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Between Borders: Theorizing Boundaries of Category and Space

Submitted to Program Units
1: Study of Islam Unit

Shankar Nair, University of Virginia, Presiding

Abstract for Online Program Book (maximum 150 words)

Borders and boundaries are essential mechanisms through which our social world is constituted. The papers in this panel contribute to a robust theorization of borders and boundaries in Islamic studies, through an array of rich and multi-layered case-studies exploring a complex intersection of boundaries: from the cosmological (boundaries between this world and the next, the living and the dead) to geographic and political boundaries of space (national and civilizational borders), as well as boundaries of religious and sectarian lines, gendered and sexual difference, and conceptual categories such as the religious and secular.

Papers

  • Timothy Gutmann, University of Southern Mississippi

    Cosmopolitan Reflections: Critique and Imperial Afterlives in the British Museum’s Islamic Gallery

    Abstract

    Since 2018, the Albukhary Foundation Gallery of the Islamic World has invited visitors to the British Museum to experience its treasures and reflect on their histories. The British Museum, and others like the Metropolitan, have turned to border-crossing ideas such as “Islamic art” to style themselves as keepers of shared humanity’s shared heritage. Such moves have provoked scholars critically museums’ reception and retention of the material inheritance of empire. In this paper, I argue that while the Islamic Gallery and similar spaces do serve a vital part in the 21st-century imaginary of the “universal museum,” they should not be simply understood as imperial treasure-troves rebranded as liberal institutions. Through its decolonial co-determination and self-critical representation, the Islamic Gallery rather serves as instruction to visitors in how to be reflective cosmopolitans, disquieted by, and yet at home in, a persistently unequal world.

  • Kecia Ali, Boston University

    Corpses and Kinship in Islamic Jurisprudence: Relating to the Dead

    Abstract

    This paper uses formative and classical Muslim legal sources about who can wash whose corpse to investigate a series of questions about bodies, kinship, and the regulation of sex and gender. Juristic discussions about ghusl al-mayyit, the washing of bodies prior to burial, reveal assumptions about what sort of relationships survive death—for instance, in the question of whether a widower can wash the body of the woman who was, when she lived, his wife. Of the many issues that arise in dealing with the newly dead, the jurists focus only on a small subset. Situating this inquiry within a larger scholarly conversation about how Muslim legal and ethical discourses seek to regulate and manage difference, vulnerability, and hierarchy, I argue that early and classical jurisprudential agreements and disagreements over washing corpses reveal both shared norms and differing priorities between and among jurists about how to relate to the dead.

  • Sam Houston, Stetson University

    Interfaith Solidarity at the Border: Ritual, the Border Mosque/Church, and the _Barzakh_ Moral Imagination

    Abstract

    In this presentation, I explore the role of ritual in the interfaith and binational efforts of the “Border Mosque” and “Border Church” in San Diego and Tijuana to express and enact a solidarity with victims of unjust and exploitative immigration systems and practices. The ritual performances by both groups not only served to cultivate solidarities across religious, racial, and national lines; they also functioned as a form of “prefigurative politics” foreshadowing a world free of xenophobia and militarized borders. I unpack the moral imagination cultivated by these performances by drawing on the Qur’anic concept of the _barzakh_ to capture a discursive space which _both_ divides _and_ connects and thus opens up ways of conceiving the self and other that neither presuppose stark opposition nor collapse difference in the name of a liberal modernity. Consequently, a _barzakh_ moral imagination offers promising insights into how we might understand solidarity.

  • Arthur Schechter, Independent Scholar

    Thinking More Historically about Islam and Violence? A Case Study of the Early Safavid Dynasty

    Abstract

    This paper challenges widespread assumptions about the role of violence in establishing Twelver Shiʿism as Iran’s official religion, by presenting the first systematic overview in scholarship of the early Safavid dynasty’s Sufi teachings (until 1524) and thereby refuting common claims of its supporters’ uniquely “militant” or “extremist” Shiʿite beliefs.  Considered alongside centuries of precedent in military activities by similar nomadic groups, I show that the Safavids’ use of violence was neither particularly exceptional nor inherently “religious,” offering a less sensational interpretation of their armed enforcement of public Shiʿism better contextualized by their history.  Responding to Smith, Asad, Cavanaugh and others, my analysis suggests that a limited rehabilitation of Hodgson’s concept of the “secular” in Islamic history, particularly related to military and administrative practices, may advance more historically grounded theorizations of violence and sectarianism in Islam capable of continued growth in responsiveness to contemporary concerns without being artificially constrained by them.

Audiovisual Requirements

Resources

LCD Projector and Screen

Full Papers Available

No
Program Unit Options

Session Length

90 Minutes

Schedule Preference

Sunday, 3:00 PM - 4:30 PM
Schedule Info

Monday, 3:00 PM - 4:30 PM

Tags

#museums
#islamicart
#materialculture
#postcolonialtheory
Shiism
Islam and violence
Sectarianism
Iran
revolution
Sufism
barzakh
borders
#Death

Session Identifier

A25-330