Harvard Islamica Podcast

Dr. Shiraz Hajiani's research contributes to the scant scholarship on the early Nizari Ismaili community. After a succession crisis in the Fatimid Empire in 1095 divided the Ismailis, the community in Iran accepted the crown-prince, Nizar, as the legitimate Imam and successor to the Imam-Caliph al-Mustanṣir and established a polity in Iran at the fortress of Alamut. While the Nizaris, in Shiraz's view, did not write history qua history, he utilizes of a handful of Nizari doctrinal treatises such as the Ḥikāyat-i Sayyid Nāṣir-i Khusraw and Ilkhanid-era chronicles written by Sunni court-historians hostile toward the Nizaris to shed light on the founder of the polity at Alamut, Ḥasan-i Sabbāḥ, the event of the Qiyāma declared by Ḥasan ʿalā dhikrihiʾl-salām in 1164, and the Nizaris' relations with the Saljuqs and Mongols. Through his novel reading of the limited sources and use of the digital humanities, Shiraz uncovers important developments in the early history of this Shiʿī community usually relegated to a subaltern status in scholarship despite its important role in Islamicate intellectual and political history.

Dr. Shiraz Hajiani is Alwaleed Bin Talal Postdoctoral Fellow at Harvard University and Research Associate in Transcendence and Transformation at the Center for the Study of World Religions at Harvard Divinity School. He earned his PhD in Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago in 2019. His forthcoming book is The Life and Times of Our Master: A Biography of Ḥasan-i Sabbāḥ. More information about Shiraz’s work can be found at his website, islamicate.net.

Credits and transcript: islamicstudies.harvard.edu/ep-15-reconstructing-alamut-shiraz-hajiani

In this episode, we leave Harvard and Cambridge to explore the little-known history of immigration from the former Ottoman Empire to Boston in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. While completing their PhDs at Boston University and Harvard, Dr. Lydia Harrington and Dr. Chloe Bordewich began to research the history of the neighborhood in today's Chinatown and South End once known as Little Syria. Through the study of property maps, newspapers, oral history interviews, and immigration records, Chloe and Lydia have uncovered the story of this diasporic community from today’s Syria and Lebanon and added both to our understanding of Ottoman immigration to the United States and the history of Boston. The resulting public history project now includes walking tours of Little Syria, an article in both English and Arabic, an exhibit, and a digital humanities project.

EVENT: The Massachusetts Historical Society will be holding a hybrid event, "Wandering Little Syria" on Wednesday, April 19, 2023 at 6:00-7:00pm. Learn more and register to attend!

EXHIBIT: The "Visualizing Little Syria" exhibit is on display at the Massachusetts Historical Society (1154 Boylston Street, Boston, MA 02215) between April 8 to April 20. Visit the exhibit!

Dr. Lydia Harrington is Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture at MIT. She earned her PhD in the History of Art and Architecture at Boston University.

Dr. Chloe Bordewich is Public History Postdoctoral Associate at the Boston University Center for Antiracist Research. She earned her PhD in history and Middle Eastern studies at Harvard University.

Learn more:

Boston Little Syria Project

"Boston's Little Syria: The Rise and Fall of a Diasporic Neighborhood" by Chloe Bordewich and Lydia Harrington in al-Jumhuriya

Anton Abdelahad

Credits, transcript, and photos: islamicstudies.harvard.edu/ep-14-boston-little-syria

Dr. Janan Delgado is the winner of the 2022 Alwaleed Bin Talal Dissertation Prize in Islamic Studies for her dissertation entitled, "The Ties That Bind: Child Custody in Andalusī Mālikism, 3rd/9th to 6th/12th c." While scholars of Islamic law have produced numerous studies on marriage and divorce in recent decades, the topic of ḥaḍāna, or child custody, has received scant scholarly attention until now. In this longitudinal study of Mālikī legal texts including the Muwaṭṭaʾ of Mālik b. Anas, Mudawwana of Saḥnūn, Kitāb al-kāfī of Ibn ʿAbd al-Barr, Bayān wa-l-taḥṣīl and the Muqaddimāt of Ibn Rushd al-Jadd, and fatāwā, Janan uncovers fascinating legal and social history of family dynamics in al-Andalus. Her analysis reveals the jursts' notions of womanhood, motherhood, fatherhood, step-fatherhood, and childhood and shows subtle shifts that occurred over time, including how the Mālikī jurists responded to intellectual, political, and social challenges.

Dr. Janan Delgado is a scholar of Islamic law. She holds a master's degree in Middle Eastern studies from New York University and a Ph.D. in the Study of Religion from Harvard University.

