what is islamisation?
TRANSCRIPT
What is Islamisation?
Third Annual LUCIS Conference
15 – 16 November 2012
Leiden University
Campus The Hague
Stichthage Offices
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CONTENTS
WORD OF WELCOME ...........................................................................5
ABOUT LUCIS......................................................................................7
PROGRAMME ........................................................................................9
ABSTRACTS OF PRESENTATIONS ......................................................13
ABOUT THE SPEAKERS ......................................................................21
USEFUL ADDRESSES...........................................................................31
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WORD OF WELCOME
Dear colleagues, participants and audience,
The Leiden University Centre for the Study of Islam and Society (LUCIS)
warmly welcomes you to its third annual conference. LUCIS was founded to
promote understanding about Islam and Muslim societies throughout time
and place – from an academic perspective, but with a relevance to today’s
world. The topic of this conference – ‘What is Islamisation?’ – is indeed
relevant to today’s debates, both amongst Muslims and non-Muslims, policy-
makers and activists, journalists and academics, and observers and believers.
Anyone following current debates in the public arena, policy discussions, or
academic discourse knows that Islamisation is perceived as a powerful and
pervasive force in societies all over the world. When looking more closely at
these often anxious and heated discussions, however, it is clear that the term
is used to describe a multitude of different processes. Does it refer to
conversion to Islam by non-Muslims, to new forms of piety or activism
amongst believers, or to an increased presence of Muslims and Islam in the
public space, both in the West and in the Muslim world? This conference
aims to unravel the different processes covered by the term Islamisation, by
looking at three different arenas of Islamisation, and comparing examples
from across the contemporary world.
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LUCIS has invited a wide range of international scholars from different
disciplinary backgrounds to investigate new forms of Islam both in their
historical, cultural and social contexts, and in their African, Southeast Asian,
European and Middle Eastern settings. Juxtaposing the influence of Islam as
a religion or culture to larger societal changes, we want to address this
relation. The aim is to come to a better understanding of the causes behind
and meanings of the processes of change commonly indicated by the word
Islamisation.
While the conference offers a platform for academics to share their research
and insights, it is our explicit aim to merge these specialised analyses with
questions raised in the larger public debate beyond these academic walls. In
keeping with LUCIS’ goal of promoting interaction between academics and
the wider professional world, we look forward to discussing how to interpret
these different forms of Islamisation, and how we can handle and respond to
such processes.
It is with great pleasure that we welcome you to what promises to be a
fruitful meeting!
Léon Buskens, director of LUCIS
Petra Sijpesteijn, conference convener
Dorrit van Dalen, conference convener
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ABOUT LUCIS
LUCIS is an interdisciplinary and interfaculty knowledge centre of Leiden
University specialising in Islam and Muslim societies. The centre was
established in 2009 to bring together academics affiliated to different
faculties, including Humanities, Law, and Social and Behavioural Sciences.
The main aim of LUCIS is to join and strengthen education and research
about Islam and Muslim societies at Leiden University. In addition, it aims at
contributing to the public debate as well as to policy making.
Leiden University holds a long-standing tradition with regard to the study of
Islam and Muslim societies. The university’s expertise in this field has led to
the acquisition of a number of important library collections, as well as many
culture and language specialists of regions in which Islam plays a pivotal role.
Research
LUCIS is dedicated to stimulating research in the field of Islam and Muslim
societies by providing academic network meetings. Through lectures and
symposia LUCIS updates its colleagues and others interested in current
research and advances the exchange of knowledge between academics.
Education
Within Leiden University’s Faculty of Humanities, Islam and Muslim
societies can be studied in several Bachelor’s and Master’s programmes. The
available courses offered in Leiden cover a wide area, ranging from the study
of religion, politics, language, culture to law. LUCIS wishes to join and
strengthen the available courses in the field of Islam and Muslim societies.
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On the LUCIS website, an education portal provides an overview of the
courses offered at Leiden University in the field of Islam and Muslim
societies, categorised by theme and region: http://tinyurl.com/cu7g5u9
LUCIS also invites guest lecturers to give courses on a specific theme within
Islamic studies.
