On October 20, 2020, Garrett Davidson, Assistant Professor of Arabic and Muslim World Studies at the College of Charleston, spoke at the first Fall 2020 meeting of the Alwaleed Bin Talal Seminar in Islamic Studies about his new book, Carrying on the Tradition: A Social and Intellectual History of Hadith Transmission across a Thousand Years (Brill, 2020). In this work, Professor Davidson tells the story of post-canonical hadith transmission. He shows that, although it has until now been overlooked by historians of Islam, for more than...

On November 25, 2019, Robert Gleave, Profesor of Arabic Studies at the University of Exeter, spoke at Harvard Law School about the early development of Imami Shiite law and its relation to the development of the broader Islamic legal tradition. 

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On May 6, 2020, Christopher Rose, Postdoctoral Fellow and Lecturer at University of Texas at Austin, delivered a webinar as part of our Director's Series on the previously-overlooked history of the devastating 'Spanish' influenza in Egypt in 1918 and how it contributed to peasant participation in the 1919 Egyptian Revolution. 

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On April 30, 2020, Nükhet Varlık, Associate Professor of History at Rutgers University - Newark and the University of South Carolina, delivered a timely webinar discussing the plague in European and Ottoman historiography, questioning Eurocentric narratives and epidemiological Orientalism, and reflecting on how we can understand this history in light of the current pandemic. 

Those who wish to learn more about the topic and Professor Varlık's research may also be interested in the webinar, "...

In a Director's Series lecture co-hosted by the Middle East Initiative at the Harvard Kennedy School, Daniel Philpott, Professor of Political Science at the University of Notre Dame, presented on his recent book, Religious Freedom in Islam: The Fate of a Universal Human Right in the Muslim World Today (2019).  The lecture was followed by a discussion moderated by Faculty Director,  Professor Tarek Masoud, about the meaning of religious freedom in Muslim-majority countries and its challenges and opportunities. 

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At the end of the Fall 2019 semester, Professor Shady Nasser convened a conference in which leading experts in Qurʾānic studies from North America and Europe shared their recent and impactful work related to the history of the reception of the Qurʾān.

The...