Everlasting Doubt: Uncertainty in Islamic Representations of the Past

Monday, April 3, 2017 - 4:00pm
Rm 101 See map
81 Wall Street,
New Haven, CT 06511

The final meeting of the Yale Seminar in Religious Studies will take place next week, on Monday April 34-5:30pm. Location: 81 Wall Street, Room 101. (Note: this is the location we have used for most of the YSRS meetings this year but it is not the place noted on the original poster.)

 

Our visitor will be Shahzad Bashir, Lysbeth Warren Anderson Professor in Islamic Studies in the Department of Religious Studies at Stanford University. Professor Bashir received his Ph.D from Yale in 1998, and is the author of Messianic Hopes and Mystical Visions: The Nurbakhshiya Between Medieval and Modern Islam (Columbia 2003), Fazlallah Astarabadi and the Hurufis (Oxford 2005), and Sufi Bodies: Religion and Society in Medieval Islam (Columbia 2011), among other publications. He has a particular interest in the intellectual and social histories of Persianate societies of Iran and Central and South Asia circa fourteenth century CE to the present, and his published work is concerned with the study of Sufism and Shi’ism, messianic movements originating in Islamic contexts, representation of corporeality in hagiographic texts and Persian miniature paintings, religious developments during the Timurid and Safavid periods, and modern transformations of Islamic societies.

 

The paper he shares with us is a forthcoming article entitled “Everlasting Doubt: Uncertainty in Islamic Representations of the Past.” The article is part of a special issue of Archiv für Religionsgeschichte on “Creating Religion Through Historiography,” and is a wide-ranging engagement with issues in the history of religions, making central a variety of Islamic positions on the past and raising fundamental questions to the study of religion and history more broadly.