Debate
In an era in which Islam raises many questions among all groups in society
and dominates the public debate and media coverage, LUCIS wants to meet
the growing demand for scholarly knowledge about Islam and Muslim
societies. To this end, LUCIS endeavours to be an important centre of
expertise and aims at increasing the public visibility of scholarship on Islam
and Muslim societies in the Netherlands and beyond, and at presenting
current academic research to a broader audience. Therefore, LUCIS engages
with current affairs by organising activities for a broader audience about
contemporary topics, and by participating in the wider public debate.
Organisation
The policy of LUCIS is determined by a steering committee which currently
consists of Maurits Berger, Léon Buskens, Nico Kaptein, Jan Michiel Otto
and Petra Sijpesteijn. The director of LUCIS, Léon Buskens, is in charge of
the daily activities of the centre, together with an executive secretary, Dr
Petra de Bruijn. They are assisted by the LUCIS office. For more information
visit www.lucis.leidenuniv.nl.
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PROGRAMME
Thursday 15 November | Stichthage Offices, ‘Lange Voorhout’ room
13:00 Registration
13:30 Welcome by Léon Buskens, director of LUCIS
13.45 Opening by Herman Quarles van Ufford, deputy director of
the Department North Africa and Middle East, Ministry of
Foreign Affairs
14:00 Introduction by Petra Sijpesteijn: “What is Islamisation?”
Session I ISLAMISATION: IMAGINED OR REAL?
Chair: Léon Buskens
14:30 Introduction by Léon Buskens
14:50 Benjamin Soares: “Rethinking Islam and Islamisation in
Sub-Saharan Africa”
15:15 Joas Wagemakers: “The Islamisation of the Arab Spring:
Islamist Appropration of Post-Revolutionary Politics”
15:40 Peter Just: “Dogs, Do You Wish to Pray? Ethnicity and
Islamisation in Donggo, Indonesia”
16:00 Discussion
16:30 Spoken column by Hassan Bahara
16:45 Drinks
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Friday 16 November
09:00-11:00 Master Class by David Cook: Classical and Contemporary
Arabic Apocalyptic Predictions | for selected graduate students
Location: Campus The Hague, Stichthage Offices |
‘Noordeinde’ room
10:30 Coffee and tea
Session II POLITICS AND CHANGE WITHIN ISLAM
Chair: Maurits Berger
Stichthage Offices, ‘Lange Voorhout’ room
11:00 Introduction by Maurits Berger
11:20 Raufu Moustapha, “Boko Haram: The Long Road to
Terrorism”
11:40 Ernesto Braam: “The Electoral Surge of Islamist Parties in
the Arab World and Responses of Western Governments”
12:00 Shamil Shikhaliev: “Transformation of Reform Movements
in Daghestan”
12:20 Roel Meijer: “The Arab Spring and the Secularisation of
Islamic Thought”
12:40 Discussion
13:00 Lunch
14:30 Lecture by Olivier Roy
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Session III AMONG THE BELIEVERS
Chair: Anne-Sylvie Boisliveau
15:45 Introduction by Anne-Sylvie Boisliveau
16:05 Samer Rashwani: “The Discourse of ‘Islamisation of
Knowledge:’ Between Ideological and Critical Reception”
16:25 Umar Ryad: “Revolution, Education or the Caliphate? Pan-
Islamic, Anti-Imperialist Discourses and Their Relevance
Today”
16:45 Maher Charif: “Le salafisme, c’est quoi?”
17:05 David Cook: “Faith and Fornication: Contemporary Islam
and the Question of Compromised Belief”
17:25 Discussion
17:45 Drinks
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ABSTRACTS OF PRESENTATIONS
SESSION I | ISLAMISATION: IMAGINED OR REAL?
Benjamin Soares: “Rethinking Islam and Islamisation in Sub-Saharan
Africa”
Responding to social scientific research on Islam and Muslim societies, which
almost completely ignores sub-Saharan Africa, Benjamin Soares proposes an
alternative model for understanding ways of being Muslim in contemporary
sub-Saharan Africa and possibly beyond. Considering ways in which the
practice of Islam has been changing in various places in West Africa, his
objective is to build an analytical model of being Muslim, which differs from
what some analysts have called post-Islamism, as well as recent
preoccupations with ethical self-fashioning in so-called piety movements.
