Arabic Pasts: Histories and Historiographies (Hybrid)

This annual exploratory and informal workshop offers the opportunity to reflect on methodologies, research agendas, and case studies for investigating history writing in Arabic in the Middle East, North Africa, and beyond in any period from the seventh century to the present.

This year’s paper will elucidate the following questions:

• How did adherents of different confessional or juristic traditions, men and women, and members of different social classes within societies that became “Islamic” imagine the shape and meaning of their specific societies’ own pasts, and their relation to the universal history of the Islamic community? Which ways of writing, remembering, or commemorating did they develop?

• How can we broaden our scope beyond just textual historiography?

• How can marginalised communities and varieties of Arabic be given due attention?

• How can works of fiction contribute to our understanding of the past?

• How can we explore the past algorithmically? Can digital methods enhance our understanding of the past? Can they also limit or even alter it? Which new digital tools are being developed? What seem to be particularly promising approaches? What is lacking?

• In what ways do educational institutions, museums, media organisations and proponents of heritage use history writing to shape loyalties and senses of belonging in society?

• How is the past used in creative arts, re-enactment, games, and augmented reality?

Download Arabic Pasts Schedule.

Organisers

Arabic Pasts is co-organised by Hugh Kennedy (SOAS), James McDougall (Oxford), Lorenz Nigst (AKU-ISMC), and Sarah Bowen Savant (AKU-ISMC).

Join Online

You can also join us online by registering via Zoom.

Image Credit

Taqī al-dīn al-Fāsī, Taḥṣīl al-marām fī taʾrīkh al-balad al-ḥarām (Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin, Wetzstein I 19, 90r)