This talk will reflect on, and attempt to contextualize, the Gezi Park protests of May 2013. What does this decade of more or less global protest have to tell us about the place of sound, and the human voice, in protest and in public space more generally? The talk will look back at various highly iconic performative moments, soundscapes and songs associated with the Gezi Park protests, including Kardeş Türküler’s “Tencere Tava Havası”, the David Martello’s ‘piano recital’, and “Every Day I’m...

Considered the most mature and progressive art movement in the Arab world through most of the second half of the twentieth century, Iraqi art faced debilitating challenges through the sanctions of the 1990s and then the invasion of 2003. While the sanctions and wars changed the nature of Iraqi art, the 2003 invasion with its destruction of infrastructure had deeper and wider ramifications. This talk will review the development of modern art during the most optimistic period of Iraqi history...

Sami Shalom Chetrit, a renowned Moroccan-Israeli poet and activist, discuses his documentary on the award-winning Moroccan-Israeli poet Erez Bitton, the voice of Israel’s marginalized classes for decades.

The break-up of the Ottoman Empire produced massive migration waves in the Balkans. However, when the Muslim populations grew larger in some areas, migration to Turkey was rendered impossible, and these peoples were obliged to stay within the borders of new nation states. Today the Turks in Bulgaria, approximately one million people, are the largest Muslim minority in the Balkans. They have faced various stages of nation building and border changes, as well as war, ethnic cleansing,...

During the fall of al-Andalus (known to Christians as the reconquista) some of the first substantial Muslim populations came under permanent non-Muslim rule. For centuries, Muslims had lived alongside Jews and Christians who accepted a subordinate, dhimmī status. Christian conquest inverted this hierarchy and thus presented novel and difficult questions for Muslim jurists. Could Muslims accept minority status under Christian rule, or must they emigrate to Muslim-ruled territory? Scholars...

The sharp spike in the price of oil in the early 1970s provided petroleum-producing countries with enormous revenues--petrodollars--to invest in the global economy. By the second half of the decade, there was widespread fear in the United States that Arab governments, companies, and individuals were using their vast wealth the "buy up America." The Abscam affair of 1978-1980, in which FBI agents posing as rich Arabs induced several members of Congress to take bribes, reflected this anxiety...

In early 1990s, Turkey was the only Muslim country where a headscarf ban in schools, universities and public institutions took place. In the aftermath of 9/11, in Western countries pious Muslim women experienced a troubling exclusion from the public sphere in the name of secularism, democracy, liberalism, and women's rights. Meanwhile, domestic courts and international courts such as the European Court of Human Rights, are increasingly influenced by social pressures concerning immigration,...

Current global warming poses important but difficult questions for historians: How has climate changed, and what has is meant for previous societies? Can we gain insights about climate change vulnerabilities, adaptation, and resilience from the past? Fortunately, current climatology also offers new ways to reconstruct the weather and climate of previous centuries, offering a powerful tool for historians. This talk will explore the state of the field and prospects for a climate history of the...

Unlike other parts of the Middle East, the Iranian home as a storehouse of people’s belongings has not been paid the scholarly attention it deserves. This inattention is in part due to the inadequacy of the themes that have dominated the scholarship of modern Iranian history, which distracts from understanding transformations of everyday life. By contrast, this presentation shows how a substantial component of the modernization process in Iran advanced in the context of the home. In...

Between 1967 and 1975 the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) burst onto the world stage and transformed the contours of the Arab-Israeli dispute. By casting itself as a national liberation movement and forging ties to other revolutionary groups around the Third World, the PLO won international attention and diplomatic support. However, the PLO's political victories in the international arena ran headlong into U.S. and Israeli efforts to contain the revolutionary organization on the...

From furious reactions to the cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammad to the suppression of women, contemporary news from the Muslim world seems to beg the question: Is Islam compatible with freedom and democracy? With an eye sympathetic to both to Western liberalism and Islamic theology, Mustafa Akyol traced the ideological and historical roots of political Islam in his 2011 book Islam without Extremes: A Muslim Case for Liberty. Following the death of the Prophet Muhammad's in 632 AD, an...