Joas Wagemakers: “The Islamisation of the Arab Spring: Islamist
Appropration of Post-Revolutionary Politics”
Since the start of the Arab Spring in late 2010, many Islamist movements –
especially the Muslim Brotherhood and different Salafi groups – have come
to the fore in the political systems of their countries. Whereas these groups
often used to be barred from openly contesting elections or adopted an
a-political position towards the pre-revolutionary regimes, they now seem to
have embraced parliamentary politics with great success. Many secularists,
non-Muslims and Western governments, however, have viewed this
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‘Islamisation’ of Middle Eastern politics with a mix of suspicion and fear,
anxious about the Islamists’ intentions with regard to democracy, women’s
rights, minority rights and civil liberties and afraid that radical Muslims may
use the instability of Arab countries to increase their influence. This paper is
based on the very preliminary findings of a Veni post-doctoral research
project on Islamic activism (quietist Salafis and the Muslim Brotherhood) in
Jordan that I started this year, as well as a small side project on radical
Islamists’ views of the Arab Spring. It analyses how the ‘Islamisation’ of the
Arab Spring has taken place by looking into Islamist ideological
appropriations of post-revolutionary politics in the Arab world.
Peter Just: “Dogs, Do You Wish to Pray? Ethnicity and Islamisation in
Donggo, Indonesia”
Why do people become Muslims? This paper examines the historical case of
the Dou Donggo, a small ethnic minority in the Regency of Bima in eastern
Indonesia. Although the sovereign of Bima converted to Islam early in the
seventeenth century and the vast majority of his people followed soon
thereafter, the autochthonous people of Donggo by and large did not join the
rest of the sultanate until late in the twentieth century. The reasons for their
conversion, the depth of that conversion, and the social impact of that
conversion, are examined. In particular, shifts in the political and economic
ecology of the Regency and the special position accorded the people of
Donggo as the aboriginal population in the context of an overall shift to
modernity are seen as determinative factors. The paper concludes with some
thoughts on the tension between preserving a cultural and ethnic identity and
entry into a globalizing modernity.
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SESSION II | POLITICS AND CHANGE WITHIN ISLAM
Raufu Moustapha: “Boko Haram: The Long Road to Terrorism”
Since the start of the Islamist insurgency carried out by the Boko Haram
group in northern Nigeria, many explanations have been advanced in the bid
to explain the emergence of the group and to try to make sense of the killings
and destruction wrought by the group. Some see Boko Haram as yet another
manifestation of the attempt by the Muslim population in northern Nigeria to
impose their religion on the rest of the country, while others see the group as
a political reaction against a Christian president. Yet some others see the
group as the local manifestation of global Islamic terrorism. In this
presentation I seek to provide a historically grounded sociological explanation
for the rise of Boko Haram.
Ernesto Braam: “The Electoral Surge of Islamist Parties in the Arab
World and Responses of Western Governments”
The Arab world has seen an electoral surge of Islamist parties, since the start
of the revolts in this region. Islamists have been elected to parliaments and
joined governments. To what extent is this a trend and what national and
international factors play a role in this Islamist surge? What are the dynamics
and interaction between the Muslim Brotherhood and likeminded
movements on the one hand and Salafi movements on the other? The
Islamist surge has confronted Western governments with the question of
how to engage Islamist parties and under what conditions.
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Shamil Shikhaliev: “Transformation of Reform Movements in
Daghestan”
Today, religious life in Daghestan is peculiar for the co-existence of various
versions of doctrinal Islam. Each micro-region tends to formulate its own
specific form of Muslim life, be it Sufi or Salafi variations. The movement of
Muslim reformers known as Jadidism appeared in Daghestan in the early
twentieth century. There were two forms of this movement, namely
reformation of education and reformation of dogma. The first group of
scholars proposed only modernization of Islamic school system, while
supporting theological tradition and the Shāfi‘ī legal school. The second party
of reformers went further. It called for revision of the four religious schools
of the Sunnī Islam and condemned Sufism.
