Re-Orienting Orientalism, Reforming Modernity and Towards an Ethics of the New Human

Date: Saturday 22 – Sunday 23, January 2022
Time: 10am – 5pm (Saturday) and 10am – 12 Noon (Sunday)

In this weekend course, Professor Hallaq will be build upon The Impossible State (2013), Restating Orientalism (2108), and Reforming Modernity: Ethics and the New Human in the Philosophy of Abdurrahman Taha (2019). He will expand on his ethics-grounded critiques of epistemology and reflections and propose a new future of possibilities for humanity as well as how Islamic Studies could also be taught.

Professor Wael B. Hallaq is one of the world’s leading academics on Islamic law and Islamic intellectual history. His work has been translated into several languages, including Arabic, Hebrew, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Persian, and Turkish. He is currently the Avalon Foundation Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University at the Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies. His teaching and research deal with the problematic epistemic ruptures generated by the onset of modernity and the socio-politico-historical forces subsumed by it; with the intellectual history of Orientalism and the repercussions of Orientalist paradigms in later scholarship and in Islamic legal studies as a whole; and with the synchronic and diachronic development of Islamic traditions of logic, legal theory, and substantive law and the interdependent systems within these traditions. Hallaq’s writings have explored the structural dynamics of legal change in pre-modern law, and have recently been examining the centrality of moral theory to understanding the history of Islamic law and modern political movements. He is the author of more than sixty scholarly articles, and his books include Ibn Taymiyya Against the Greek Logicians (Oxford, 1993); A History of Islamic Legal Theories: An Introduction to Sunni Usul al-fiqh (Cambridge, 1997); Authority, Continuity and Change in Islamic Law (Cambridge, 2001), to name a few. His Shari’a: Theory, Practice, Transformations (Cambridge, 2009) examines the doctrines and practices of Islamic law within the context of its history, from its beginnings in seventh-century Arabia to the present. His latest work, The Impossible State: Islam, Politics, and Modernity’s Moral Predicament (Columbia University Press, 2013), has won Columbia University Press’s Distinguished Book Award for 2013-2015. For more information about him and publications, please visit: www.columbia.edu/cu/mesaas/faculty/directory/hallaq.html

Dr. Ovamir Anjum is the Imam Khattab Endowed Chair of Islamic Studies at the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies at the University of Toledo. His work focuses on the nexus of theology, ethics, politics and law in Islam, with comparative interest in Western Thought. Trained as a historian, his work is essentially interdisciplinary, drawing on the fields of classical Islamic studies, political philosophy, and cultural anthropology. He obtained his Ph.D. in Islamic Intellectual history in the Department of History, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Masters in Social Sciences from the University of Chicago, and Masters in Computer Science and Bachelors in Nuclear Engineering and Physics from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Before higher education, his Islamic training began at home while growing up in Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and the United States with a broad range of scholars including his remarkable grandmother, and continued as he studied fiqh with South Asian Ḥanafī and Ahl-e-hadīs scholars and usūl al-fiqh and qirā’āt of the Quran with scholars from Egypt’s Al-Azhar and Syria. He is the author of Politics, Law and Community in Islamic Thought: The Taymiyyan Moment (Cambridge University Press, 2012). He has translated Madarij al-Salikin (Ranks of Divine Seekers, Brill 2020) by Ibn al-Qayyim (d. 1351), one of the greatest Islamic spiritual classics, which upon completion will be the largest single-author English translation of an Arabic text. His current projects include a survey of Islamic history and a monograph on Islamic political thought.

Open to the general public and intermediate and advanced students of Islamic Sciences, Islamic Studies, post-graduates and academics.

Those who follow his works and have read his books and related.