of such interactions, modern scholars in the fields of Sufism and Islamic philosophy alike have often been reluctant to venture beyond the conventional boundaries of their respective disciplines and investigate the links that tie Sufi thought to the philosophical traditions of the Muslim world. The aim of this conference is to provide a forum for a cross-disciplinary exploration and re-examination of the relationship between Sufism and philosophy. Key discussion-points include: A) Sufism’s reception of ancient and late antique philosophical traditions. When did this process begin, how did it manifest itself, and through which channels did it occur? B) Falsafa’s interaction with classical Sufism. What impact did the mystical aspects of Avicenna’s thought have on the subsequent development of Islamic philosophy? Have such aspects been over-emphasized or under-estimated? C) ‘Philosophical Sufism’ in the post-classical era. How apt is this label? To what extent did the members of Ibn ʿArabī’s school adopt or engage with theories propounded by al-Fārābī, Avicenna, Suhrawardī or the Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ?
Confirmed speakers include:…. Read more