2:00 PM - 3:30 PM
1261 Bunche Hall
UCLA

Abstract: This lecture aims to show that the history of the rationalist disciplines (ma'qulat, such as logic, philosophy, astronomy, etc.) in Muslim South Asia was driven by non-trivial social and political contexts. Taking up the example of a theological debate on the finality of the Prophet, this lecture examines how reformist and establishment scholars deployed various technical tools in rationalist scholarship (especially logic) to argue for the validity of their position on this issue. In the process, they breathed new life into several subfields of the rationalist disciplines. This brief period of focus on the relevant technical tools was not due to some predictable orientation of texts, but was the product of the complex layers of the cultural, social, political, and technological landscapes of nineteenth century Muslim India.

Asad Q. Ahmed is Associate Professor of Arabic and Islamic Studies in the Department of Near Eastern Studies, the University of California, Berkeley. He received his B.A. in 2000 from Yale University, majoring from the Department of Philosophy and the Department of Literature. He was awarded a Ph.D. in 2007 from the Department of Near Eastern Studies, Princeton University.
Ahmed specializes in early Islamic social history and pre-modern Islamic intellectual history, with a special focus on the rationalist disciplines, such as philosophy, logic, and astronomy. Though he has worked extensively on Islamic intellectual history of the so-called classical period (ca. 800-1200 CE), his current focus is the period ca. 1200-1900 CE, especially with reference to the Indian subcontinent. He is the author of *The Religious Elite of the Early Islamic Hijaz* (University of Oxford, 2011) and *Avicenna’s Deliverance: Logic* (Oxford University Press, 2011). He is also the co-editor of *The Islamic Scholarly Tradition* (Brill, 2010). He has published several articles in the aforementioned fields and in usul al-fiqh and kalam. His general training also includes Graeco-Arabica, classical Arabic poetry and poetics, and hadith and Qur'anic Studies.