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New Approaches to Media and Methods in Islamic Studies

Submitted to Program Units
1: Study of Islam Unit

Digital humanities is playing an increasingly important role in religious studies. This panel advances this methodological agenda in Islamic studies in particular, by helping us envision possibilities of how new media and computer-based technologies can be understood and utilized in the field. The papers theorize new media in insightful ways, model novel methodologies in the study of Muslim communities and traditions, and reflect on the use of digital tools in our pedagogy and scholarship. 

Elliott Bazzano, Le Moyne College, Presiding

Abstract for Online Program Book (maximum 150 words)

Digital humanities is playing an increasingly important role in religious studies. This panel advances this methodological agenda in Islamic studies in particular, by helping us envision possibilities of how new media and computer-based technologies can be understood and utilized in the field. The papers theorize new media in insightful ways, model novel methodologies in the study of Muslim communities and traditions, and reflect on the use of digital tools in our pedagogy and scholarship. 

Papers

  • Mairaj Syed,
    Mariam Sheibani,

    Mut'a in the formation of sectarian identity, law, and morality: a digital humanities approach

    Abstract

    Our study explores the role of temporary marriage (mutʿa) in the development of sectarian identities and the intersection of law and morality in early Islamic law. Through digital humanities techniques, we construct a corpus from hundreds of hadiths to examine the debate over mutʿa’s legitimacy. Analyzing the hadiths' geographic spread and the sectarian affiliations of their transmitters, we highlight mutʿa's influence on sectarian identity formation and the jurisprudential tensions between law and morality in early Islam. This research showcases the value of digital humanities in historical Islamic law and hadith analysis.

  • Ariela Marcus-Sells, Elon University

    Teaching "A New Vision" for Islamic Studies

    Abstract

    My paper argues that Shahzad Bashir’s new, all-digital book A New Vision for Islamic Pasts and Futures offers an alternative to the typical timeline of Islam presented in undergraduate survey courses. Accessibly written, the book invites scholars and students to think of Islamic history as a web, through which different people along different paths which intersect through various thematic, narrative, and material “nodes.” In Fall 2023, I redesigned my introductory survey course, “Islamic Traditions” around Bashir’s A New Vision. The course follows a “choose-your-own-adventure” format in which students collectively select each section of the book that we read as a group. The paper draws on my experience as an instructor and student survey responses to demonstrate that it is possible to introduce students to the study of Islam without flattening the complexity of Islamic historical thinking and that doing so can increase student excitement about, and engagement in, our courses.

  • Ian VanderMeulen, New York University

    Traces of the Shaykh’s Ear: Islamic Teaching Certificates as Premodern “Sound Media”

    Abstract

    This paper mobilizes premodern textual artifacts relevant to the tradition Islamic sciences of Qur’an recitation (tajwid and the qira’at) as a means to theorize “sound media” from an Islamic perspective. It begins by noting the foreshadowing of modern recording technologies in the spiral shape of the late premodern Moroccan Sultan Sulayman’s sanad, or scholarly genealogy, in the recitational sciences. But it focuses, analytically, on the traditional teaching certificates, or ijazas, or Moroccan reciters in the generations leading up to Sulayman’s era. Such documents include increasingly detailed descriptions by the ijaza author of his student’s ijaza-earning recitational performance, known as a khatma, linked, textually, to a longer genealogy of practice represented by the sanad. I argue that such ijazas thus functioned as “sound media” that are both similar to, and more expansive than, modern technologies, preserving not just a “record” of a single performance but an entire history of practice.

  • Max Dugan, University of Pennsylvania

    Muslim Geographies of Consumption in Philadelphia

    Abstract

    Drawing on geographic approaches to urban consumption, this paper conceptualizes Muslim geographies of consumption in Philadelphia. Based on twelve months of ethnographic research and digital mapping of halal businesses, I make two central claims: (1) there are multiple concentrations of halal consumption in the city that are racially, socio-economically, and devotionally distinctive; (2) in addition to Islamic institutions, these concentrations of halal consumption take shape in relation to gentrification, infrastructure, and urban renewal. I focus on two geographies of consumption in Philadelphia—one in West Philadelphia and one in North Philadelphia—as case studies of infrastructure's and urban renewal's effects on halal consumption. Ultimately, this paper demonstrates that attention to the everyday urban process that shape Islamic tradition clarifies the anti-Black and capital-driven forces that constrain the enactment of Islamic tradition in Philadelphia, as well as the ways that Muslim sustain devotional practices and forge convivialities across difference.

Audiovisual Requirements

Resources

LCD Projector and Screen
Play Audio from Laptop Computer
Podium microphone

Comments

I need to update my institutional affiliation. My current title and affiliation is: Junior Research Fellow, Crown Center for Middle East Studies, Brandeis University

Full Papers Available

No
Program Unit Options

Session Length

90 Minutes

Schedule Preference

Sunday, 5:00 PM - 6:30 PM

Tags

#pedagogy #teaching #learning #orientalism #theory #islam