Location: Sweelinckzaal (room 0.05), Drift 21, Utrecht University

The year 2023 marks the 750^th anniversary of Jalāl al-Dīn Rūmī’s death (1207-1273), one of the mostly read authors in the Islamic world, and a best-selling poet in the United States, praised for his aesthetics, his wisdom, practical advice, and passionate love. Why is Rūmī so appealing to people of different ethnic and religious backgrounds? What is his timeless message that attracts both Muslims and non-Muslims alike? Is his modern appreciation merely to do with his non-conformist and transgressive ideas? How are his transgressive ideas used as a counter to the violent ideas of Islamist ideology, emphasizing a different Islam? Rūmī composed an impressive amount of works, his poetry consists of about 120.000 lines. His magnum opus, the Spiritual Poem (Masnavī-yi ma‘navī) is called the Koran in the Persian language as he comments on the Koran in an attractive fashion, adorning his message with metaphors and illustrative anecdotes. His opening lines about the complaint of a reed cut from the reedbed is a metaphor for the separated human soul, longing to return to the original home.

This conference brings together scholars who have worked or are working on various aspects of Rūmī as a mystic, a religious scholar, and a poet. We would like to invite scholars who are working on Rūmī to present a paper on any aspects of this medieval sage who has become a source of inspiration for many people around the world today. The conference is organized to encourage discussion on understudied aspects of Rūmī’s poetry, personality, legacy and his reception history. His oeuvre is unmatched. In Professor William’s words, “It is perhaps the single most influential piece of mystical writing ever conceived.” Therefore, we would like to analyse new aspects of Rūmī’s mystical philosophy.

To see the full programme click here.

You can attend the conference both on location and by livestream. In both cases registration is needed by sending an email to beyondsharia@uu.nl.

The Kitāb al-Ṭabaqāt al-Kabīr (Biography of Muḥammad, His Companions and the Successors up to the Year 230 of the Hijra) by Ibn Saʿd (d. 230 A.H./845 C.E.) is the earliest extant biographical dictionary on the life of the Prophet and the early generations of Muslims. It is one of the most important historical works about the first centuries of Muslim society in Arabic. This classic Brill edition was supervised by Eduard Sachau and was originally titled Biographien Muhammeds, seiner Gefährten und der späteren Träger des Islams bis zum Jahre 230 der Flucht.

This edition was originally published by Brill between 1904 and 1940. The print version was republished in 16 paperback volumes in January 2022.

This is the online classical Arabic text edition of the Kitāb al-Ṭabaqāt al-Kabīr (Biography of Muḥammad, His Companions and the Successors up to the Year 230 of the Hijra) by Ibn Saʿd (d. 230 A.H./845 C.E.). The print version has been published between 1904 and 1940 by Brill, and a paperback reprint version was published in January 2022. This online version is published as a full text searchable product on the Scholarly Editions platform.

We are pleased to announce the publication of the fourth issue  of the open-access, peer-reviewed Journal of Islamic Law, a special issue titled “The Dynamics of Islamic Law with the Rise of Modernity.”

We invite you to digitally explore the fourth issue which explores the interactions between Islamic law and other legal traditions during the modern period, particularly in the contexts of colonialism, imperialism, and centralized bureaucratic states from the eighteenth to early twentieth centuries. The three essays in the issue contribute to the ongoing scholarly debates that present contrasting views on the fate of sharīʿa during this period. Between the two sides of this debate, there is a space ripe for exploring the fitness and movement of Islamic law in the contested period between tradition and modernity.

This special issue includes an introduction by this Special Issue’s Editor and current PIL Research Fellow, Dilyara Agisheva (Harvard Law School), and essays by Brian Wright (McGill  University), Ninja Bumann (University of Vienna), and Rozaliya Garipova (Nazarbayev University), that illustrate the interaction of sharīʿa within the imperial and nascent nation-state legal systems with the coming of modernity. Together, the authors’ conclusions contribute to a new wave in the study of Islamic legal dynamism and resilience. Read these essays today!

Edited by: C.H. Bleaney, S. Sinclair, P. García Suárez and G. Schwarb

Index Islamicus Online is THE international classified bibliography of publications in European languages on all aspects of Islam and the Muslim world. Rightly described as ‘an indispensable tool for libraries, graduates and undergraduates alike’. The Index Islamicus Online provides the reader with an effective overview of what has been published on a given subject in the field of Islamic Studies in its broadest sense.

Subscriptions: see Brill.com

Presently, Index Islamicus contains over 600,000 records, covering all the main Muslim areas of Asia and Africa, as well as Muslims living elsewhere, and their history, beliefs, societies, cultures, languages and literatures. It includes material published by Western scholars in the fields of Humanities and Social Sciences, specialist area- and subject-based areas, and by Muslims writing in European languages. Publications recorded are in the form of articles, books and online resources. All essays and papers contained in multi-author volumes are recorded, classified and indexed separately.

Periodicals

Over 5,000 journals are surveyed for inclusion in the database, together with conference proceedings, monographs, multi-authored works and online resources. Journals and books are indexed down to the article and chapter level. Newspapers, news magazines, and government or official “grey” literature are excluded.

An overview of the consulted periodicals: download PDF (600 KB)

Classification

The well-known Index Islamicus classification scheme, uniquely and carefully geared to the field of Islamic Studies, allows one to quickly find all literature headed under a particular, broader subject area (e.g., Education, Philosophy, Shi’ism, Sudan, Palestine, Israel, as well as their subcategories).

Extensive indexes

Those who prefer more specific queries, have in the print edition at their disposal two elaborate indexes, facilitating quick and effective searches: the subject index guides the user to material on specialised subjects not covered by the classification scheme (e.g. Al-Azhar, mawlids, railways), and also to items relevant to one subject but classified under another. The name index lists not only authors, but also editors, translators, reviewers and personal subjects. So researchers interested in, for instance, Ibn Khaldun or Muhammad Iqbal or the Ayatollah Khomeini can quickly find publications both by and about them. The online edition offers a full text and advanced search opportunities.

The editors of Index Islamicus may be contacted at ixis[at]soas.ac.uk. Users are welcome to submit new or missing items to Index Islamicus by sending a file with complete bibliographic metadata in BibTeX, RIS, Zotero RDF, Mendeley or any other commonly used citation format to ixis[at]soas.ac.uk. Inclusion of submissions is at the discretion of the editors.

The Editorial Offices are located in the Library, SOAS, University of London and the Instituto de Lenguas y Culturas del Mediterráneo y Oriente Próximo (CCHS, CSIC) in Madrid.