Though some positions of the Salafis and Jadids are similar, their basic ideas
are different. Most notably, the Jadids want to reform Islam and use
European models of science and education, while the Salafis are strongly
opposed to European liberal values and imagine the period of the early
Caliphate as the ideal of the Islamic state. Support from those who hold
political power, has moved over the past century from the Jadids to the Sufis.
Roel Meijer: “The Arab Spring and the Secularisation of Islamic
Thought”
Although Islamist groups have come to dominate the aftermath of the Arab
uprising, they have been to a large extent influenced by the general discourse
of rights and the secular concept of citizenship that has emerged during the
Arab uprising. This presentation will analyze how concepts as citizenship
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(muwatana) and rights (huquq) have penetrated the discourses of the Muslim
Brotherhood and affiliated organizations as well as Salafism. The reason is
that Islam does not provide the necessary political concepts and tools for the
present situation where the logic of the political dominate.
SESSION III | AMONG THE BELIEVERS
Samer Rashwani: “The Discourse of ‘Islamisation of Knowledge’:
Between Ideological and Critical Reception”
Since its birth in the late seventies as a reflection of the postmodernism
debate of the time, the discourse of ‘Islamisation of knowledge’ has been
received by the intellectuals in the West and in the Muslim world mostly with
suspicion. This paper aims to present a condensed overview of the different
critical approaches, epistemological, philosophical, political, sociological and
even ideological, that have been applied to the discourse of ‘Islamisation of
knowledge,’ and to evaluate their role in the later development of this
discourse. One of the main shortcomings of the intellectual reception of the
Islamisation discourse is the great interest in discussing the main premises
and presenting the main pioneers, whilst neglecting the vast and diverse
literature that has been produced mainly by less known advocators, whose
writings are perhaps nowadays much more influential than the writings of the
main founders.
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Umar Ryad: “Revolution, Education or the Caliphate? Pan-Islamic,
Anti-Imperialist Discourses and Their Relevance Today”
Much has been written about the role of pan-Islamism in confronting
western empires in the colonial era. This paper addresses pan-Islamism as a
global movement for Muslim reform and against European imperial
domination. It focuses on anti-colonial discourses and the activities of the
leading pan-Islamic proponents and main actors, most notably the triad Jamal
al-Din al-Afghani (1838-1897), Muhammad ‘Abduh (1849-1905) and
Muhammad Rashid Rida (1865-1935), who sought to strengthen Islamic unity
in order to confront the European penetration of Muslim lands.
The paper argues that despite the fact that each of these revolutionaries was
disillusioned about European intervention in the Muslim world, it was their
colonial experience and Weltpolitik that determined their anti-imperialist
intellectual and activist strategies. The first agitator of the three, al-Afghani,
was shaped by his experience in colonial India, participation in freemasonry
lodges, dissatisfaction with the traditional ‘ulama, confrontations with the
Supreme Porte and his exile in Paris. Afghani advocated revolution from
above. Abduh developed different ideas regarding the reformation of Islam
and firmly believed in a revolution from below, carried by a reform of
religion and religious education. Rida, on the other hand, called for a pan-
Islamic project on the basis of his nostalgia for the Islamic rule of the
Caliphate and on the reformation of Muslim activism.
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Maher Charif: “Le salafisme, c’est quoi?”
Pour certains chercheurs l’islamisme représente un prolongement du
réformisme musulman. Parmi les dénominateurs communs entre ces deux
courants, ils citent leur désir commun de revivifier l’islam, ainsi que leur
appartenance commune au ‘salafisme’. Je suppose, pour ma part, que
l’islamisme n’était pas un prolongement du réformisme religieux, mais qu’au
contraire il marquait une rupture avec lui. Même si on peut déceler, chez les
tenants du réformisme musulman, d’une part, et de l’islamisme, de l’autre, des
dénominateurs communs, il faut noter cependant que leurs systèmes de
références, leurs objectifs et leurs projets de société divergent radicalement.
En prenant le réformiste musulman alépin ‘Abdel Rahman al-Kawakibi
(1854-1902) comme objet de mon analyse, je vais démontrer que son
‘salafisme’ ne s’accorde pas avec la définition courante. Al-Kawakibi remonte
certes aux origines de l‘Islam et prend comme référence un modèle ‘idéalisé’,
celui du gouvernement à l’époque du Prophète et des quatre califes al-
Rashidîn, mais sans pour autant avoir la volonté de ressusciter un tel modèle.
