Institute of Islamic Studies

This workshop will introduce participants to the disciplinary terrain of Islamic studies, as it varies across North America and Europe. The two regions are important producers of knowledge on Islam and Muslims, but they do so through distinct disciplinary registers and historical contexts — both of which inform the range of research questions and the intricacies of research design.  Moreover, these distinct intellectual contexts inform processes of peer review for publication purposes. Extending the IIS’s earlier discussions on publication processes, Dr. Cavatorta will compare and contrast the intellectual climates on both side of the Atlantic for a profession that faces the challenges of increasing mobility, interdisciplinary, and collaboration.

Francesco Cavatorta is a professor of political science at Laval University, Quebec.  He is currently visiting professor of political science at UofT.

Following a brief sketch of how Islamic law has been studied, and to what ends, Messick will argue for new methods and rationales. To do so, he will present  an inside-out version of his recent book, Sharīʿa Scripts. Beginning with a survey of the book’s ethnographic foundations, personalities, and key insights. he will then concentrate on the types of readings on which the book is based–readings that were both solitary and participatory in nature and that crossed a spectrum of genres–highlighting examples of the pleasures and the understandings that are associated with the study of Islamic texts. The result amounts to an alternative, source-emphasizing account of the book’s interdisciplinary project, namely an “historical anthropology” of the Islamic sharīʿa.

This lecture addresses the contemporary and historical problem of Islamic governance. The talk will first offer a quick review that moves back in time from such disparate contemporary phenomena as the ISIS Caliphate, the several present day kingdoms, and the status of minority communities of Muslims as citizens of nation states. It will then turn to discuss in brief the earlier advent  of Pakistan and the Islamic Republic in Iran, and before that, the 20^thcentury Khilafat Movement and the last decades of rule by sultan-caliphs under the Ottoman Empire. This historical context will serve as backdrop to Dr Messick’s presentation of a little known but instructive case of legitimate Islamic sovereignty.  He will treat the audience to a penetrating discussion of this curious polity, both in terms of its doctrinal conception and its lengthy experience of on-the-ground governance.

Art historical accounts of the foundation of Baghdad under the Abbasids in 762 mention that the eponymous founder of the Hanafi school of law Abu Hanifa (d. 767) was appointed by the Caliph to supervise construction and establish the standard size of mud bricks used to build the city. This narrative is one of the rare intersections between the study of Islamic architecture and urbanism and that of Islamic law. Methodologically, each field of study evolved following its own internal trajectory and, until recently, within an orientalist framework. Considering that Islamic law is based, in part, on using set principles to regulate transactions related to human interactions with each other and with the material objects around them, its exclusion from the study of art and architecture is quite problematic. In the case of mosque architecture, the art historical approach predominantly focuses on the materiality and patronage of the mosque and fails to take due consideration of the legal understanding of prayer and the symbolic role of theimam. Through the lens of a longue duréeapproach to Friday mosques based on a 13^thcentury fatwaand the mosques this fatwadiscusses, this talk proposes a methodological shift in the study of Islamic architecture and approaches to urbanism more generally.

The reconstruction of Beirut’s city center after a destructive war (1975–1990) expropriated most property rights-holders against their wishes for shares in the company in charge of reconstruction. One of those who escaped expropriation were the Islamic inalienable charitable endowments (waqfs). Was these endowments’ inalienability, as required in Islamic law and in the Lebanese real-estate code, the reason for their preservation? Archival research and interviews show that these inalienable endowments were not simply kept outside the market. Some were taken to market, which allowed for income for the perpetuation of other endowments. Nonetheless, these inalienable endowments were not simply disciplined to further accumulation, as the incomes from the kept endowments are disbursed to teach about and facilitate living according to the Islamic tradition. Despite inalienability being more of a fiction, anthropologists and Islamic legal scholars should remain attuned to discourses of inalienability (or Islamic law in “theory”). Indeed these are statements not only reflect what matters and what ought to be, but also do things “in practice,” like stand in the way of dispossession.