Humanities and Social Sciences Colloquium

The nature of pre-modern Islamic sources lend themselves particularly well to the study of the professional mobility of the scholars (ulama) and literati. This is best achieved through the genre of ‘biographical dictionaries’ (tabaqat) often authored by the scholars to document thousands of individual stories of success and failure from within their own social-cum-cultural group. A close examination of this biographical literature – produced between 900 and 1700 in the region spanning from Delhi to Granada- shows that professional mobility should be considered a defining characteristic of pre-modern Islamic societies. In the first part of this talk, I will introduce a collaborative research project that achieved exactly that. A principal aim of this project was to understand whether entry into this group was relatively accessible and depended on personal scholarly accomplishment, and whether other considerations like cultural or geographical origin played a role. A second aim was to get a fresh and cross-regional assessment of the influence of social networks and, in some cases, adherence to certain families and legal schools, on the professional mobility of the scholars and advancement opportunities within this group for religious, judicial, administrative, and political appointments. A third aim was to study how and why the scholarly elite increasingly succeeded in monopolising religious, judicial, and administrative appointments from the 11th to the 18th century. In the second part of this talk and as a case study, I will address the interrelatedness between professional mobility and the production of Islamic political thought. I will look at the career of Ibn Ṭalḥa (d. 652/1254) – a judge, jurist, diplomat, Sufi, occultist, and Vizier- and examine how his professional mobility shaped his political ideas and the stylistic features of his treatise The unique necklace for a content king and its original and eclectic style. 

Commentator: Shuang Wen

14:00-15:00, Room 1150

This is a past event.

Moderated by Aner Barzilay

The Second World War was one of the most disorienting events in history. Millions of people were killed, displaced and drafted, and the geopolitical balance shifted to a bipolar world led by two formerly isolationist powers – the United States and the Soviet Union. These states raised massive armies virtually overnight to wage this war and relied on particular institutions – the chaplaincy in the US Army and the Communist Party in the Red Army – to both make sense of the conflict and serve the spiritual needs of their newly minted citizen-soldiers, who had been ripped from their communities to conduct total war. This talk will examine how those institutions functioned on a day to day level, focusing on the pastoral work of chaplains in the US Army and political workers in the Red Army during the war.  I will argue that despite tremendous differences in these societies and institutions, parsons and partorgs were mobilized to serve the same needs – to explain the meaning and stakes of the war, to raise morale, to keep soldiers moral and to provide solace and spiritual growth during the conflict. 

Commentator: Aleksandar Stojanović 

14:00-15:00, Room 1150

Zoom Registration; In-person RSVP (limited seats)

Moderated by  Aner Barzilay

A few days into the quarantines that ushered in the Year of the Rat, printed QR codes began to appear everywhere in Shanghai. This was the beginning of a QR code health registration scheme, developed by China’s two tech giants in partnership with the government, that was used to manage population during the Coronavirus pandemic.  Register and you were given a colored QR code that was based on cell phone signal tracking, which could be scanned before entering subways, shopping malls, and tourist sites. A green code meant access to the city was open, yellow and movement was much more circumscribed. With a red code the metropolis was locked, there was no choice but to stay inside.

Ubiquitous QR codes are not new to China’s urban landscape. Starting around 2015 these simple black and white images, complex enough to encode characters, but cheap and easy to produce, merged with China’s two QR driven platforms Wechat and Alipay. The synthesis of QR codes and cell phones created a virtual economy based on mobile-payments that has totally transformed city life.  More than texting or talking, watching, listening or wayfinding, today, in China at least, QR codes are the cell phone’s killer app. Urban residents use them to rent bikes, umbrellas and cell phone chargers, and pay at restaurants and market places.  Now even offering incense to the Buddha at Shanghai’s Jing’An temple is only possible by scanning a QR code.

This essay explores the machinic assemblage of cell phones + QR Codes which opens a portal into an emerging mediasphere that is fundamentally nonanthropomorphic in nature. Scanning a QR code is an embodied practice or sensing system that activates an all-pervasive locative media, transforming the previously inert physical landscape into the urban scale, distributed intelligence of the sentient city.

