Arabic Pasts: Histories and Historiography 2015

Friday 25 September

9:30 – 10:45 Session 1: Sultan

Chair: James McDougall, Trinity College/Oxford

Welcome

“The Use of the Term ‘Sultan’ in Some Tenth-century Arabic Texts”

Hugh Kennedy, SOAS, University of London

“ Narrating Sultanship: Perspectives on the Narrative Construction of Sultanic Biographies from The Early Mamluk Period”

Gowaart Van Den Bossche, Ghent University

10:45 – 11:15 Coffee

11:15 – 12:30 Session 2: Legend

Chair: Konrad Hirschler, SOAS, University of London

“ Islamic Prophetic Legend and the Prophetic Königsnovelle in Egyptian Popular Epic”

Helen Blatherwick, SOAS, University of London

“ The Adventures of the courageous prince Aʿbd-al-Raḥmān in the Far West. Some remarks about historical legends and their meaning’

Isabel Toral-Niehoff, Georg-August-Universität Göttingen

12:30 – 13:30 Lunch

13:30 – 15:30 Session 3: Networks and Intertextuality

Chair: Sarah Bowen Savant, Aga Khan University, ISMC

“ Writing a Network, Constructing a Tradition: Ibadi Intellectual Networks in 11th century North Africa and Beyond”

Paul Love, University of Michigan

“ The Taʾ rīḫ al-islām of al-Ḏahabī (d. 748/1347 CE): Computational Exploration of the Life-Cycle of a 50-Volume Arabic Chronicle-cum-Biographical Collection”

Maxim Romanov, Tufts University/Universität Leipzig

“ Intertextual Interconnections: the Case of the Ilkhanid Mamluk Historiography”

Hadi Jorati, The Ohio State University

Friday 25 and Saturday 26 September 2015Venue: Aga Khan University, Institute for the Study of Muslim Civilisations

210 Euston Road, London, NW1 2DA

(International) in the United Kingdom

Institute for the Study of Muslim Civilisations

15:30 – 16:00 Afternoon tea

16:00 – 18:00 Session 4: Shaping the Past

Chair: Antoine Borrut, University of Maryland

“‘What went wrong’ in ‘other times’”

Letizia Osti, Università degli Studi di Milano

“Penning the Foundations: The Shaping of Fatimid Historiography”

Shainool Jiwa, Institute of Ismaili Studies

“The Fifteenth-Century Debate on History in Arabic and Persian”

Christopher Markiewicz, University of Chicago

Saturday 26 September

9:30 – 10:45 Session 1: Theology

Chair: David Bennett, University of Gothenburg

“ Do Theologians Make Good Historians? On the construction of the Islamic past in the doxographies of the classical period”

James Weaver, Universität Zürich

“Theology meets Historiography – Ibn Kaṯīr and his al-Bidāya wa-n-nihāya”Mohammad Gharaibeh and Annemarie Schimmel Kolleg, Bonn University

10:45 – 11:15 Coffee

11:15 - 12:30 Session 2: Voices in History

Chair: Hugh Kennedy, SOAS, University of London

“ Asserting a Shī‘ī ī past in the history of songs: the Kitāb al-Aghānī and its authorial voice”

Su I-Wen, University of Edinburgh

“ The Remembered Imam: Mūsā al-Kāẓim and the Role of Rhetoric in Early Muslim Historical Writing”

Najam Haider, Barnard College/Columbia University

For catering purposes, if you would like to attend please email one of the following:

Sarah Bowen Savant sarah.savant@aku.edu

Konrad Hirschler kh20@soas.ac.uk

Hugh Kennedy hk1@soas.ac.uk

James McDougall james.mcdougall@trinity.ox.ac.uk