Credits and transcript: islamicstudies.harvard.edu/ep-13-ties-bind-child-custody-andalusi-malikism

Professor Leila Ahmed's book, Women and Gender in Islam: Historical Roots of a Modern Debate (1992) was published in a time in which there was little scholarship on the history of women in Islam. Over the years, it became a classic and was re-published in 2021 with a new foreword by Professor Kecia Ali, who has used it in her own scholarship and also consistently in her teaching. In this episode, we talk to both scholars about Professor Ahmed's scholarship and the study of women and gender within Islamic studies, how far the field has come, and the work still ahead.

Leila Ahmed is Victor S. Thomas Research Professor of Divinity at Harvard Divinity School. She came to Harvard as the Divinity School's first Professor of Women's Studies in Religion in 1999 and became Victor S. Thomas Professor of Divinity in 2003. She is the author of many publications including Edward William Lane: A Study of His Life and Work and of British Ideas of the Middle East in the Nineteenth Century (1978), Women and Gender in Islam: Historical Roots of a Modern Debate (1992), A Border Passage: From Cairo to America - A Woman's Journey (2000), and A Quiet Revolution: The Resurgence of the Veil from the Middle East to America (2011).

Kecia Ali is Professor of Religion at Boston University, where her research and teaching focus on Islamic law, women and gender, ethics, and biography. Her most recent book is the open-access edited volume Tying the Knot: A Feminist/Womanist Guide to Muslim Marriage in America. Twitter: @kecia_ali

Credits and transcript: islamicstudies.harvard.edu/ep-12-revisiting-women-and-gender-islam-leila-ahmed-and-kecia-ali

The Alwaleed Program team speaks with András Riedlmayer, former Aga Khan Bibliographer of Islamic Art and Architecture at Harvard's Fine Arts Library, about his career as a librarian, the development of the field of the history of Islamic art and architecture, and how his passion for cultural heritage preservation took him from working in Harvard's libraries to conducting field research in the war-torn streets of Kosovo and Bosnia and testifying as an expert witness for the UN war crimes tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in The Hague and the International Court of Justice (ICJ), even being interrogated by the former Serbian President, Slobodan Milošević, himself.

András Riedlmayer, scholar of Ottoman studies, writer, and editor, served as the Aga Khan Bibliographer of Islamic Art and Architecture at Harvard’s Fine Arts Library from 1985 until his retirement in 2020. In that time, András built up the Fine Arts Library’s collection, which has become North America’s largest collection of materials on the art and architecture of the Islamic world. He has served as an invaluable resource for Islamic studies researchers at Harvard and beyond and a collaborator in the production of Muqarnas: An Annual on the Visual cultures of the Islamic World, published by the Aga Khan Program for Islamic Art and Architecture at Harvard. In addition to his work at Harvard, András distinguished himself as a cultural heritage historian on the Ottoman-era Balkans, documenting the destruction of cultural monuments, libraries, and archives in the wars and ethnic cleansing that took place in Bosnia and Kosovo in the 1990s. In 2018, the Middle East Librarians Association granted András the David H. Partington award for his “contributions to the field of Middle East librarianship, librarianship in general, and the world of scholarship.”

Credits, transcript, and resources: islamicstudies.harvard.edu/ep-11-preserving-islamicate-cultural-heritage

In this episode, we discuss the new edited volume, Islamic Scholarship in Africa: New Directions and Global Contexts, with its editor, Professor Ousmane Kane, and his colleague, Dr. Ebrima Sall, who wrote the conclusion. This volume is the product of two conferences convened at Harvard by Professor Kane in 2017 on "Texts, Knowledge, and Practice: The Meaning of Scholarship in Muslim Africa" and "New Directions in the Study of Islamic Scholarship in Africa" that brought together scholars of diverse disciplines from around the world to explore the understudied tradition of Arabo-Islamic scholarship in Africa. Professor Kane and Dr. Sall talk about what led them to want to bridge the divides between different knowledge traditions and comment on the contributions of 19 scholars to this volume on themes that include Islamic scholarly networks, textuality and orality in Islamic scholarship, the transformation of Islamic education in Africa, and the role of 'Ajami and Sufism in the transmission of Islamic knowledge in the region.

Ousmane Kane is Prince Alwaleed bin Talal Professor of Islamic Religion and Society at Harvard Divinity School and Professor of African and African American Studies at Harvard University.

Ebrima Sall is the executive director of Trust Africa and former executive secretary of the Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa (CODESRIA).

