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April 2022
Far from Mecca: Gender and the Performance of Piety in the Muslim Caribbean
Abstract: The changing norms of Muslim women’s dress and national participation are intersectionally gendered and racialized in the twenty-first-century Anglophone Caribbean, where nineteenth-century subcontinental Indian indentured labor, rather than translatlantic African slavery, has been more visibly linked to regional Islam. Gendered Muslim dress and cultural practices are framed as obstructing postcolonial creolization projects and demonstrating allegiance to a radicalized "global Islam", rather than to the Caribbean nation-state. Aliyah Khan is associate professor of English, and Afroamerican and African Studies,…
Find out more »Social Activism and Anti-Blasphemy Laws in Mauritania: the Mkhaitir Affair (2014-19)
The court case of Mohamed Mkhaitir, imprisoned in January 2014 and released in July 2019, caused considerable controversy in Mauritania and abroad. After a Facebook post critiquing the stratified social order among Mauritania’s Hassaniyya Arabic speakers that used examples from Islamic history, Mkhaitir was accused of apostasy and sentenced to death. This presentation focuses on the Mauritanian state’s efforts to reconcile its commitment to democratic values (central to its relations with key Western partners) and a complex sociopolitical hermeneutics based…
Find out more »January 2023
Shi’i Traditionalism in Modern South Asia
This online symposium will be held by UF's Center for Global Islamic Studies, organized by Dr. Ali Mian from the Department of Religion. Participating speakers include: Dr. Sajjad Rizvi from the University of Exeter; Dr. Mashal Saif from Clemson University; and Dr. Simon Wolfgang Fuchs from Albert-Ludwigs-Unviersität Freiburg
Find out more »February 2023
Queer Companions: Religion, Public Intimacy, and Saintly Affects in Pakistan
This online zoom lecture is organized by Dr. Ali Mian from the Center for Global Islamic Studies at UF. Dr. Omar Kasmani will be talking about his new book which features discussions on gender, queer, Islam, and many other topics in Pakistan. Dr. Omar Kasmani is a research associate at the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology at Freie Universität Berlin.
Find out more »Ritual, Power, and Modernity in Muslim South Asia
This online lecture will focus on how some South Asian Muslim thinkers conceptualized core Islamic rituals between the 18th and 20th centuries, presented by professor Muhammad Qasim Zaman from Princeton University.
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