Tuesday 26 Jan 2016 - 12:04 Makkah mean time-16-4-1437
Left to Right: 2015-16 Andrew W. Mellon John E. Sawyer Seminar co-directors David Wasserstein, Samira Sheikh and Tony K. Stewart. Image from (Vanderbilt University)
Tennessee, USA (IINA) - Juan Cole, a historian and prominent blogger on the Middle East, will lead off a Vanderbilt University series of public talks on Islam on Wednesday at 4:10 p.m. in the Kissam Center, Room 216, Vanderbilt University News reported.
Cole, the Richard P. Mitchell Collegiate Professor of History at the University of Michigan, will discuss “Iran in Syria: Ideology or Pragmatism?”
Cole runs the blog Informed Comment: Thoughts on the Middle East, History and Religion. He lived in various areas of the Muslim world for nearly 10 years and continues to travel there. He is a frequent commentator on topics that include al-Qaeda and the Taliban, the Iraq War, the politics of Pakistan and Afghanistan, and Iranian domestic struggles and foreign affairs. Cole’s books include The New Arabs: How the Millennial Generation is Changing the Middle East (Simon & Schuster, June 2014) and Engaging the Muslim World (Palgrave Macmillan, March 2009, rev. 2010).
The five talks in this series are being held in conjunction with the 2015-16 Andrew W. Mellon John E. Sawyer Seminar, “Where the Fringe Dwarfs the Center: Vernacular Islam Beyond the Arab World.” Faculty members across a wide variety of academic disciplines have been meeting weekly at the Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanities on the Vanderbilt campus.
Samira Sheikh, associate professor of history and a seminar co-director, said that Vanderbilt has a significant number of scholars who study Islam in many different parts of the world. “We wanted to bring together interested faculty, graduate students and outside experts to think about the relationship between what we call the fringe—the vast majority of Muslims who live outside the Arabic-speaking countries and the smaller-populated so-called center of Islam.
Sheikh noted that the largest number of Muslims live in India, Pakistan and Indonesia. In addition, Nigeria is the African nation with the largest number of Muslims. “Most Muslims don’t speak Arabic and don’t live in Arab countries,” she said. “One of the issues that we are exploring is the relationship of these Muslims with the so-called ‘center,’ or at least what some scholars and believers consider the ‘center’ of Islam to be.”
Naveeda Khan, associate professor of anthropology at Johns Hopkins University, will speak at 4:10 p.m. on Feb. 3 in Buttrick Hall, Room 123. She is the author of Muslim Becoming: Aspiration and Skepticism in Pakistan (Duke University Press and Orient Blackswan India, 2012). She also served as editor for Beyond Crisis: Re-evaluating Pakistan (Routledge India/UK, 2010), a book that brought together 19 rising scholars of Pakistan within the social sciences and humanities to explore what it is to live with or refuse the designation of crisis.
Moses Ochonu, a professor of history at Vanderbilt, will discuss “Boko Haram and Radical Islamism in the West African Sahel.
Brian Larkin, the Tow Associate Professor for Distinguished Scholars at Barnard College and an expert on ethnography and history of media in Nigeria, will speak March 16 at 4:10 p.m.
Faisal Devji, the University Reader in Modern South Asian History at the University of Oxford, will speak April 13 on “ISIS.
Members of the Sawyer Seminar took part in a panel discussion called “Understanding Islam” during last fall’s Southern Festival of Books. In addition, faculty members have given talks at the Frist Center for the Visual Arts in conjunction with an exhibition of Islamic art from the Boston Museum of Fine Arts.
SM/IINA
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