Credits and transcript: islamicstudies.harvard.edu/ep-10-islamic-scholarship-africa-ousmane-kane-and-ebrima-sall

The Alwaleed Program team speaks with Dr. Rushain Abbasi, winner of the 2021 Alwaleed bin Talal Prize for Best Dissertation in Islamic Studies for his dissertation entitled, "Beyond the Realm of Religion: The Idea of the Secular in Premodern Islam." In this study, Rushain challenges the prevailing view that maintains that premodern Muslims did not distinguish between the religious and the secular and that this distinction only emerged with the invention of these categories in the modern, post-Enlightenment West. His longue durée study demonstrates how numerous Muslim thinkers from the medieval to early modern period (1000-1750) regularly differentiated between the religious and the secular in subjects ranging from politics to prophethood. Furthermore, Rushain constructs a radically different conception of secularity that, far from being opposed to the religious, was based on a desire to bring religion to its best and fullest expression.

Rushain Abbasi recently completed his Ph.D. at Harvard University in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations. In 2021-22, he is a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Humanities and Lecturer in the Department of Religious Studies at Stanford University. Twitter: @AbbasiRushain

Credits and transcript: islamicstudies.harvard.edu/ep-9-beyond-realm-religion-idea-secular-premodern-islam-dr-rushain-abbasi

The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic raised questions about how the health crisis, government-imposed lockdowns, and economic recession would affect religious faith and behavior. While many social scientists expected it to strengthen religiosity as people turned to their faith for comfort in a time of need, others suspected a religious recession could result from the limitations on communal religious activity. In this episode, we speak with three political scientists, Tarek Masoud, A. Kadir Yildirim, and Peter Mandaville, about their new study of religious behavior following the pandemic in the Muslim-majority countries of Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Pakistan, and Indonesia in November and December of 2020.

Tarek Masoud is Faculty Director of the Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Islamic Studies Program at Harvard University, Professor of Public Policy, and Sultan Qaboos bin Said of Oman Professor of International Relations at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government.

A. Kadir Yildirim is Fellow at Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy. Twitter: @akyildirim

Peter Mandaville is Professor of International Affairs at George Mason University’s Schar School of Policy and Government. Twitter: @pmandaville

Credits and transcript: islamicstudies.harvard.edu/ep-8-pandemic-religious-behavior-muslim-world-tarek-masoud-kadir-yildirim-and-peter

In spring 2021, Hassaan Shahawy (A.B. '16, J.D. '22) was elected the 135th president of the Harvard Law Review, making him the first Muslim and first expert in Islamic law in the position. In the first half of our conversation, Hassaan talks about his background in Islamic law and how it contributes to his studies at Harvard Law School and work at the Harvard Law Review. He also shares his interests in broader social issues such as criminal justice reform and refugee issues. In the second half, we discuss Hassaan's Ph.D. dissertation entitled, "How Subjectivity Became Wrong: Early Hanafism and the Scandal of Istiḥsān in the Formative Period of Islamic Law (750-1000 CE)." Hassaan talks about how his interest in modern Islamic legal debates led him to research how early Muslim jurists dealt with political, economic, and social change; specifically, the use of istiḥsān, juristic preference (literally, “to seek what is good”), in the Hanafi school of law and the subsequent controversy around the use of subjectivity to depart from more conventional legal reasoning.

Hassaan Shahawy is a second-year law student at Harvard Law School and president of the Harvard Law Review. He graduated from Harvard College in 2016, where he studied history and Near Eastern studies, and went on to study at the University of Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, where he earned his master's and Ph.D. in Islamic law.

Credits and transcript: islamicstudies.harvard.edu/ep-7-seeking-what-good-dr-hassaan-shahawy

Professor Ali Asani tells the Alwaleed Program team about his scholarly trajectory, beginning with his experiences coming to Harvard College as an international student from Kenya and entering Islamic studies as an Ismaili student in the early 1970s. He also discusses the importance of expanding perspectives in Islamic studies to include different interpretations of Islam, his interest in studying Islam as a living tradition in the lives of ordinary believers, especially through the arts, and his commitment to education beyond the walls of the university. Given Professor Asani's interest in the experience of Islam through the sound arts, this episode contains selections from Qur'anic recitation, qawwali, and the ginans, the devotional hymns of South Asia’s Nizari Ismaili communities.

Ali Asani is Murray A. Albertson Professor of Middle Eastern Studies Professor of Indo-Muslim and Islamic Religion and Cultures. He is also former director of the Alwaleed Islamic Studies Program at Harvard University.

Credits and transcript: islamicstudies.harvard.edu/ep-6-giving-voice-to-silenced-islams-ali-asani