Who are the Turks? The answer differs vastly, depending on whether we start from today's Turkey and look back, or whether we start with their origins in what is now Mongolia and look forward. Do the Turkish peoples even form a coherent category? The answer differs vastly, depending on whether we look at their languages (which are very much alike), environmental adaptations, religions, or physical features. (There is no determinant "racial" identity at all). What about their pre-modern history...

Since the summer of 2009 in Iran, and the Spring of 2011 in the Arab world, a succession of world historic events have radically altered the geopolitics of the region. How are the rise of the Green Movement in Iran and the revolutionary momentum code-named the Arab Spring connected, and what can we learn from the structural link between these two transformative events in the Arab and Muslim world? Hamid Dabashi is the Hagop Kevorkian Professor of Iranian Studies and Comparative Literature at...

This talk examines the life and work of Dinshah Irani, a prominent Parsi scholar, lawyer, and philanthropist who was a key intellectual intermediary between the Parsi community of Bombay and the intellectual community of Iranian nationalists during the 1920s and 1930s. Dr. Marashi details the role played by Irani in patronizing the publication of Zoroastrian-themed printed works in Bombay that were intended for export to the reading market in Iran, and the important role the Parsi community...

Critiques of neo-liberalism, authoritarianism, and military rule played an obvious role in the Egyptian revolution. This talk will examine an emerging urbanist agenda in Egypt which has been buoyed by the revolution's commitment to social justice and the desire to move beyond neo-liberalism and improve the built environment, enhance public services and democratize municipal politics. It will also explore the relevance of insights from other nations whose urban populations have increased...

Nasir al-Din Shah (r. 1848-1896), the longest reigning Qajar monarch traveled to Europe three times during his rule. While he was not the first monarch from the region to travel to Europe, he was the first to record each travel extensively in daily diaries that were made public shortly after. Until recently, these travelogues were dismissed by scholars for focusing on frivolous and repetitive information. This talk presents a new interpretation of Nasir al-Din Shah's extensive travel writing...

In the years 1921–1951, the Iraqi Jewish community thrived. Numbering around 150,000, this primarily urban community figured prominently in Iraq’s culture, literature and economy. Bashkin raises a few questions relating to the meanings of the Jewish sense of belonging to the Iraqi community through a reading of three poems written by Iraqi Jews. In doing so, I explore the ways in which Iraqi Jews wrote about modernity and secularism, and the manners in which their texts shed light on...

Prof. Crapanzano's paper is concerned with the role of narrative and silence in the passage of a wound – a trauma – from generation to generation. Specifically he looks at the way parental – in case in point, paternal – silence perpetuates the wound in children. Set stories, which inevitably lack particularity, seem incapable of “filling” that silence, fulfilling the children’s quest to know. They subsume what particulars are known in a generalized narrative that, repeated over and over...

Beginning in December 2010, the suicide of a Tunisian street vender ignited protests and uprisings that spread throughout the Arab world. James L. Gelvin, Professor of History at UCLA and author of The Arab Uprisings: What Everyone Needs to Know (Oxford University Press, 2012), looks back at the first year of those protests and uprisings, exploring their causes, their trajectories, and the lessons we might learn from them.

Clifford Geertz famously described law as a form of “local knowledge.” In this lecture Prof. Messick examines the Islamic Shari'a as it was manifested in a system of local texts. He refers to a corpus of written work produced by a particular community of Muslim jurists and practitioners. Yemen, mountainous and agrarian, provides the setting; the Zaydis, rooted there for over a thousand years, the juridical community. Although his research in highland Yemen has spanned the last several...

With the rise of the Arab Spring of 2011, Turkey has been identified by many analysts and activities within and outside of the Middle East as a potential model for post-revolutionary states. Turkey's position as a mediator between the west and the Islamic world appears to be more critical than at any point in recent history. Join us for a forum and discussion with prominent Turkish journalist Abdülhamit Bilici about Turkey's role in shaping the future of the Middle East. Abdülhamit Bilici is...