Monday 15th – Tuesday 16th April 2019 

Teaching and Learning Building, University Park, University of Nottingham, NG7 2RD

REGISTRATION FOR BRAIS 2019 IS NOW OPEN. CLICK HERE TO REGISTER.

PROVISIONAL PROGRAMME

All panels and plenaries will take place in the Teaching and Learning Building, University Park, University of Nottingham, NG7 2RD

Sunday 14^th April

15:00 – 23:30 Arrival and Registration (arrivals after 23:30 must inform the conference organizers three days in advance)

Monday 15^th April

9:30 – 9:45 Words of Welcome

9:45 – 11:00 Plenary

Khaled Fahmy (Cambridge University), ‘Implementing Shari’a in Modern Egypt: A Medical Perspective’

11:00 – 11:30 Coffee/Tea

11:30 – 13:00 Panel Session 1

1. Emigration: Conceptualising hijra from the Qur’an to medieval Islamic thought

Chair: Saqib Hussain (University of Oxford)

Saqib Hussain (University of Oxford) Displacement and Punishment: hijra and militancy as components of the Qur’an’s punishment stories

Hasher Nisar (University of Oxford) Exploring the Concept of hijra in Qur’anic Commentaries

Nabeelah Jaffer (University of Oxford) The Estranged Emigrant: Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya’s engagement with hijra and ghurba

2. Contemporary Muslim Societies in the Middle East and Asia

Chair: Dietrich Reetz (Berlin Graduate School of Muslim Cultures and Societies)

Murad Ismayilov (University of Cambridge) State-Society Relations & the Changing Landscape of Political Islam in Azerbaijan

Corina Lozovan (Lund University) Religion in a landscape of change: the role of Ibadi-Islam in contemporary Omani society

Geoffrey Nash (SOAS) Women madrasa students access to mainstream university education in India

Wikke Jansen (Berlin Graduate School of Muslim Cultures and Societies) Negotiations with the Prophet Lūṭ: Alternative Muslim Scholarship on Sexuality and Gender in Indonesia

3. Medieval Muslim Societies

Philip Grant (University of Edinburgh) Neither free markets nor state intervention: economics and al-sulṭān in the high Abbasid period

Yossef Rapoport (Queen Mary University of London) City plans in medieval Islam

Sara Mohanna (SOAS) Nasrid Granada Based on the Testimony of Ibn al-Khaṭīb’s (d.1374) al-Iḥāṭā fī Akhbār Gharnāṭa

Lubaaba Al-Azami (University of Liverpool) Princess Power: Imperial Formation and the Mughal Zenana

4. Classical Islamic Theology and Philosophy

David Bennett (Göteborgs Universitet) Sense Perception in early Kalām

Alaa Murad (Brandeis University) Aberration in Ibn Ḥazm’s al-Fiṣal

Hannah Erlwein (LMU Munich) The Function of the sharīʿa in Ibn Sīnā’s Political Thought

Fuga Kimura (University of Tokyo) Comparative Study between al-Ghazālī and Maimonides: their theory about obligation of repentance to God based on human free will

5. Issues in European Islam

Ima Sri Rahmani (Université Catholique de Louvain) What is wrong with a headscarf in a court room?

Glen Moran (University of Birmingham) Harun Yahya and the “rise in Islamic creationism”

6. Early Islamic Law

Salman Younas (University of Oxford) Istiḥsān in the Early Ḥanafī School

Hassaan Shahawy (University of Oxford) Subjective Legal Reasoning in the Formative Period: An Empirical Anatomy of al-Shaybānī’s Aṣl

Mohammad-Payam Saadat-Sarmadi (University of Exeter) Qiyās upon Qiyās: al-Shāfiʿī’s analogical arguments for analogy and their reception

Youcef Soufi (University of British Columbia) The Rise of the Munāẓara in Classical Islamic Legal Thought

13:00 – 14:00 Lunch

14:00 – 15:30 Panel Session 2

1. Clerical Networks, Discourses and the State in Modern Twelver Shi’ism

 Chair: Oliver Scharbrodt (University of Birmingham)

Mohammad Mesbahi (The Islamic College) An assessment of the collective leadership of Maraje Thalath

Christopher Pooya (University of Birmingham) Motahari and the Consequences of Instrumental Reason: State, Social Justice, and Fitrah

