NYU Silsila: "THE MAQAMAT TRADITION AND THE PRE-MODERN ROOTS OF ARAB MODERNISM"

Maurice Pomerantz, NYU Abu Dhabi
Matthew Keegan, Barnard College
Saleem Al-Bahloly, Independent Scholar
Elizabeth Rauh, American University in Cairo
Anneka Lenssen, UC Berkeley

One of the most popular texts chosen for illustration in the medieval Islamic world was the Maqamat (Assemblies) of Al-Hariri of Basra (d. 1122). The text combines linguistic pyrotechnics with morally ambiguous tales of a roguish protagonist who beguiles and charms through verbal dexterity. The accompanying images are among the most engaging ever produced in the medieval Arab world. The most celebrated illustrated copy of the manuscript, famed for the conceptual sophistication, scale and quality of its images, was calligraphed and painted by Yahya al-Wasiti in Iraq (probably Baghdad) in 1237 CE.

The genre of the maqama left a rich legacy to modern literary traditions in the Arab world. Similarly, the images in the 1237 manuscript (now in the Bibliothèque nationale in Paris) proved inspirational to a wide range of artists and artistic movements across the modern Arab world from the Maghreb to Iraq. Both phenomena are marked by numerous paradoxes: the idea that the genesis for Arab visual or literary modernisms might be sought in medieval genres and idioms; the reception of figural paintings by modern champions of abstraction; or, the fact that most artists could access the medieval paintings that so inspired them only in reproduction.

The workshop attempts to complicate the temporalities of Arab modernism arising from the continuities and disjunctions that mark these kinds of productive paradoxes, exploring a remarkable series of transtemporal intersections between literary and visual cultures.

11.00-11.15 Introduction, Finbarr Barry Flood, Silsila/NYU

11.15-11.45 Maurice Pomerantz, NYU Abu Dhabi, “'On Sight and Insight in the Maqāmāt"

11.45-12.15 Matthew Keegan, Barnard College of Columbia University, "Islamic Commentaries on al-Hariri's Maqamat and the Idea of Literature"

12.15-12.45 Saleem Al-Bahloly, Independent Scholar, "The Two Lives of MS. 5847"

12.45-1.15 Elizabeth Rauh, American University in Cairo, "Towards an Active Witnessing: Artistic Experiments with Islamic Heritage in 1960s Iraq"

1.15-1.45 Anneka Lenssen, UC Berkeley, "Linear and Atomistic: Louis Massignon on the Maqamat"

1.45-2.30 Questions and Discussion

Paper abstracts and further details.
 

Finbarr Barry Flood, Silsila/NYU

Maurice A. Pomerantz is Associate Professor of Literature at New York University Abu Dhabi. He is author of Licit Magic: The Life and Letters of Ṣāḥib b. ʿAbbād (d. 385/995) (Leiden: Brill, 2017) and a forthcoming study on the Maqāmāt of al-Hamaḏhānī with Bilal Orfali. He is an editor of the Library of Arabic Literature published by New York University Press.

Matthew L. Keegan is the Moinian Assistant Professor of Asian and Middle Eastern Cultures at Barnard College of Columbia University. His research focuses on the intersections of Islamic thought, Arabic poetry, and Arabic storytelling traditions. He works on tricksters, commentaries, riddles, anthologies, and Islamic legal writing from the pre-colonial period. He has served as an Assistant Professor at American University of Sharjah and as a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Freie Universität Berlin.

Saleem Al-Bahloly is a cultural anthropologist based in California. He is writing a book about how the history of Islam has been re-encountered in the practice of artists in Iraq as an archive of concepts for responding to a modern problem of meaning.

Elizabeth Rauh (PhD, University of Michigan, 2020) is Assistant Professor of Modern Art and Visual Cultures at the American University in Cairo. Specializing in modern arts and visual cultures of Iran, Iraq, and Western Asia, her work examines artist engagements with Islamic heritage, popular image practices and technologies in Shi`i Islam, and arts of the twentieth-century “Shi`i Left.” She also pursues research in ecological art practices in the history of the Persian Gulf, such as in her forthcoming study: “Experiments in Eden: Midcentury Artist Voyages into the Mesopotamian Marshlands” (Journal of Contemporary Iraq & the Arab World, Summer 2021). Her research has been funded by The Academic Research Institute in Iraq, the Darat al Funun Center for Modern and Contemporary Arab Art, the Max Weber Foundation, and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Anneka Lenssen is an Associate Professor of Global Modern Art at UC-Berkeley. She is co-editor (with Nada Shabout and Sarah Rogers) of the anthology Modern Art in the Arab World: Primary Documents (New York: MoMA, 2018), and author of Beautiful Agitation: Modern Painting and Politics in Syria (Oakland: University of California Press, 2020).

Co-sponsored by NYU's Hagop Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies.

Date: Friday, March 26th
Time: 11:00am-2:30pm
Location: Online

This event will take place as a live Webinar at 11:00am ET (New York time). To register as an attendee, please use the following link:
https://nyu.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_4Bi4IaqHTGCgZxhXbBc_DQ
Only registered attendees will be able to access this event.

Silsila: Center for Material Histories is an NYU center dedicated to material histories of the Islamicate world. Each semester we hold a thematic series of lectures and workshops, which are open to the public. Details of the Center can be found at: 

http://as.nyu.edu/content/nyu-as/as/research-centers/silsila.html