Institute of Islamic Studies

Amir Hussain received his PhD from UofT’s Centre for the Study of Religion with a dissertation on Muslim communities in Toronto. He returns to UofT as Professor of Theological Studies at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles. The author or editor of six books and over 60 scholarly articles and book chapters, from 2011 to 2015 he was the editor of the Journal of the American Academy of Religion. Amir will lead a lunchtime conversation about scholarly publishing, discussing what editors are looking for in journal articles and book proposals. Amir is also the editor in chief of the new Oxford Encyclopedia of Islam in North America. He’ll discuss that project and consult with students about its design and content. This is a great opportunity to help shape a major new resource in the study of Islam.

This talk explores the role of medieval Islamic visual illustrations in the making of a modern Arab art tradition. The Iraqi artist Jawad Salim encountered Yahya al-Wasiti’s medieval illustrations of al-Hariri’s maqamat for the first time in Paris at the Bibliothèque national de France, an experience he described in his diaries as being formative to the development of his own modern visual style. Yet the mobilization and migration of this medieval pictorial style was mediated through a range of modern discourses, both political and artistic. This talk will focus on one aspect of Salim’s moment of “awakening” in his encounter with al-Wasiti’s illustrations—the appropriate use of local colour suited to an emerging Iraqi national art tradition.

The chapter to be discussed is an outtake from a monograph-in-progress on dragomans (diplomatic interpreters) in early modern Istanbul. It considers how dragomans mediated Ottoman language ideologies to a nascent European discipline of Orientalism, and, more specifically, how they helped institutionalize Ottoman Studies in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. The chapter traces dragomans’ substantial output of Ottoman-language grammars, dictionaries, lexicons and vocabularies, and contrasts it with that of other professional groups, particularly seminary-trained missionaries and university-trained philologists. It teases out dragomans’ unique contributions to enduring Ottoman language ideologies, including the elevation of Ottoman Turkish to the trifecta of the “three learned languages” of Islam, and the naturalization of Istanbulite courtly registers of the language as particularly pure and authoritative. It then shows how dragomans’ unique mode of language acquisition through immersive apprenticeship—rooted in Istanbulite diplomacy—eventually became an important aspect of foreign language pedagogy more broadly.