Beyond the Rose and the Nightingale: What Makes Islamic Literature Islamic?

Announced by the University of Pittsburgh

April 1st and 2nd, 9:30am to 5:00pm. In-person and broadcast online over Zoom webinar.

This conference focuses on Islamic literatures, in the broadest sense, as a means of investigating the concept of “the Islamic.” By exploring Islamic literatures in disparate temporalities, geographies and linguistic spheres, what can we say about how Islam and "Islamic-ness" are articulated? How do such particularities shape the notion of an Islamic universal and how are they themselves constrained by it? And -- inasmuch as literary categories of genre, language, form and context are real -- how do they reflect diachronic stability and instability as well as synchronic consonance and dissonance? Through the exploration of such questions in the work of twelve experts covering a range of literary and linguistic cultures and time periods, this conference promises both to further our understanding of literary and cultural production in the Islamic world and to center Islamic cultures as productive contexts for intellectual inquiry on important topics of broader scholarly interest.

Conference program and details for attendance will be emailed to registrants.

Sponsored by the Penn Forum for Global Islamic Studies, the South Asia Center, the Middle East Center, the Wolf Humanities Center, and the Departments of Religious Studies and of History.

Image: Daisy Rockwell, My Sister’s Hand in Mine 1, Acrylic on wooden panel, 2019

Register here: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/beyond-the-rose-and-the-nightingale-what-ma...