Croyant fermement au principe de l’évolution et à l’interaction des
civilisations, sur la base d’un humanisme rationnel affiché, la référence d’al-
Kawakibi au présent, c’est le gouvernement constitutionnel démocratique en
Occident qui, une fois débarrassé de ses maux, sera un modèle auquel les
musulmans pourront emprunter pour dépasser leur retard et s‘engager sur la
voie du progrès.
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David Cook: “Faith and Fornication: Contemporary Islam and the
Question of Compromised Belief”
In pre-modern discussions of what constitutes faith (iman) in Islam, the
tradition “the fornicator does not commit fornication when he fornicates,
while he is a believer” was a lightening rod for what are the outer limits of sin
and forgiveness. Ibn Taymiyya and others grappled with this question but it
has been left to contemporary Salafis in their need to police the boundaries of
faith (and infidelity) to define what constitutes Islam versus neo-Murjiaism
(the willingness to avoid judgment concerning grave sins) common in Muslim
societies. The Saudi thinker Safar al-Hawali, and the other activists associated
with the Sahwa movement attempt to define using the issue of faith and
fornication what constitutes Islam, what are its boundaries, and most
importantly what constitutes infidelity (especially among apparent Muslims).
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ABOUT THE SPEAKERS
Maurits Berger
Leiden University | [email protected]
Maurits Berger is a lawyer and Arabist. He holds the chair of Islam in the
contemporary West at the Institute for Religious Studies at Leiden University,
and is a senior research associate with the Clingendael Institute for
International Relations in The Hague. He has worked as a lawyer in
Amsterdam, and as a researcher and journalist in Cairo and Damascus.
Hassan Bahara
Hassan Bahara is a journalist and editor of the Dutch weekly De Groene
Amsterdammer. He was a columnist for the Dutch daily newspaper NRC
Handelsblad. He is also the author of two novels about the life and aspirations
of different generations of immigrants to the Netherlands from a Moroccan
background, and winner of two literary prizes.
Anne-Sylvie Boisliveau
University of Groningen | [email protected]
Anne-Sylvie Boisliveau is a postdoc in Islamic studies at the University of
Groningen. Her research focuses on early religious Islamic sources: Qur’an,
hadith, classical exegesis on the Qur’an and contemporary studies of the
Qur’an, faith and practice in Islam and the development of Islamic dogma.
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Ernesto Braam
Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs | [email protected]
Ernesto Braam joined the Dutch Foreign Service in 1988 and began his
career at its Middle East Department responsible for Iraq and Kuwait during
the first Gulf War. He has served at Dutch missions in Singapore, Brussels
(EU), Tokyo, Bangkok and Baghdad, as well as in The Hague, at the EU and
Asylum and Migration departments. Currently, he is strategic policy advisor at
the North Africa and Middle East Department. He has been an affiliated
fellow at ISIM and is conducting PhD research on the Salafi movement in
the Malay Muslim community of southern Thailand. He has published on this
topic, as well as on the Shi‘a and politics in Iraq.
Léon Buskens
Leiden University | [email protected]
Léon Buskens defended his PhD thesis on Islamic law and family relations in
Morocco at Leiden University in 1993. He holds the chair for Law and
Culture in Muslim Societies at Leiden University. The focus of his research is
Islamic law and society, with a particular interest in Morocco and Indonesia.
He is director of the Leiden University Centre for the Study of Islam and
Society (LUCIS), as well as of the Netherlands Interuniversity School for
Islamic Studies (NISIS, www.nisis.nl). His most recent publication is, with B.
Dupret, “L‘invention du droit musulman. Genèse et diffusion du positivisme
juridique dans le contexte normatif islamique”, in François Pouillon and Jean-
Claude Vatin (eds), Après l’orientalisme. L’Orient créé par l’Orient (Paris: Karthala,
2011).