Oliver Scharbrodt (University of Birmingham) Modernising clerical authority in Twelver Shiism: consultation (shura), clerics, and the state

Yousif Al-Hilli (University of Birmingham) The political influence of the Najafi Marja’iyya in contemporary Iraq:  the role of Friday midday prayer sermons in 2014

2. Islam and Society in Britain I

Basma Elshayyal (Warwick University) The phone’s your dunya, the mushaf’s your akhira”: the impact of Qur’anic study on Young British Muslim Women

Fella Lahmar (Markfield Institute of Higher Education) Practising Islam, Fundamental British Values and Muslim schooling

Musleh Faradhi (Markfield Institute of Higher Education) The application of Fiqh al-Aqalliyyat in British Islamic Schooling

3. Sunni Law School Dynamics in History

Elias Saba (Grinnell College) Coherence from Disagreement: Disputations and Distinctions in Early Islamic Law

Mohammed Al Dhfar (University of Nottingham) Al-Subkī on how the beginning of the month of Dhū al-Ḥijja should be determined

Mustafa Baig (University of Exeter) Living in non-Muslim Lands: Maliki legal positions in Almoravid Spain

Farah El-Sharif (Harvard University) The Salafi Sūfis of 19th Century West and North Africa

4. Early Islamic History and Literature

Mohammad Ghandehari (University of Tehran) Sulaym b. Qays al-Hilālī or Abū Sadiq al-Azdī?: The question of authorship for the oldest surviving Shī‘ite book

Nuha Alshaar (The Institute of Ismaili Studies/American University of Sharjah) Pre-Modern Arabic Literary Anthologies and the Social Imaginary: The Construction of Social, Cultural and Political Paradigms

Fozia Bora (University of Leeds) What’s in a mukhtaṣar? Abridgement as epistemic agency

Sohail Hanif (University of Oxford) The Hanafi Classification of Legal Rulings

5. Contemporary Islamic Theology

Taraneh Wilkinson (FSCIRE) Tawhid as a Response to Pluralism in Turkish Muslim Thought

Serafettin Pektas (UC Louvain) Imago Raḥmān: A Modern Muslim Theological Anthropology

Abbas Ahsan (University of Birmingham) Quine’s Ontology and the Islamic Tradition

Ramon Harvey (Ebrahim College) Reasoning from the Quantum to God: A Neo-Māturīdī Stance

6. Islamic Texts, Biblical Sources and Oriental Archives

David Vishanoff (University of Oklahoma) Origins and Sources of the Islamic Psalms of David

Seyfeddin Kara (Hartford Seminary) Comparing the levels of faith in the Bible and Qur’an: Examining the Parables of the Sower and the Rainstorm

Nayra Zaghloul (University of Oxford) The Ouseley Manuscripts: A History

15:30 – 16:00 Coffee/Tea

16:00 – 17:30 Panel Session 3

1. Medieval Islamic Theology, Philosophy and Science

Michael Noble (LMU Munich) The Occult Source of Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī’s Counter-Avicennan Prophetology

Safaruk Chowdhury (The King Fahad Academy) Destructibles and Indestructibles: Examining Some Problems Related to Resurrection and Bodily Continuity in Medieval Islamic Theology

Omar Anchassi (University of Edinburgh) Stacks of Plates and Cosmic Kebabs: Some Reflections on Muslim Receptions of Scientific Cosmographies

2. Islam and Society in Britain II

Davide Pettinato (University of Exeter) A ‘Ramadan Revolution’: exploring the “ethical” and the “everyday” in the discourse of the youth-led British Muslim charity MADE

Saleema Burney (SOAS) Ordinary women, extraordinary lives: a case study of British Muslim Women negotiating successful, hybridised identities in the ‘third space’

Abi Woodward (Sheffield Hallam University) The power of collective participation: Exploring the coping strategies of Pakistani Muslims

Nicole Lehmann (Nottingham University) The Muslimah entrepreneur and how religion informs their intersectional social positioning

3. The Qur’an and Its Interpretation I

Redhwan Karim (SOAS) Zīna’ in the Qur’ān: a study of Qur’ānic intra-textuality

Shafi Fazaluddin (SOAS) Conciliation and Conflict in the Meccan and Medinan Qur’an

Simon Loynes (University of Edinburgh) The concept of divine sending down (tanzīl) in the Qur’an

