Institute of Islamic Studies

“The Big Books” series is monthly reading group, led by IIS Post-Doctoral Fellow Youcef Soufi,  that allows Islamic studies students to delve into influential texts of their discipline.

About this month’s reading:

What do the occult sciences, sciences with the souls of the dead, and appeals to saintly powers have to do with rationality? Since the late nineteenth century, modernizing intellectuals, religious leaders, and statesmen in Iran have attempted to curtail many such practices as “superstitious,” instead encouraging the development of rational religious sensibilities and dispositions. However, far from diminishing the diverse methods through which Iranians engage with the immaterial realm, these rationalizing processes have multiplied the possibilities for metaphysical experimentation.

The Iranian Metaphysicals examines these experiments and their transformations over the past century. Drawing on years of ethnographic and archival research, Alireza Doostdar shows that metaphysical experimentation lies at the center of some of the most influential intellectual and religious movements in modern Iran. These forms of exploration have not only produced a plurality of rational orientations toward metaphysical phenomena but have also fundamentally shaped what is understood as orthodox Shi‘i Islam, including the forms of Islamic rationality at the heart of projects for building and sustaining an Islamic Republic.

Delving into frequently neglected aspects of Iranian spirituality, politics, and intellectual inquiry, The Iranian Metaphysicals challenges widely held assumptions about Islam, rationality, and the relationship between science and religion.

Contemporary Palestinian politics is marked by paradoxical dynamics: while we observe an entrenchment of the colonial regime, division within the national movement, territorial and institutional fragmentation, and heightened authoritarianism, we also witness a growing reliance on international law, the language of rule of law, good governance, and human rights. This turn to law has prompted a sort of further legalization of Palestinian politics. From the perspective of the Palestinian Authority –a non-sovereign entity but highly legalistic in its actions- this shift is extremely clear, and it is best reflected now by the PA’s almost obsessive use of international law to frame Palestinian political claims. But also ordinary citizens are turning to law and increasingly bring -what they perceive as violations of their rights by Israel but also by the PA -to international legal organs or to the Palestinian constitutional court–albeit with meager results. Similar dynamics occur within Palestinian and pro-Palestinian social movements which persistently frame their political agenda within the language of law, particularly human rights and international law.

It is strange to see that Palestinians, who have witnessed their dispossession and colonization organized, reified, and embodied in law can place so much faith in legality to achieve liberation. This paper intends to engage with the Palestinian movement’s turn to law and its potential consequences for political emancipation by exploring questions such as: Should Palestinians embrace legalism as their only or their main strategy of struggle? By which logic our claim for the liberation of human subjects becomes a discursive strategy for legal recognition? How does legality constrains our political aspirations and makes us want what it promises but cannot deliver? How do law and its productive and legitimizing powers bring us to desire -with such a force- things (rights, institutions, regulations, statuses) that are not only different from our original political claims, but that very often subvert them?

This paper will critically look at legal activism and the limits of international law in emancipatory struggles by drawing parallels between Palestine and other contemporary struggles. The final objective isto continue a necessary debate on the paradoxes, ambiguities, and traps that law offers, so that our “strategies of emancipation” do not become “technologies of domination”.

This is the fourth workshop in the series “Theoretical and Methodological Advances in Studying Islam and Muslims in Canada”

As social scientists grapple with how to theorize and measure Islamophobia, Canada offers a unique site to address these questions. Canada has long been hailed as an exceptional country when integrating immigrants, yet researchers have documented a significant and salient increase in anti-Muslim violence. Therefore, this monthly workshop will create an opportunity for all interested in the topic to reflect on methodological design in how scholarship claims to investigate the social experiences and outcomes among Canadian Muslims.

“The Big Books” series is monthly reading group, led by IIS Post-Doctoral Fellow Youcef Soufi, that allows Islamic studies students to delve into influential texts of their discipline.

About this month’s reading:

In Muslim Becoming, Naveeda Khan challenges the claim that Pakistan’s relation to Islam is fragmented and problematic. Offering a radically different interpretation, Khan contends that Pakistan inherited an aspirational, always-becoming Islam, one with an open future and a tendency toward experimentation. For the individual, this aspirational tendency manifests in a continual striving to be a better Muslim. It is grounded in the thought of Muhammad Iqbal (1877–1938), the poet, philosopher, and politician considered the spiritual founder of Pakistan. Khan finds that Iqbal provided the philosophical basis for recasting Islam as an open religion with possible futures as yet unrealized, which he did in part through his engagement with the French philosopher Henri Bergson. Drawing on ethnographic research in the neighborhoods and mosques of Lahore and on readings of theological polemics, legal history, and Urdu literature, Khan points to striving throughout Pakistani society: in prayers and theological debates and in the building of mosques, readings of the Qur’an, and the undertaking of religious pilgrimages. At the same time, she emphasizes the streak of skepticism toward the practices of others that accompanies aspiration. She asks us to consider what is involved in affirming aspiration while acknowledging its capacity for violence.

This is the 5th workshop in the series Theoretical and Methodological Advances in Studying Islam and Muslims in Canada

As social scientists grapple with how to theorize and measure Islamophobia, Canada offers a unique site to address these questions. Canada has long been hailed as an exceptional country when integrating immigrants, yet researchers have documented a significant and salient increase in anti-Muslim violence. Therefore, this monthly workshop will create an opportunity for all interested in the topic to reflect on methodological design in how scholarship claims to investigate the social experiences and outcomes among Canadian Muslims.