The Selection Committee is pleased to announce that they have selected Dr. Nariman Aavani (Study of Religion) as winner of the 2023 Alwaleed Bin Talal Dissertation Prize in Islamic Studies for his dissertation entitled, “Knowledge, Action, and the Ultimate Goal of Human Life: A Hindu-Muslim Cross-Cultural Philosophy of Religion in the Early Modern Era: Gadādhara (d. 1660) and Mullā Ṣadrā (d. 1635).” Nariman conducts an impressive comparative study of the views of two early modern philosophers, Gadadhara from the Hindu tradition and Mulla Sadra from the Islamic tradition, on the relationship between theoretical knowledge and ethical striving. Nariman shows a remarkable ability to engage in an in-depth manner with philosophers in two distinct traditions, and successfully shows that, despite their different conceptual frameworks, these two philosophers independently grappled with similar issues and often arrived at commensurable conclusions. The original ideas presented in this dissertation and its clear and focused writing make it an important contribution to the fields of Islamic studies and Comparative Religion.
The Selection Committee would also like to recognize Dr. Marijana Mišević (History and Middle Eastern Studies) as honorable mention for her dissertation, “Writing Slavic in the Arabic Script: Literacy and Multilingualism in the Early Modern Ottoman Empire.” Marijana uses South-Slavic languages written in the Arabic script in the Ottoman Balkans from the 15th to 17th centuries as a window into a multicultural environment. Marijana uncovers important new material and reconceptualizes Slavic aljamiado as Slavophone Arabographia, which she uses as a case for the investigation of the relationship between language and power in the early Ottoman empire, challenging the prevailing contemporary and ahistorical conceptions of language, culture, and script.
Congratulations Nariman and Marijana!