Events

Past Event

Columbia University Seminar on Religion and Writing: Jill Ross on Hebrew poetry from Medieval Aragon

November 12, 2020
5:30 PM - 6:30 PM
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Details

Because of Covid19 the meetings of the Columbia University Seminar 751 in Fall 2020 will be held on ZOOM.  Taking advantage of the digital format, speakers have been invited from outside the USA.  To accommodate different time zones, three meetings will be held midday, and only one in the early evening.  The first three meetings will take place on Thursdays, but in December we will convene on a Wednesday.  Arrangements may be subject to change because of the pandemic, and we apologize in advance for any inconvenience that this may cause.  If you wish to attend a meeting, please email our rapporteur Ms. Wilkening (abw2163 [at] columbia.edu). 

Separate invitations will be sent out for each meeting. For more information, see our website:https://researchblogs.cul.columbia.edu/islamicbooks/religionwriting/

Thursday, November 12, 2020, 5:30pm(NYC) Jill Ross (Center for Comparative Literature University of Toronto) “Words of a Desperate Man”: Poetics and Cultural Identity in a Late Medieval Hebrew Rhyming Dictionary from the Crown of Aragon,”

Dr. Ross' talk will discuss how Solomon ben Meshullam de Piera's rhyming dictionary Sefer imrei no’ash deploys linguistic formalism as a platform for cultural assertion, religious continuity and social cohesion in a period of intensifying religious persecution in the fourteenth-century Kingdom of Aragon.

Full Abstract: This seminar explores how the rhyming dictionary Sefer imrei no’ash (“Words of a desperate man”), written by the poet Solomon ben Meshullam de Piera in the late fourteenth-century Crown of Aragon, deploys linguistic formalism as a platform for cultural assertion, religious continuity and social cohesion in a period of intensifying religious persecution.  While Solomon’s dictionary is intended to encourage the vitality of Hebrew for the continuing composition of poetry, his engagement with rhyme is deeply indebted to the Romance, Occitan poetic culture in which he is steeped and whose influence he works hard to exclude or occlude.  I will situate the composition of the dictionary within the complex cultural matrix of literary theory and practice in the Crown of Aragon, demonstrating the degree to which De Piera’s appropriative adaptation draws on Occitan models, turning the poetries of “other peoples” to his own purpose of strengthening Jewish religious and cultural identity.

 

If you would like to attend Dr. Ross' talk, please RSVP to [email protected] by  Tuesday, November 10th.  

Columbia University encourages persons with disabilities to participate in its programs and activities. University Seminar participants with disabilities who anticipate needing accommodations may contact the Office of Disability Services at 212.854.2388 or [email protected]. Disability accommodations, including sign-language interpreters, are available on request. Requests for accommodations must be made two weeks in advance.

Thursday, October 1, 2020, 12 pm noon (NYC) – Ute Falasch (Independent Scholar, Berlin, Germany) – Creating a Sufi Hagiography in the Mughal World: ʿAbd al-Raḥmān Chishtī’s Mirʾāt-i Madārī (1654)

Hagiographical works play a significant role in the formation of the narrative that constitutes a holy person, because they offer an interpretation of aspects of their life, such as biographical details, the expressions of their piety, teachings, or miraculous powers.  With regard to Sufi hagiographies in the Mughal period, these works contributed significantly to the local identity formation of Indian Muslims: they connected Indian Sufis with eminent Sufis in the larger Muslim world, while emphasizing the importance of a Sufi saint’s own local lineage.  Undoubtedly, the writing of such a work requires creativity on the part of its author.  

The seminar will focus on the Persian manuscript titled Mirʾāt-i Madārī (lit. “The mirror of Madār”) which is dated 1654 and was written by ʿAbd al-Raḥmān Chishtī (d. 1683).  The Mirʾāt-i Madārī is the first hagiography, which deals exclusively with Badīʿ al-Dīn Shāh Madār (d. 1434), the founder of the Madāriyya Sufi brotherhood in North India. ʿAbd al-Raḥmān Chishtī took the creative writing process to new heights by inventing a source that allowed him to attribute a Jewish lineage to Shāh Madār instead of his descent from the Prophet Muḥammad as transmitted among the Madāriyya.

We will examine both ʿAbd al-Raḥmān Chishtī’s reasoning for Shāh Madār’s Jewish lineage and his possible intentions as a member of the Chishtī brotherhood for writing a hagiography of the founder of another brotherhood. In order to better understand how ʿAbd al-Raḥmān Chishtī represents Shāh Madār as a holy man, we will discuss earlier sources for Shāh Madār and explore how his hagiography is shaped by the socio-cultural context of Islamicate South Asia during the Mughal period.  The question of how the assertion of Shāh Madār’s Jewish lineage was received by ʿAbd al-Raḥmān Chishtī’s contemporaries and beyond will allow us to broaden the inquiry from historical Sufi communities to academic research about Sufism up to the twenty-first century.  With regard to the latter, the Mirʾāt-i Madārī offers an example for the analysis of the particular mechanisms of knowledge production in western academia.