Fifty years after Marshall Hodgson and the Idea of a Discernible Islamic Civilization

Symposium sponsored by the Abdallah S. Kamel Center for the Study of Islamic Law and Civilization

Yale Law School, Room 129

9:30 am – 12:00 pm
The interaction of Islam with other traditions, cultures, religions and civilizations

Ahmed El-Shamsy, University of Chicago
Concepts and their Consequences: Revisiting Hodgson’s Islam/Islamicate Distinction

Carole Hillenbrand, University of Edinburgh
‘The View from Above’: Muslim Perceptions of the Turks of Syria and the Jazira in the Period 1070 to 1176

Richard Bulliet, Columbia University
Critiquing Orientalism: Marshall Hodgson and Edward Said

Wael Hallaq, Columbia University
Hodgson’s Great Transmutation: Some Reflections on the Great Question

Moderator: Frank Griffel, Yale University

12:00 pm – 2:30 pm
Lunch and Keynote

David Nirenberg, University of Chicago
Hodgson’s “The Historian as Theologian”: A Manifesto on the Use and Abuse of History

2:30 pm – 5:00 pm
Is the distinction between a “core” and a “periphery” within Islam itself a useful idea or an obstacle to understanding?

Bruce Lawrence, Duke University
Hodgson on Core-Periphery: Some general reflections related to Shahab Ahmed and a post- Weberian view of the modern West

Kevin van Bladel, Yale University
The First Institution of Islamic Civilization: Chicago, 1956

Nile Green, UCLA
From ‘Persianate Zone’ to ‘Persianate World’: Thinking with Hodgson Fifty Years On

Richard Eaton, University of Arizona
Hodgson, Cores, and Modernity

Moderator: Hedayat Heikal, American University in Cairo

This symposium is free and open to the public. The papers to be discussed are to be read in advance as they will not be presented. Because they are drafts, they are not to be shared or published without the author’s express consent. To receive them, contact [email protected].