Hi friends!
A (much) belated congratulations to the new Chair of Urdu Language and Culture, Dr. Pasha M. Khan. Dr. Khan began in the Institute of Islamic Studies last year and has quickly risen ranks!
If you haven’t, be sure to take a read through Dr. Khan’s impressive PhD dissertation entitled “The Broken Spell: The Romance Genre in Late Mughal India.” Or his essay on “The Lament for Delhi ( Fughan-i Dihli).”
Congratulations, Dr. Khan.
The Open Access (OA) movement, which has been on-going for some time now, promotes resources that have no access limitations for anyone and encourages authors to publish in freely available resources. For the Middle East and Islamic Studies, AMIR has been collecting OA journals for the past few years.
There are a number of fantastic OA resources for the study of Islam and the Middle East, some of which are in print while others offer lectures and podcasts.
A highly valuable lecture series and pertinent one for the IIS & ISL community, in particular is the History of Philosophy (HoP) podcasts from King’s College, London. HoP covers the Classical age, Later Antiquity and the Islamic World striving to seamless illustrate the evolution of ideas in different eras, epochs and religious vantage points. The Islamic World covers the idea of falsafah (philosophy) before moving on to some of the great proponents of philosophy in the Islamic World, e.g. al-Kindī, al-Fārābī and others. Each episode lasts for about 20-30 minutes and offers a bibliography of core texts.
Another lecture based series, and still in its nascent stage is the History of Iran podcast. Founded earlier this year (2013) by Dr. Khodadad Rezakhani (UCLA, 2011), he is currently a Research Officer on Islamic Central and West Asia at the London School of Economics. This podcast “is dedicated to the history of the lands of Iran, in its broadest, pre-modern nation-state sense. It will not be straight political history and will include many episodes on aspects of social, economic, cultural, and artistic history.” To date there are four episodes though it is updated with a new episode every week.
Yale University has a number of series and lectures available for free. Included amongst these are some 20 lectures pertaining to different aspects of the Islamicate, Islam or the Middle East. Each one of these lectures is roughly 40-45 minutes and includes an assignment and often a mini-syllabus.
iTunes U offers a many freely accessible resources. One has to register with iTunes U but after that a number of valuable resources are available. A particularly delightful feature of iTunesU are the language courses, check out the Arabic one. These are great for the multi-tasker in you!
Finally, a very general resource of OA materials spanning multiple disciplines is Open Culture. There are countless resources available to the researcher from language classes to ebooks to short essays of interesting facts such as the last, known, hand-written newspaper Musalman.
Three additional resources for you to check out:
This is not meant to be an exhaustive list but rather to peek your interest in some of the freely available resources.
Hi friends! Another one the brilliant IIS’s students recently gave a lecture entitled “Historical Memory, Piety, and Politics: ‘Sectarianization’ of Syria’s Civil War.” The lecture was given at George Mason University in Washington. Enjoy!
Hi friends! As summer begins to wind down it seemed appropriate to announce a new subject guide dedicated to South Asian studies. The guide was specifically designed for students studying Islam in South Asia though is a good starting point for students of South Asian studies in general.
If you have any questions or suggestions, please send them along!
Hi friends! If you missed the beautiful exhibition, curated by Adam Gacek you now have the opportunity to view the accompanying catalogue: Strokes and Hairlines. Enjoy!!
A colleague reminded me the other day of predatory journals. These types of journals look to take advantage of new scholars looking to publish. They are difficult to detect and, well who doesn’t like receiving an email offering to publish a presentation. Luckily, Jeffrey Beall has amassed Criteria for Determining Predatory Open-Access Publishers. Please have a read through from time to time and ahead of submitting to a journal you are unfamiliar with.
Sources for further reading:
Scholarly Open Access Critical analysis of scholarly open-access publishing (Jeffrey Beall blog)
Research Intelligence – ‘Predators’ who lurk in plain cite (THE)
Hi friends!
Recently, Dr. Robert Wisnovsky of the IIS of McGill was promoted to full professor and has also been appointed to a James McGill professorship. This is of course wonderful news and a much deserved recognition for his individual achievements, but it also is an important milestone for the Institute for which we can all be proud.
In related news, Dr. Wisnovsky was recently interviewed by the Montreal newspaper, Le Devoir: Humanités 2.0 – Le zéro et l’infini McGill numérise la science et la philosophie islamiques.
In addition, Dr. Wisnovsky has an article in the forthcoming Cambridge University Press publication entitled Interpreting Avicenna Critical Essays.
Many congratulations, Dr. Wisnovsky!
Hi friends!
The recent uprisings in Gezi Park have peeked people’s interest in Turkey and the various uprisings across the Middle East, particularly those of the 2011 Arab Spring. Our colleague, John Eilts at Stanford University wrote an informative post on sources on and about Gezi. And our friend Rifat Bali of Libra Books has listed the following websites and resources:
http://taksimdayanisma.org/?lang=en
http://www.geziparki.org/english/
https://www.facebook.com/geziparkidirenisi
http://www.geziparkiguncesi.com/#
http://revoltinturkey.tumblr.com/
http://resisttaksim.blogspot.com/?zx=3f097ebe37b5a5dc
http://occupygezipics.tumblr.com/
http://occupygezi.blogspot.com/
However, most interesting (to me!) is today’s al-Jazeera photo essay “In Pictures: The Taksim Square Book Club” which depicts numerous people reading in the park. And a couple of weeks ago the Turkish newspaper, Hurriyet, had an article on “Publishing houses to unite in Gezi Park to distribute major resistance material: Books.”
For those curious to read more about reading habits and the evolution of reading in Ottoman Turkey and the early Republic take a look at:
Şahbaz, Namık Kemal. 2009. Türkiye’de ilkokuma ve yazma öğretiminin tarihsel gelişimi. Ankara: MEB.
Fortna, Benjamin C. 2011. Learning to read in the late Ottoman Empire and the early Turkish republic. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan.
Hi friends! Arabic calligraphy is one of the finest arts of Islamic culture. The illustrious Dr. Annemarie Schimmel noted calligraphy to be “an art which can be called without exaggeration the ‘quintessential’ art of Islam” (Schimmel in Highlights of Persian art. Richard Ettinghausen; Ehsan Yar-Shater, eds. 1979).
McGill is fortunate to have several hundred calligraphy specimens, including 200 in Arabic alone. This particular calligraphy piece is a Ḥadīth. Unfortunately the calligrapher did not autograph the work but we may guess that this is a later calligraphy piece, perhaps 18th-19th century. An interpretation of this particular Ḥadīth was recently commented on in al-ahram (Egypt).
The ISL, itself holds a number of pertinent resources in Arabic, English and other languages on Ḥadīth. One may find these through searching WorldCat using “su: hadith” (su stands for subject as in subject heading) to guide your search.
Enjoy!
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