Commentator(s): Weixian Pan

Zoom; In-person RSVP (limited seats)

Moderated by Aner Barzilay

Sūrat Yūsuf (Qur’ān 12) strikingly announces itself as the “best of stories” and relates the travel, trial and ultimate triumph experienced by Yūsuf, son of the Prophet Ya’qūb, during his own ascent to prophethood. The story closes with an equally striking but elusive remark concerning the sūra’s lesson for the people of spiritual insight. Owing to this, and to the undeniable appeal of Yūsuf himself--who is given the divine gift of great beauty and great interpretive power as the mark of his prophecy—Sūrat Yūsuf distinguished itself for heightened interpretive attention. In this talk, I will argue that the work of interpreting the sūra and locating its lesson was not conducted solely by tradition-bound Qur’ānic commentators, but that the story of Yūsuf prompted a profound creative investment taken up by pre-modern Muslim exegetes, theologians, mystics, linguists, romance writers, and miniature painters alike, all eager to elaborate on the lesson of the Qurʾān’s best of stories in imaginative and insightful terms. This resulted in the creation of a collective story of its own: deeply revelatory of the Qurʾān’s ongoing generative and creative impact in works of human authorship, highly diverse in genre and content, and circulated in pre-modern Muslim centers of learning amongst literate and lay people alike. I will also spend some time explaining the ways in which the effort to approach "the best of stories" for its special lesson continues to the present day in the contemporary spheres of television, cinema, fiction, and other popular media.

Commentator: Megan Herrold 

Zoom; In-person RSVP (limited seats)

Moderated by Lala Zuo

Developing Religion is an ethnographic study of religious intermediaries in participatory development projects in rural Tanzania. Since 1990s, the Tanzanian government and international NGOs have shown great interest in recruiting religious leaders as local implementers for health projects in rural areas. Recent shifts in global development embracing participatory approaches, which use individuals with local expertise and social capital to implement projects, have partly fueled this demand. In Tanzania, many of the development projects I studied used the shehe, a Muslim religious leader, to achieve their goals. However, in the rural settings where I carried out my research, the shehe did not readily exist. If there were no shehe as imagined by the project, what did they do to find them? What rural individuals and figures suddenly become legible figures in NGOs recruitment? In turn, what manner and for what ends did these potential candidates enter this new relationship with health NGOs? My book shows health NGOs did not simply employ religious leaders rather they had to invent “shehes” from a diverse range of other Muslims figures such as herbalists, marriage counsellors and Quran teachers. Such misrecognition was common in international development projects, and led to tensions on the ground in Tanzania, but many project-defined shehes also used this misrecognition to their advantage, leveraging their new status and its associated resources to advance their careers. 

Commentator: Jackie Armijo

Zoom; In-person RSVP (limited seats)

Moderated by Aner Barzilay

In 1831, a cyclone tore across Cuttack, a coastal district in the modern Indian state of Odisha. Sea water broke embankments and flooded rice paddies and saltworks. Countless heads of cattle were destroyed and upwards of 22,000 people died during the disaster and its aftermath. The following year Henry Ricketts, a revenue collector employed by the East India Company (EIC), submitted a report detailing the long-term impact of the cyclone on agrarian production and, therefore, tax collection. Ricketts’ report is surprisingly human-centric; rather than recommending technical solutions such as sea walls or embankments to prevent future cyclone damage, it instead concentrates on changing the behavior of the landholding zamindars to lessen the vulnerabilities of the peasant farmers, or raiyats. 

Because of this focus, Ricketts’ report prefigures the contemporary discipline of disaster studies, which has long stated that “natural” disasters are not natural, but rather a combination of hazard and vulnerability. Therefore, the material impact of a hazard such as a cyclone or earthquake is better predicted by the social, economic, political, or geographical vulnerabilities of a community rather than the ferocity of the initial hazard event. Such vulnerability-based analysis can also highlight priorities and hierarchies of a community, particularly in the immediacy of disaster response.

By reading Ricketts’ report as an analysis of vulnerability, we can see the utter dependence the EIC had on the raiyats to sustain their system of taxation and conquest. He emphasizes that, without the raiyats’ labor, the zamindars would abandon their tax obligations to the Company. He then recommends that the EIC wield the promise of tax remission as a disciplinary tool to ensure that the zamindars support their raiyats until new crops are harvested. Though the foundational principle of the EIC’s system of taxation was an annual, permanently-fixed revenue obligation, when faced with the material environmental conditions created by the cyclone they abandoned it to keep the raiyats on the land. 

Commentator(s): Yifei Li

Zoom; In-person RSVP (limited seats)

Moderated by Aner Barzilay