This session offers a rich opportunity to engage with up-and-coming scholarship in the field, by showcasing the research of several doctoral candidates. Each graduate student will present on their dissertation project for five minutes followed by short responses from other panelists, and then open discussion among panelists and audience members.
My dissertation explores a widely popular yet overlooked transgressive subaltern tradition in contemporary Pakistan known as Faqiri. Faqiri emerges at the interstices of Sufi, Bhakti, and Yogic lifeworlds through the aporetic figure of the faqir. It absorbs that which is uneschewably contradictory to dominant religious and knowledge frameworks such as conservative piety or bourgeois rational knowledge. Malangs and faqirs fulfill the highest ideal of this tradition, rejecting hegemonic social norms, including the reproduction of wealth and family at the call of the divine or a saint, and performing an embodied critique of society’s hypocritical attachment to worldly wealth and performative piety by transgressing religious law and gender norms. What unites those “in Faqiri” – from low-caste Hindus to transgressive mystics to occult practitioners to peripatetic animal entertainers is a subaltern religious imagination that defies and exceed the state and the ruling class’s conceptions of “Islam” and “religion” and “Sufism”.
This paper examines the pivotal role of the School of Hilla (6th–8th century Hijri) in shaping Imāmi Shia charitable thought, focusing on Zakat and Khums. Set against the backdrop of Mongol rule, the school advanced crucial jurisprudential concepts, including ijtihad and the general appointment of jurists. Through the works of Al-Muhaqqiq al-Ḥillī and Al-Allāmah al-Ḥillī, the study explores how Shia scholars redefined the management of religious dues, transitioning from individual acts of charity to more institutionalized frameworks. Al-Muhaqqiq emphasized juristic authority over Khums and Zakat with a voluntary collection approach, while Al-Allāmah supported a more active clerical role. Through historical and textual analysis of primary sources, the research highlights the lasting impact of these debates on contemporary Shia charitable practices, shedding light on the evolution of religious philanthropy in Shia Islam and its relevance to modern discussions on clerical authority and state involvement.
In this interdisciplinary dissertation project, I take the Islamic idea of beauty (jamal) as starting point to reconceptualize Muslim subjectivity, studyng how Muslims in the Benelux are see(k)ing, aspiring to and actively pursuing beauty in their divine engagement and spiritual development. Writing an autoethnography in which I have been participating in covert prayer circles in the Netherlands and Belgium and conducting in-depth interviews with other fellow see(k)ers, I anchor the connection between the imaginative, the beautiful, and the ethical in this process. Accordingly, it is also through the vector of beauty that I attempt to situate and unpack the lived tradition that is Islam. Taking al Ghazali's virtue ethics and the work of his contemporary “successor” Abdurrahman Taha as starting point for this reconceptualization of Muslim subjectivity, I aim to ultimately contribute usefully to discussions pertaining to the epistemic diversity in the study of Islam and Muslims in Europe.
Graduate Student Session: American Islamic schools have been under criticism that their students learn to show primary allegiance to their ‘countries of origin’ and to the Islamic faith instead of the U.S. constitution. However, based on the few empirical research conducted so far, civic engagement is higher among the graduates of these schools compared to their public counterparts. To explore the pedagogical details of how such an outcome is accomplished, I conducted a case study research at a Chicago based Islamic school. I collected photos, curricula, lesson plans, did classroom observations and ran interviews with the school staff. I discovered that learning of history, social studies, language arts, sciences, and religious studies had a combined American and Islamic influences. Civic awareness with a primary sense of self as Muslims within the American context was the intended outcome because their Islamic faith mandated allegiance to the authority they lived under.
This paper explores the intersection of religion and politics during the emergence of Bangladesh with a special focus on Maulana Abdul Hamid Khan Bhashani (1880-1976). Bhashani was a Sufi saint and peasant leader who throughout his life fought for the causes of toiling masses and oppressed peasants and was known as the “prophet of violence”, “Red Maulana” and “Fire-eater Maulana”. Though intellectuals and political commentators from Bangladesh have written volumes on him, there is a paucity of scholarly work that focuses on his religio-political philosophy, without which, one can only see the tip of the iceberg, hence, it will bring a hollow interpretation. This paper scrutinizes the core religious philosophy of Maulana Bhashani, which shaped his anti-colonial and emancipatory politics. Simultaneously this paper argues that Bhashani’s politics derived from the philosophy of Rububiyah (Divine Providence) and a hermeneutic engagement with the concept (Rububiyah), we will be able to understand how religion became a central domain for the emancipation of the oppressed.
This dissertation investigates the development of the social roles of Muslim Palestinian scholars (ulama) and their intellectual tendencies during the 19th century. It begins with an examination of Palestinian society in the first half of the 19th century and continues in the second half with the introduction of Ottoman reform (Tanzimat) and intensive interaction with European modernity. By integrating the Palestinian experience into the historiography of Islamic reform, traditionalism, and Arab nationalism, this project seeks to expand the scope of modern Arab and Islamic intellectual and social history.