Minoritization in Middle Eastern Geopolitics: Histories and Theoretical Approaches

Minoritization in Middle Eastern Geopolitics: Histories and Theoretical Approaches

A shrine in the Draa region, Morocco visited by Jews and Muslims (Photo Aomar Boum, July 2021; cropped).

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Description:

Despite the growing academic interest that Middle Eastern minorities have continued to receive over the decades since the publication of Albert Hourani’s Minorities in the Arab World in 1947, the theme of minoritization has remained a marginal topic in Middle Eastern and North African studies. In this international conference that builds on a series of workshops and lectures funded by Andrew W. Mellon Foundation over the last two years, we revisit from multidisciplinary, geographic and historical perspectives the concept of minority (ethnic and religious). Our objective is to engage with minorities from the angles of the humanities and social sciences by considering the histories, ethnographies, and artistic approaches of ethnic and religious groups, and to interrogate the concept of minority itself.

 Day 1: Thursday, January 6, 2022
9:00-10:40a  Difference and Affiliation in the Early Islamic Period
   Mawlayāt at the Intersection of Gender, Ethnicity, and Unfreedom
 Elizabeth Urban, West Chester University 
   Demography, Hierarchy, and Religious Minorities in the Medieval Middle East
 Lev Weitz, Catholic University of America 
   Religious integrity and a world without religious minorities: non-Muslim women and the Muslim household
 Christopher PreJean, Fulbright Fellow, Haifa University
   Grateful Subjects: East Syrian Christians and Muslim Sovereignty in The Book of the Tower (Kitāb al-majdal)
 Luke Yarbrough, UCLA
10:40-11:00a  Break
11:00-12:40p  Difference and Distinction in Ottoman-Era Urban Space
   Narrating Murder: Damascus Jews and 1860
 Orit Bashkin, University of Chicago
   Ottoman Demographic and Spatial Politics in Comparative Perspective: Armenians and Jews in Jerusalem
 Michelle Campos, The Pennsylvania State University
   Superstition and the Haunting of Sephardic Modernity
 Rachel Smith, UCLA
12:40-2:00p  Break
2:00-3:40p  Interrogating Minorities: Concepts, Methods, Histories
   Assessing Ethnic Self-Identity using Open-Ended Survey Questions: Theory and Method in the Iran Social Survey
 Kevan Harris, UCLA
   Minority Counter-State Building in the Long Great War: Kurdish Uprisings, the Rif War, and the Druze Revolt (1924–27)
 Jonathan Wyrtzen, Yale University
3:40-4:00p  Break
4:00-5:40p  Non-Muslims and the Law in Modern Iran
   Constructing a new self: Faith and individuality in Memoirs of Jewish-Bahai Converts
 Mehrdad Amanat, Independent Scholar
   Being a Jew in the Islamic Republic: Religious and National Identities in Post-Revolutionary Iran
 Lior Sternfeld, The Pennsylvania State University
   The Jewish Exemption Claim: Addressing Histories and Narratives about Iranian-Jews in the Iran-Iraq War
 Neda Bolourchi, Rutgers University

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 Day 2: Friday, January 7, 2022
9:00-10:40a  Language, Ethnicity, and Difference in the Maghreb
   The Affect of Amazigh Activism: Translating Berber Landscapes into a Politics of Transformation
 Paul Silverstein, Reed College
   Indigenizing the Quran: Translation and the Politics of Amazighizing Islam
 Brahim El Guabli, Williams College
   Ethnicity, Race and Religion: Early histories of Baha’i Faith in Northwest Africa
 Aomar Boum, UCLA
   Nationalism and Minority Rift: Mzabis and the Statute of Algeria
 Amal Ghazal, Simon Fraser University and The Doha Institute for Graduate Studies
10:40-11:00a  Break
11:00-12:40p  Minorities, Belonging, and the Law in the Maghreb
   Maghrebi Jews, Black Maghrebis: Racialization before Zionism
 Jessie Stoolman, UCLA
   Abolishing the Status of Dhimmī in Nineteenth-Century Tunisia
 Jessica Marglin, University of Southern California
   Inheriting Women in the Anti-Atlas Mountains of Morocco: Sources and Methods
 Katherine Hoffman, Northwestern University
   Herstory: Shades of Migration and Social Mediation in Colonial Morocco
 Zakia Salime, Rutgers University
12:40-2:00p  Break
2:00-3:40p  The Middle East Diaspora
   Faith and Diasporic Uncertainty: An Ethnographic Study of the Lebanese Druze Migrants to the United States
 Leigha AbiSaab, UCLA
   A Comparative Analysis of Iranian Racialization and Minoritization in Europe and North America
 Amy Malek, College of Charleston
   Transnational Networks of Senegalese and Middle Eastern Shi‘i Muslims
 Mara Leichtman, Michigan State University
   Living in a Stratified Ummah
 Pamela Prickett, University of Amsterdam
3:40-4:00p  Break
4:00-5:40p  Visual Representations and Group Difference
   Venus in Chains: Planetary Personas as Unfree Elite in Medieval Islamic Art
 Ava Hess, UCLA
   What is a photograph?: Race, enslavement, and photography in late Qajar Iran
 Beeta Baghoolizadeh, Bucknell University
   Captive Sites and Survivor Objects: Theorizing State Power and the Production of the Cultural Heritage of Minoritized Groups
 Heghnar Watenpaugh, UC Davis
   Minorities in Islamic Art: A Graduate Seminar
 Lamia Balafrej, UCLA

 


Sponsor(s): Center for Near Eastern Studies