Andreas Vogl (Berlin Graduate School) Nakedness in the Qur’ān Commentary

4. Hadith and Law

Belal Abu Alabbas (University of Oxford) Al-Bukhārī a Jurist

Usman Ghani (American University of Sharjah) Ḥadīth usage in Ḥanafī Fiqh: A case study of al-Marghinānī’s al-Hidāya

Rahile Yilmaz (Marmara University) Same author and two different commentaries: Ibn ‘Abdul Barr and his commentaries of the Muwatta’ at-Tamhīd and Al-Istidhkār

Mostafa Movahedifar (University of Birmingham) New contemporary approaches to the isnād in Shīʿī scholarship on aḥādīth: the examples of Abu al-Qasim al-Khoei (d. 1992), Mūsā al-Shubayrī al-Zanjānī (b. 1928) and Ahmad al-Madadī (b. 1951/1952)

5. Post-Revolutionary Iran

Arun Rasiah (Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies) The Madrasa and the Movement of Ideas

Babak Rahimi (University of California San Diego) Techno-Muharram: The Mourning Soundscape and the Shia Public in Post-Revolutionary Iran

Carlos Mendez (University of Edinburgh) The Silent Threat to the Islamic Republic from Within

Naser Ghobadzadeh (Australian Catholic University) Nested game of elections in Iran

6. Thirteenth and Fourteenth Century Islamic History

Tarek Makhlouf (University of Melbourne) The Success of Andalusian Philological learning in the Mashriq

Mohamed Maslouh (University of Ghent) The Wanderers and the Eternal Traveler: The Employment of the al-Khidr’s narrative in the Sufi Apologetic Works During the Mamluk-Mongol Warfare (1258-1335 CE)

Mourad Laabdi (Carleton University) Ibn Khaldun on Law and Society: The Germ of a Social History of Islamic Law

Alexander Khaleeli (University of Exeter) Re-evaluating the state of Twelver Shi’ism in pre-Safavid Iran – the case of Ibn al-Makki (k. 1384) and the Sarbadars

17:30 – 17:45 Short Break

17:45 – 19:15 Plenary

Alison Scott-Baumann (SOAS) and team, ‘Re/presenting Islam on Campus, contested identities and the cultures of higher education’

19:30   Halal Dinner (for those in conference accommodation)

Tuesday 16^th April

09:00 – 10:30 Panel Session 4

1. What is Sufism? – An exploration of Sufi studies and Sufism in the West

Chair: Saeko Yazaki (University of Glasgow)

Makoto Sawai (Kyoto University) Sufi Studies in Gender Equality: Re-reading Ibn ʿArabī’s Anthropological Thought

Saeko Yazaki (University of Glasgow) Understanding Sufism: Dances of Universal Peace UK and its Syncretic Approach

Mark Sedgwick (Aarhus University) Variety and Uniformity in the Multiple Dimensions of Western Sufism

2. Recalling Islamism: A Critical Muslim Studies approach

Chair: Sarah Marusek (University of Leeds)

Sheheen Kattiparambil (University of Leeds) Decolonizing the caliphate: Narrating the Mappila rebellion

Sümeyye Sakarya (University of Leeds) A relational approach to Islamism: From nation-state to Muslimistan

Ayşe Kotan (University of Leeds) John Dewey meets Ataturk: Educational reform of the New Republic

Sarah Marusek (University of Leeds) Palestine, Islamism and the transatlantic Islamophobia network

3. The Qur’an and Its Interpretation II

Abdud Dayyan Younus (University of Birmingham) The unique characteristics of Urdu tafasīr in comparison to other modern and classical Arabic tafasīr

Sohaib Saeed (University of Glasgow) The Mufassir as Translator: A Paradigm for Exegesis in Non-Arabic Languages

Hossein Godazgar (Al-Maktoum College of Higher Education) ‘Islamic pluralism’: Insights into Sunni and Shi’ite exegeses of the Qur’an with reference to (physician assisted) suicide

4. Islamic Jurisprudence in the Modern World

Muhammad Almarakeby (University of Edinburgh) Ijtihād and Social Changes in the fatwās of Egypt’s 19th century ‘ulama

Rezart Beka (Georgetown University) The Jurisprudence of Reality (fiqh al-wāqi’) in Yūsuf al-Qaraḍāwī’s Thought

Ali-Reza Bhojani (University Of Nottingham & Al-Mahdi Institute) Uṣūlī Shī’ ī exegesis of 9:122- A potential Quranic ‘justification’ for collective ijtihād & consultative taqlīd?

