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Columbia University Seminar on Religion and Writing: Ornament and Meaning in the Carpet Pages of Sephardic Codices

April 21, 2021
12:00 PM - 1:30 PM
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The Bible and the Banker’s Box: Ornament and Meaning in the Carpet Pages of Sephardic Codices.

This study emerges out of a collision between two formidable strands of inquiry in the discipline of art history: the phenomenon known as the manuscript carpet page and the topic of nonfigural ornament.  In little of the eloquent writing devoted to these subjects does Jewish art figure prominently.  Nor, until recently, have specialists in Jewish art history been eager participants in theoretical or cross-cultural considerations of form that might shed light on their development and meaning in multi-confessional societies such as medieval Iberia.  Thus, the ornamental carpet pages of Iberian Hebrew Bibles (c.1260-c.1320) remain a relatively unexamined subject.  While the schemata found in these Bibles are Islamic in derivation, it remains challenging to isolate sources for particular patterns.  My paper will examine the close visual correspondence between a carpet page in a Bible associated with the workshop Joshua Ibn Gaon (BNF MS hébreu 21, Tudela c.1300; a digital surrogate of the entire codex is available Open-Access on Gallica at: https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b8538800c) and an ivory banker’s box – of unknown provenance – in Ourense Cathedral.  In so doing, it links investigations regarding the meaning of ornament and the development of the Hebrew Bible codex in Iberia

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

If you would like to attend Dr. Harris’s talk, please RSVP to [email protected] by Wednesday, April 14th.

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.

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