Chronicle, Autobiography, Fiction, and Art

Chronicle, Autobiography, Fiction, and Art: Islamic History as a Web of Associations

Shahzad Bashir
The Aga Khan University

Friday 19 September, 3-5PM, Bancroft Building 200B

For zoom registration: https://utoronto.zoom.us/meeting/register/BWDpxL5fQ2SlobWi3uAnkw

How to understand Islam as a historical phenomenon while accounting for its diversity and avoiding an approach so expansive it renders Islam unrecognizable to its practitioners? In A New Vision for Islamic Pasts and Futures, I have suggested that ‘dynamic nominalism,’ a concept introduced by Ian Hacking in a different context, as the optimal lens. This talk will describe this argument and use literary and materials sources to show how this view requires us to, first, break categorically from existing modern emplotments of Islamic history, and second, become hyper attuned to orders of time embedded within all evidence.

Shahzad Bashir is Dean of Aga Khan University’s Institute for the Study of Muslim Civilisations in London. His recent publications include the digital monograph A New Vision for Islamic Pasts and Futures (MIT Press, 2022) and The Market for Poetry in the Persian World (Cambridge, 2021). He is the editor of the Islamic Humanities series from the University of California Press. He specializes in the intellectual and social history of Iran and Central and South Asia from the late medieval period to the present.

co-sponsored by The Elahé Omidyar Mir-Djalali Institute of Iranian Studies

Michael E. Marmura Lecture Series in Arabic Studies | Department of Near & Middle Eastern Civilizations