Thirteenth Conference of the School of Abbasid Studies

Tuesday July 12 – Friday July 15, 2016
Leiden University, The Netherlands

Universiteit LeidenUniversiteit Leiden

Participants

Camilla Adang; Hussain Alqarni; Lale Behzadi; David Bennett; Monique Bernards; Hans Hinrich Biesterfeldt; Antoine Borrut; Julia Bray; Jelle Bruning; Michael Cooperson; Beatrice Gruendler; Simon Gundelfinger; Avraham Hakim; Stefan Heidemann; Matthew Keegan; Hugh Kennedy; Alexander Key; Pamela Klasová; James Montgomery; Karen Moukheiber; Suleiman Mourad; Pernilla Myrne; John Nawas; Bilal Orfali; Letizia Osti; Chafika Ouail; Hans Peter Pökel; Dwight Reynolds; Ignacio Sánchez; Sarah Savant; Emily Selove; Petra Sijpesteijn; Shawkat Toorawa; Deborah Tor; Isabel Toral-Niehoff; John Turner; Uwe Vagelpohl; Maaike van Berkel; Josef van Ess; Geert Jan van Gelder; Kathy van Vliet; James Weaver; Peter Webb; Mohsen Zakeri.

Programme

Love and the intolerable (chaired by Letizia Osti)
Mohsen Zakeri Athqalū min wāshin ʿalā ʿāshiqi: Heavier than a slanderer on a lover”: The thuqalāʾ, “the insufferable,” vs. the ẓurafāʾ, “the raffiné”
Pernilla Myrne Experts in intimacy: Female characters in fourth/tenth century erotic stories
Discussion Geert Jan van Gelder
Fiction (chaired by Emily Selove)
Matthew Keegan Abbasid theories of fictive experience and the reception of al-Ḥarīrī’s exordium
Isabel Toral-Niehoff A case study in Begriffsgeschichte: The term adab as used in the ʿIqd al-Farīd
Discussion Shawkat Toorawa
The Ineffable (chaired by John Nawas)
ChafikaOuail Al-Niffarī’s mawqif: Between the “Sacred Valley” and the “Lote Tree of Boundary”
Lale Behzadi How to cope with disaster: The language of emotion in al-faraj baʿd al-shidda texts
Discussion Julia Bray
Administration (chaired by Petra Sijpesteijn)
Stefan Heidemann Administration of the empire – The integration of the empire under the Ṭāhirids
Simon Gundelfinger Geographical and administrative structures in Abbasid al-Shām: A Historical conceptualization
Discussion Maaike van Berkel
Beginning and end (chaired by John Nawas)
Peter Webb Muḥammad and al-Jāhiliyya: Pre-Islam in Prophetic ḥadīth
Deborah Tor The political revival of the Abbasid caliphate: The reign of al-Muqtafī (530-555/1136-1160)
Discussion Avraham Hakim
Alterity (chaired by Monique Bernards)
Peter Pökel How to talk about “Religion”? Third/ninth-century writers on the hermeneutics of Holy Scriptures
Alexander Key Late Abbasid Perseo-Arabica: Fifth/eleventh-century theories of translation
Discussion Suleiman Mourad
Poetry (chaired by Shawkat Toorawa)
Hussain Alqarni Naqāʾiḍ Poetry in the Post-Umayyad Era
Bilal Orfali Walking in the steps of poets: Courtly themes in early Sufism
Discussion Beatrice Gruendler
Sciences (chaired by Ignacio Sánchez)
James Weaver The place of the “foreign sciences” in al-Maqdisī’s The Book of the Beginning and History
David Bennett The sixth sense and the limits of perception in pre-Ashʿarite kalām
Discussion Hans Hinrich Biesterfeldt
Song (chaired by Monique Bernards)
Dwight Reynolds Song and punishment, or, the perils of performance
Karen Moukheiber Slavery, gender and music in Kitāb al-Aghānī: Revisiting the cultural boundaries of women musicians in medieval Islam
Discussion Camilla Adang
Memory (chaired by John Turner)
Pamela Klasová Remembering the Umayyads in the Abbasid era: The case al-Ḥajjāj b. Yūsuf al-Thaqafī in the seventh/twelfth-century Tārīkh madīnat Dimashq by Ibn ʿAsākir
Antoine Borrut Forgetting al-Khwārizmī’s History
Discussion Sarah Savant
Writing the Abbasids (chaired by Hugh Kennedy)
Monique Bernards, Michael Cooperson, John Nawas, Letizia Osti, Shawkat Toorawa, and James Weaver
General meeting (chaired by Hugh Kennedy)
Business and Where to …?