Saba Kareemi (University of Management and Technology) The Jurisprudence of Public Official Immunity in Pakistan: Competing Maxims, Conflicting Norms, and the Utility of Islamic Law

5. Salafism: Contested Boundaries

Deniz Cifci (Independent Scholar) Construction of Militant Jihadi and Non-Militant Forms of Salafism: Ansar al-Islam and Abdullatif Salafi Groups in Kurdistan Region in Iraq as Case Studies

Iman Dawood  (London School of Economics and Political Science) Salafism without Salafis: Exploring the Wider Impact of Salafism in London

Azhar  Majothi (University of Nottingham) The Three Fundamental Principles: A Global Salafi Primer?

Abdelghani Mimouni (University of Manchester) Towards a Redefinition of Salafism

6. Islamic Religious Culture in the Modern World

Oriol Guni (Justus Liebig University Giessen) Images of Muslims in the late 19th-early 20th century travel writing about Albania and intersections with contemporary debates

Naira Sahakyan (University of Amsterdam) Dialogue with Materialist: The Rise of the Soviet Atheism and the Daghestani Scholars of Islam

Soheb Niazi (Freie Universitat, Berlin) Social Stratification of Muslims at a Qasbah in Colonial India. Genealogy as Narrating the Past at Amroha

Justin McGuinness (American University of Paris) Islam in pictures for the Moroccan kuttab: a descriptive analysis of an educational image sheet from Fès

10:30 – 11:00 Coffee/Tea

11:00 – 12:15 Plenary Maribel Fierro (CSIC Madrid) ‘Rulers as Authors in the Medieval Islamic West’

12:15 – 12:45 De Gruyter Prize presentation

12:45 — 13:15 BRAIS AGM

13:15 – 14:15 Lunch

14:15 – 15:45 Panel Session 5

1. Forms of Muslim Religiosity in the UK

Ayesha Khan (Cardiff University) ‘Spiritual’ or ‘Sufi’?: Ethnographic Reflections from Rumi’s Cave

Mohammad Amer Morgahi (Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam) Devotion, sanctity and new forms of religiosity among the Barelvis in the UK

Seán McLoughlin (University of Leeds) Islamic Soundscapes in a Translocal City: Co-Produced Research Among Muslims in Bradford

Riyaz Timol (Cardiff University) Something Old, Something New: The Changing World of British Imams

2. Islam across time and space: comparing temporalities within the Islamicate world

Chair: Jack Clift (SOAS)

Mariam Shehata (SOAS) The Arabic Sea Battle: al-Farābī & Abū l-Barakāt al-Baghdādī on the problem of Future Contingents

Florence Shahabi (SOAS) “Now is the time for the revolution of Self:” Temporality in the psycho-social writings of Bahauddin Majruh

Jack Clift (SOAS) “History is a mirror:” Historical-fictional time in Naseem Hijazi’s Ākhirī Maʻrakah (The Last Battle, 1953)

3. Contemporary Islamic Law and Ethics

Nazneen Asmal (University of Central Lancashire) The Sunni and Shia Perspectives on Surrogacy: A Comparative Analysis

Mansur Ali (Cardiff University) Our Bodies Belong to God. So what?

Nahid Khan (University of Birmingham) Adoption is not Prohibited in Islam, it is Misunderstood

Mohamed Abdelsalam (Sciences Po) The Role of Islam in the Egyptian Legal System: An Analysis of the Council of State Judicial decisions in post-revolution Egypt

4. Late Ottoman History

Sada Payir (University of Oxford) Indulgence in Entertainment: Police Officers as Partners in Crime in Late Ottoman Istanbul

Ahmet Yusuf Yuksek (SUNY-Binghamton University) Sufis and Sufism in Istanbul in the Late Nineteenth Century: A Spatial Analysis

Bilal Gökkir (Istanbul University) Reflections of Eugenic Medical Theories in Jamal al-din al-Qasimi’s Exegesis of the Qur’an

William Ryle-Hodges (University of Cambridge) The Religious Dimension of State Educational Reform in 19th Century Khedival Egypt: Abduh on animating the soul by taming the ego and teaching the truth

