Language, Literacy, and the Social Construction of Authority in Islamic Societies
h20506805 | 05 août, 2010 16:35
Call for Papers
Workshop at Stanford University, March 3-4, 2011
The Abbasi Program in Islamic Studies at Stanford University invites
submission of paper abstracts for a workshop on Language, Literacy, and
the Social Construction of Authority in Islamic Societies. The workshop
will take place on March 3-4 2011 in Stanford (California, USA) and is a
joint project of the Abbasi Program and the Middle East – Mediterranean
Studies Program at Sciences Po in Paris. Travel and lodging arrangements
for the workshop participants will be provided.
The workshop
will focus on the processes underlying the social construction of
authority in Islamic societies and the way those processes have been
affected by issues of language and the development of literacy from 17th
century and onwards in the context of peripheries as well as the core
regions (specifically, West Africa, the Caucasus, South Asia, Central
Asia, Southeast Asia, Middle East). Particular topics of interest
include but are not limited to:
- issues concerning print, manuscript
and oral tradition
- rise of new media (such as internet) and
language
- the ulama's retention of authority through reassertion or,
in some cases, reinvention of their relationships to classical
discourses
- the emergence of new spheres of religious authority
beyond the ulama, and how this is related to evolutions in language and
literacy
- the production of Modern Standard Arabic out of classical
literary Arabic and its relationship to rise in literacy and consequent
devolution of religious authority
- the politics of languages of
education in West Africa, between Arabic and vernaculars
- the fate
of Arabic as a the universal Islamic language more generally across
various regions
- the rise of English, French, and Russian as
authoritative languages of Muslim discourse in colonial and
post-colonial settings
- the development of Urdu as the lingua franca
of Muslim communication in India and its relationship to reformist
madrasas in north India
- relationships between nationalisms,
languages, and universal versus local religious communities
Please
submit a brief abstract (not to exceed 300 words) by September 1st 2010
via the online secure form available at http://www.stanford.edu/dept/islamic_studies/socconst.fb
. The abstract should specify the proposed paper topic, major
argument(s) of the paper and the methodology used. Participants will be
notified by September 30th 2010. Complete papers are to be submitted by
January 14th 2011.
A copy of this CfP is available online at http://islamicstudies.stanford.edu/CfP0311.pdf
.