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Maher Charif
Institut français du Proche-Orient, Damascus | [email protected]
Maher Charif studied at the Faculty of Arts and Humanities, Sorbonne
University in Paris, where he received his PhD in History. He currently works
as a researcher and professor at the French Institute of the Near East
(Institut français du Proche-Orient, IFPO) in Damascus and Beirout. Among
his recent publications are, with Sabrina Mervin, Modernités islamiques
(Damascus: IFPO, 2006) and L’évolution du concept de Jihad dans la pensée
islamique (Damascus: Dar al-Mada, 2008).
David Cook
Rice University | [email protected]
David Cook is associate professor of religious studies at Rice University and
is the author of five books, including Studies in Muslim Apocalyptic (Princeton:
Darwin, 2002), Understanding Jihad (Berkeley: University of California Press,
2005) and Martyrdom in Islam (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007),
and numerous articles about classical and contemporary Islam. His research
interests include apocalyptic movements and thought, contemporary radical
Islam, West African Islam and historical astronomy, and he is currently
working manuscript on contemporary Shi‘ite apocalyptic literature.
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Peter Just
Williams College, Williamstown | [email protected]
Peter Just is Professor of Anthropology and Chair of the Interdisciplinary
Studies Program at Williams College in Massachusetts, USA. He has
conducted ethnographic fieldwork in Java, Bali and Bima, NTB, Indonesia
and is the author of Dou Donggo Justice: Conflict and Morality in an Indonesian
Society as well as numerous articles.
Roel Meijer
Netherlands Institute of International Relations Clingendael and Radboud
University Nijmegen |[email protected]
Roel Meijer is senior research fellow at the Netherlands Institute of
International Relations Clingendael, where his fields of expertise are the
modern history of the Middle East and Islamist and Salafi movements,
especially in Iraq, Egypt and Saudi Arabia. He also teaches history of the
Middle East at Radboud University in Nijmegen and is head of the Arabic
section of the Middle East desk at the International Institute of Social
History in Amsterdam (IISH). He participates in a research project on
Salafism. Meijer is the editor of four anthologies on Modern Middle East
History.
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Raufu Mustapha
University of Oxford | [email protected]
Abdul Raufu Mustapha is a University Lecturer in African Politics at the
Oxford department of international development. He studied political science
at Ahmadu Bello University in Nigeria and at the University of Oxford. He is
the Principal Researcher of the Nigeria Research Network in Oxford, which
has been conducting, together with the Research and Policy Centre in Kano
(Nigeria) the Islam Research Project Abuja for the Dutch Foreign Ministry.
He is an assistant editor of Oxford Development Studies. His recent publications
include Turning Points in African Democracy edited with L. Whitfield (Suffolk &
Rochester, NY: James Currey, 2009) and Gulliver’s Troubles: Nigeria’s Foreign
Policy After the Cold War edited with A. Adekeye (Scottsville, South Africa:
University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, 2008). His research concerns identity
politics, the politics of rural communities, and the politics of democratization
in Africa.
Samer Rashwani
Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin | [email protected]
Samer Rashwani studied Islamic Sciences at Damascus University (BA, 1997).
In cooperation with a group of pan-Arabic young intellectuals, he founded a
new forum of critical Islamic thought (al-Multaka al-Fikri / Intellectual
Forum for Innovation) in 1998. Rashwani moved to Egypt to complete his
Qur’anic studies at the University of Cairo, receiving an MA in 2004 and a
PhD in 2007 for his dissertation Defending the Qu’an from the 3rd to the 5th
Century A.H. and Its Role in the Development of Qur’anic Sciences. Rashwani has
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been a lecturer at the Faculty of Sharia (Universities of Damascus and
Aleppo) since 2007. He has taught several courses in Hadith, Qur’anic studies
and methodology. He was a fellow of the EUME project in the
Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin in 2011/2012.
Olivier Roy
European University Institute, Florence | [email protected]
Olivier Roy is professor at the European University Institute in Florence,
Italy. He was previously a research director at the French National Center for
Scientific Research (CNRS) and a lecturer for both the School for Advanced
Studies in the Social Sciences (EHESS) and the Institut d’Études Politiques
de Paris (IEP). From 1984 to 2008, he has acted as a consultant to the French
Foreign Ministry. Roy has published widely on the subject of contemporary
Islam and politics. His ideas and publications about the ‘failure of political
Islam’ have been very influential. His latest publications include Secularism
Confronts Islam (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007).