5. Asceticism and Sufism

Arafat Abdur Razzaque (University of Cambridge) Ibn Abī l-Dunyā, an Ascetic at the Abbasid Court? Ḥadīth as Adab and the Cultural Context of Early Islamic Piety

Khairil Husaini Bin Jamil and Kozhithodi Salahudheen (International Islamic University Malaysia) Taḥbīb Theory as Neoplatonic Emanationism? al-Jīlānī’s Thought between Argumentum Ex Silentio and Ḥadīth Interpretive Tradition

Abdulhakeem Alkhelaifi (Qatar University) Metaphysical Teleology: From Ibn Sina to Ibn Arabi

6. Islam and Politics in North and West Africa

Guy Eyre (SOAS) Divine paths to politics: Islamist-Salafi political competition and the state in North Africa

Lenka Hrabalova (Palacky University) Moroccan Religious Export

Laura Thompson (Harvard University) A Cart-Pusher and an ‘Alim: Historicizing Post-Arab-Spring Blasphemy Prosecutions in Tunisia

Miguel Paradela López (Tecnológico de Antioquia) Assessing Islamic extremism expansion in Mali. The links between theocracy and minoritarian claims unraveled 

15:45 – 16:15 Coffee/Tea

16:15 – 17:45 Panel Session 6

1. Modern Islamic Political Thought

Usaama al-Azami (Markfield Institute of Higher Education) Scholars for Peace in a Gulf at War: The Contributions of Hamza Yusuf and ‘Abdullah b. Bayyah in the Crafting of Counter-revolutionary Islam

Yazid Said (Liverpool Hope University) Hallaq, Said and Orientalism: Implications for political thought

Nadia Duvall (SOAS) The Doctrine of Jihad in Sayyid Qutb’s Thought

Ahmet Köroğlu (Istanbul University) Translating Islamism: Taking Sayyid Qutb, Abu’l Ala Mawdudi and Ali Shariati to Turkey

2. Islam and Politics in the Middle East and Asia

Alexander Weissenburger (Austrian Academy of Sciences) The concept of the Zaydi Imamate and its role in Yemen’s current crisis

Umer Karim (University of Birmingham) The Political Rise of Tehreek-e-Labaik Pakistan (TLP) and Politics of Religious Rent Seeking

Caglar Ezikoglu (Aberystwyth University) The Logic of Political Survival in Muslim Politics: The Case of AKP

Lucia Ardovini (The Swedish Institute of International Affairs) The Competition for Islamic Authority in post-2013 Egypt: Old Actors, New Dynamics

3. Colonialism and the Muslim World

Ula Merie (University of Sheffield) Re-representing the Islamic architecture during the British Mandate in Iraq

Besnik Sinani (Free University of Berlin) Late Wahhabi Orthodoxy and Orientalist Scholarship on Sufism

Nessim Znaien (Aix-Marseille University) Alcohol and the Muslim world during the era of French colonization

4. Ibn ‘Arabi’s Reception

Leila Chamankhah (University of Dayton) Dialogue with the “Master”: Early Shīʿa Encounters with Akbarīan Mystics

Fakhruzzaman Faiz (Jawaharlal Nehru University) Is Ashraf Jahāngīr Simnānī in line with Ibn ‘Arabī ontology?

Johannes Rosenbaum (University of Bamberg) A Sufi critique of Philosophy in the work of the 17th c. revivalist ‘Abd al-Haqq Dehlavi

5. Muslims in UK Higher Education

Hanan Fara (University of Birmingham) Qualitative research on how university experiences of Muslim students’ impact on the construction and presentation of their identities on campus

Muhammed Tajri (Al-Mahdi Institute) Shī‘a Female University Experiences Shaping Religious Authority Conceptions

Abida Malik (University of Nottingham) British Muslims in UK Higher Education: socio-political, religious and policy considerations

David Ring (Middlesex University) An ethnographic study of the experiences of Muslims studying nursing in London

6. Ibn Taymiyya: Theology and Ethics

Daniel Lav (The Hebrew University of Jerusalem) The Aristotelian Imprint on Ibn Taymiyya’s Doctrine of Tawḥīd

Hugh Goddard (University of Edinburgh) Ibn Taimiyya and John Knox on the Limits of Obedience to the State

Abdul-Rahman Mustafa (University of Edinburgh) Theology versus the Theologian: Reexamining Ibn Taymiyyah’s Critique of Shīʿism and Christianity