Rethinking Islam & the West: A New Narrative for the Age of Crises

Product Information

CIS Public Talks – Magnus Marsden on ‘ ‘Inter-Asia’ through Inland Eyes: Afghan Trading Networks across Land and Sea.‘ Don’t miss this thought-provoking panel discussion on the continued significance of the Caliphate in modern Muslim discourse. Although often viewed negatively in the West as an outdated institution, for Muslims, the end of the Ottoman Empire marked the end of the last Muslim Caliphate, and its legacy still holds a sense of nostalgia and romanticism. CIS-DHF Malabar series– Mohit Manohar on ‘ “A Victory Tower Built by a Slave”: The Chand Minar at Daulatabad‘

CIS Public Talks – Prof. Michael Cooperson on “ They cannot be imitated in English”: translating the Arabic Impostures of al-Hariri (d. 1122)’‘ Hussam R. Ahmed is a historian of the modern Middle East. He completed his Ph.D. at McGill University in 2018 focusing on the social and cultural history of modern Egypt. He then took up postdoctoral fellowships at KU Leuven and the University of Cambridge before joining the Department of History at the National University of Ireland, Maynooth as Assistant Professor.CIS Public Talks – Nadia Kamel discusses her book –‘ Al_Mawloudah’ with Prof. Khaled Fahmy and Dr. Hussam Ahmed CIS-DHF Malabar series– Katherine Kasdorf on ‘ Monumental Jinas and Networks of Prestige: Jain Temples of the Hoysala Capital’ With regards to Economics, then once again if we were to remove Religion from the equation, then we end up with intense societal equality, overarched by financial systems which embed people in debt and general oppression. It isn’t hard to see that this too is where we find ourself in the world today. Anand’s research and teaching focus on the religious and cultural traditions of South Asia, specializing in the anthropological study of contemporary Islam, Indian popular culture, and inter-religious relations between Muslims and Hindus. CIS Public Talks – Dr. Hussam Ahmed on “ The Last Nahdawi: Taha Hussein and Institution Building in Egypt’‘

Khaled Fahmy Professor Khaled Fahmy is the Director of the Centre of Islamic Studies, His Majesty Sultan Qaboos Bin Sa’id Professor of Modern Arabic Studies, and a Fellow of King’s College, Cambridge. CIS Public Talks – Dr. Edward Zychowicz-Coghill on “ Reconstructing the Earliest Islamic History Writing from the 2nd Hijrī Century: The Case of the First Arabic Annals’‘ A conference @CambridgeUniversity Sun, 3rd Nov, 2019. Organised by Cambridge University Islamic Society. Watch the videos from the conference below, featuring Imam Dawud Walid, Abdulhakim Murad (Tim Winter) and IHRC’s Arzu Merali. CIS Public Talks – Prof. Petra Sijpesteijn on “ Petitioning government officials in early Islamic Egypt’‘ Michael Cooperson teaches Arabic at the University of California, Los Angeles. He has published numerous studies of early Abbasid cultural history, including Classical Arabic Biography (2000) and Al-Ma’mun (2005). His translations from Arabic include The Life of Ibn Hanbal, by Ibn al-Jawzī (NYU Press 2017), and al-Hariri’s Impostures (NYU Press, 2020), which won the 2021 Sheikh Zayed Book Award in the translation category.Ahmed Paul Keeler refuses this question in his eye-opening new book ‘Rethinking Islam and the West: A New Narrative for the Age of Crises’. According to Keeler, the Islamic world has not “fallen behind”; rather the modern idea that human history is one of uninterrupted progress and development and that the Islamic world has fallen behind in recent times should be questioned and re-examined altogether. Keeler rejects the idea that the contemporary world represents the most “advanced” and magnificent phase of human history and that the success of cultures should be judged based on their resemblance to today’s “developed” Western world. According to him, the modern world represents a deviation in human history. With predatory capitalism, colonialism, obsessive consumerism, hedonistic individualism, and technological advancements that are ultimately irresponsible towards man and disrespectful of nature, the modern world has dragged humanity into a dead end, or ‘an age of crises’. A chance meeting with a master musician from India introduced him to a new cultural realm. In response, he formulated and organized The World of Islam Festival that took place in London in 1976, was opened by Her Majesty the Queen, and was the most comprehensive exposition of Islamic culture ever to have taken place in the West. Six months before the festival opened, he embraced Islam.