Umar Ryad
Leiden University | [email protected]
Umar Ryad is assistant professor for the study of Islam in the modern world
at the Leiden Institute for the Study of Religions. He studied at al-Azhar
University in Cairo (BA Islamic Studies in English, 1998) and obtained his
MA degree in Islamic Studies (cum laude) from Leiden University (2001),
where he also received his PhD. His book Islamic Reformism and Christianity: A
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Critical Study of the Works of Muhammad Rashid Rida and his Associates (1898-
1935) (Leiden: Brill 2009), focuses on the interaction between Islam and
Christianity in the early twentieth century as reflected in the writings of the
Muslim scholar Sheikh Muhammad Rashid Rida (1865-1935). His current
research focuses on the dynamics of the networks of Islamic reformist and
pan-Islamist movements, Muslim polemics on Christianity, the history of
Christian missions in the modern Muslim World, and transnational Islam in
interwar Europe.
Shamil Shikhaliev
Russian Academy of Sciences | [email protected]
Shamil Shikhaliev is a senior scientific researcher at the Institute of History,
Archeology and Ethnography, Daghestan Scientific Center of the Russian
Academy of Sciences, and head of the department of Oriental manuscripts of
IIAE. His main fields of academic interest are Islam in Daghestan (medieval
and modern periods), notably Sufism, Islamic law, and history, Islamic
networks of education as well as the historical-philological study of Arabic
manuscripts.
Petra Sijpesteijn
Leiden University |[email protected]
Petra Sijpesteijn holds the chair of Arabic language and culture at Leiden
University. After obtaining her PhD in Near Eastern Studies from Princeton
University in 2004, she was a junior research fellow at Christ Church Oxford
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(2003-2007) and ‘chargée de recherche’ at the Institut de Recherche et
d’Histoire des textes at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique in
Paris (2007-present). She has widely published in the field of early Islamic
history and Arabic papyrology. Her book The Formation of a Muslim State will
appear next year (2013) with Oxford University Press.
Benjamin Soares
African Studies Centre, Leiden | [email protected]
Benjamin Soares is an anthropologist whose research interests include
religion and ‘modernity’, Islam, and religious encounters in West Africa. In
recent work, he has looked at the connections between changing modalities
of religious expression, different modes of belonging, and emergent social
imaginaries in colonial and postcolonial West Africa, especially in Mali. In
addition to ongoing research on religion, the public sphere, and media, he is
studying contemporary Muslim public intellectuals in West Africa.
Joas Wagemakers
Radboud University Nijmegen and Netherlands Institute of International
Relations Clingendael | [email protected]
Joas Wagemakers is assistant professor of Islamic Studies at Radboud
University Nijmegen, where he also conducts post-doctoral research on
Islamic activism in Jordan. He is also a senior research associate at the
Netherlands Institute of International Relations Clingendael. His research
focuses on the intellectual history of Islam since the 19th century and he has
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published widely on Salafi and Islamist ideology and movements. His latest
book appeared this year: A Quietist Jihadi: The Ideology and Influence of Abu
Muhammad al-Maqdisi (Cambridge University Press, 2012). Wagemakers also
co-edits ZemZem, a Dutch-language journal on the Middle East, North Africa
and Islam, and blogs at www.jihadica.com.
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USEFUL ADDRESSES
Conference venue
Leiden University
Campus The Hague
Koningin Julianaplein 10
The Hague
The Netherlands
+31 (0)70 800 9502
Tourist Information Office /
VVV The Hague
Spui 68
+31 (0)70 361 8860
www.denhaag.nl
LUCIS
Visiting address:
Matthias de Vrieshof 4 |room 0.11
Witte Singel 25 | Leiden
Postal address:
PO Box 9515
2300 RA Leiden
The Netherlands
Organising committee
Petra Sijpesteijn
Dorrit van Dalen
Josien Boetje
www.lucis.leidenuniv.nl
+31 (0)71 527 2628
Follow us on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/lucis.universiteitleiden.1
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Useful locations
1. Campus The Hague, Stichthage Offices (conference venue)
2. Tourist Information The Hague
3. IBIS Hotel City Centre The Hague