The Middle
East: Diversity - Variation - InterpretationThe Seventh Nordic
Conference on Middle Eastern Studies
21-23 September 2007,
Helsinki
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Key note -speakers |
KEY NOTE -SPEAKERS Professor Yvonne Haddad, Georgetown University Muslims and the Challenge of Pluralism in the Age of Globalization The lecture will discuss efforts by Muslim intellectuals to ground the ideal of pluralism in Islam. The first part will focus on the discourses in the Arab world generated as a response to the UN resolution on human rights, and Islamist affirmation of Islam. The second part will assess the works of Muslim intellectuals living in the West who are engaging the question whether Islam is intolerant and whether Muslims in the West can learn to accommodate the religious preferences of others. Dr Asef Bayat, ISIM Leiden Movements and Non-Movements in the Muslim Middle East A prevailing outlook has it that change in the Middle East comes from outside, by the elites and often through force. My talk focuses on internal sources of change by the non-elites. I discuss the diverse ways in which the ordinary people-- men, women, and the young-- strive to affect the contours of change in their societies, by refusing to exit from the social and political stage controlled by authoritarian regimes, and by discovering or generating spaces within which they can assert their active presence. The paper will engage critically with both the recent history and theory of various forms of collective agency in the Middle East - ranging from endemic protest actions, to durable social movements, and those fragmented but common social actions, or what I would call ‘non-movements’. Inspired by the complex texture of the Middle Eastern societies, the paper appeals for a re-examination of the ways in which we have been thinking about change and agency in this part of the world. Professor Jaakko Hämeen-Anttila, University of Helsinki Religious Diversity in the Middle East In daily media Islam is often depicted as an intolerant religion. This picture is based on extremist fundamentalist rhetorics which sometimes claims the wholesale Islamization of the world as the final goal of the activists. Likewise, the Mediaeval Islamic society is presumed to have been basically intolerant and religious freedom to have been strictly limited to what is defined in the Sharī'a, viz. to the Dhimmī system assigning an internal, but no external, freedom of religion for the People of the Book and forcing conversion on others. The existence of non-monotheistic religious communities within the Dār al-Islām is often ignored, if not outright denied. A historian's look at the sources themselves soon shows that an exclusively monotheistic society in the Mediaeval Middle East is a fallacy. The Sharī'a led a theoretical and prescriptive life of its own, neither describing the social reality nor dictating its course. In other words, the Islamic law was rarely, if ever, enforced in any significant measure as it comes to non-monotheist religions. On the contrary, we find polytheists and heretics even in the very heart of the Islamic Empire. The Mediaeval Islamic world was religiously much more diversified than the law manuals might induce us to think. |