Global Muslim Encounters: Homogenisation and Diversity across Time and Space

Description

Registration for the conference is now closed.

 

Convenors 

Amira Bennison (University of Cambridge)

Simon Wolfgang Fuchs (University of Cambridge)

Helen Pfeifer (University of Cambridge)

 

Summary

The 20th century is often seen as a period of increasing homogenisation within Islam. The attempted codification of Islamic law by various nation states as well as the rise of Salafism are often cited as symptoms of such a streamlining trend. Yet, narratives of ‘puritanical’ forms of Islam spread by Saudi Arabia or ‘revolutionary’ modes of thought exported by Iran do not capture the local dynamics by which Muslim individuals, groups, and societies have always negotiated religious change. Even our age of globalisation witnesses fundamental disagreements about how to live a proper Muslim life, how to implement Islamic law or how to structure society in accordance with religious precepts. Such debates and frictions are only likely to intensify in the light of increasing migration, mobility, and interactions of Muslims from various linguistic and regional backgrounds.

Although modern technologies have made it easier for Muslims to travel and communicate across large distances, the tension between universal aspiration and local practice are not new. Since the early Islamic period, the faithful sought to systematise the religion as it entered regions with wildly varying ethnic, intellectual and spiritual landscapes. In the early modern era, Islamic states and pietistic movements used new means both to differentiate themselves from others and encourage homogeneity within particular groups.

 

Aim of the Conference

This two-day interdisciplinary conference aims to compare and connect such encounters as they occurred in various spatial and temporal settings since ca. 1250. Bringing together historians, art historians, anthropologists, political scientists, and scholars of comparative literature and Islamic studies who work on Islamic communities all across the globe, our aim is to analyse how Muslim travellers, scholars, state officials and migrant workers made sense of radically different forms of practical piety and religious thought they encountered while being on the move. How did they justify the seemingly incoherent appearance of the Muslim umma? How did they draw boundaries between ‘orthodoxy’ and ‘heresy’? What kinds of tools did the Islamic tradition offer for understanding human diversity? What was the impact of more peripheral settings of the Islamic world, and how did anxieties of Muslims based in the ‘centres’ of political and religious power play out when being confronted with unexpected forms of Islam? To what extent did travel and encounter encourage homogenisation within the Islamic community, and to what extent did it breed polarisation?

By placing such processes within a broader historical perspective, this conference aims to examine the meta-narratives of Islamic history, evaluating the usefulness of concepts like globalisation, modernity and orthodoxy in understanding the diversity and endurance of the Islamic project.

 

Sponsors

            

Supported by the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (CRASSH), the Cambridge Inter-faith Programme, the Centre for History and Economics at the University of Cambridge, Christ's College, the HRH Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Centre of Islamic Studies, the Smuts Fund, the George Macaulay Trevelyan Fund, and the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies.

 

Administrative assistance: events@crassh.cam.ac.uk