2008-2009 IPS Lectures

MAHMOUD EL-GAMAL: "Islamic Law and Finance: Regulatory Substance and Incoherent Jurisprudence" [PDF]

JAN 9, 3:30 - 5:00 pm, Room 327*, Social Sciences Building                  (*NOTE: Lecture location has been moved from room 119)

Mahmoud A. El-Gamal, Ph.D is Professor of Economics and Statistics at Rice University in Houston, TX, where he is currently Chair of the Department of Economics and also holds the endowed Chair in Islamic Economics, Finance, and Management. Before joining Rice in 1998, he was an Associate Professor of Economics at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. He has also worked as an Assistant Professor of Economics at the University of Rochester, and the California Institute of Technology, and as an Economist in the Middle East Department at the International Monetary Fund, responsible for the West Bank and Gaza Strip during the promising years of the Oslo Accords. In the second half of 2004, he served as Scholar in Residence on Islamic Finance at the U.S. Department of Treasury. He has published extensively in the areas of econometrics, economic dynamics, risk and uncertainty, financial economics and econometrics, economics of the Middle East, and the economic analysis of Islamic Law. His recent books include a 1500-page translation Financial Transactions in Islamic Jurisprudence, Dar al-Fikr, 2003, and the Choice Magazine (outstanding academic title, 2007) award-winning Islamic Finance: Law, Economics, and Practice, Cambridge University Press, 2006. Here is a paper from his forthcoming entry in the New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics [PDF].

Cosponsor: History of Political Economy (HOPE) workshop series

ASIM KHWAJA: "Estimating the Impact of the Hajj: Religion and      Tolerance in Islam’s Global Gathering"

FEB 18, 4:30-6:00pm, Room 311, Social Sciences Building [PDF]

Asim Ijaz Khwaja is Associate Professor of Public Policy at Harvard Universitys Kennedy School of Government. His areas of interest include economic development, corporate finance, education, political economy, industrial organization, contract theory, mechanism design, and computational economics. Combining fieldwork, micro-level empirical analysis, and theory, his recent work ranges from understanding political and informational constraints in emerging financial markets to examining the private education market in low-income countries. He received BS degrees in economics and in mathematics with computer science from MIT and a PhD in economics from Harvard. A Pakistani citizen, Khwaja was born in London, U.K., lived for eight years in Kano, Nigeria, the next eight in Lahore, Pakistan, and the last sixteen years in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He continues to enjoy interacting with people around the globe.

Cosponsor: Applied Microeconomics workshop series

HAIDER ALA HAMOUDI: "The Death of Islamic Law"

MAR 2 , 4:30 - 6:00, Room 4042, Duke University School of Law

Professor Hamoudi received his B.Sc. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1993, with a double major in Physics and Humanities with a Near Eastern Studies Concentration. He was both a member of the Physics Honor Society, Sigma Pi Sigma, and a Burchard Scholar for Excellence in the Humanities and Social Sciences. In 1996, Professor Hamoudi received his J.D. from Columbia Law School, where he was a Harlan Fiske Stone Scholar, and later received his doctorate from the same institution, with a dissertation on understanding the shari’a from a legal perspective. After graduating, Professor Hamoudi served as a law clerk to the Honorable Constance Baker Motley in the Southern District of New York and then worked as an Associate at the law firm of Debevoise & Plimpton. In 2003, Professor Hamoudi went to Iraq and acted as both a legal advisor to the Finance Committee of the Iraq Governing Council, as well as a Program Manager for a project managed by the International Human Rights Law Institute of DePaul University School of Law to improve legal education in Iraq. Professor Hamoudi has written a memoir of his experiences in Iraq entitled Howling in Mesopotamia.

Professor Hamoudi's scholarship focuses on commercial law, Middle Eastern and Iraqi law, and Islamic finance. He has written for numerous law reviews on these subjects, spoken at conferences sponsored by the MacMillan Center at Yale University, the American Association of Law Schools and the New York City Bar Association, and given interviews to various news organizations including ABC News, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, the McNeil-Lehrer News Hour Online and the New York Law Journal. Professor Hamoudi is also the author of a blog on Islamic Law entitled Islamic Law in Our Times. Here is an abstract for his paper entitled "The Death of Islamic Law." A draft of the paper is linked to the talk title above.

 

Cosponsor: Center for International and Comparative Law

 

MICHAEL ROSS: "Oil and Islam"

MAR 16, 12:00 - 1:30 pm, Room 201, Flowers Building

Michael Ross studies a range of issues that concern the developing world; he has a special interest in political economy, natural resource issues, democratization, and the states of Southeast Asia. His book Timber Booms and Institutional Breakdown in Southeast Asia was published in 2001 by Cambridge University Press, in their Political Economy of Institutions and Decisions series. His current work includes research on the problems of states that have an abundance of natural resources (the “resource curse”); the breakdown of authoritarianism in Indonesia; Indonesia's conflicts in Aceh and Irian Jaya; and the influence of taxation on democratization.

Cosponsor: Comparative Politics workshop series

 

MANSOOR MOADDEL: " Historicizing Muslim Exceptionalism: Islamic Modernism versus Fundamentalism"

MAR 27, 12:00 - 1:30pm, Room 139, Social Sciences Building

Dr. Moaddel studies culture, ideology, political conflict, revolution and social change. His work currently focuses on the causes and consequences of values and attitudes of the Middle Eastern and Islamic publics. He has carried out values surveys in Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Jordan, Morocco, and Saudi Arabia. His previous research project analyzed the determinants of ideological production in the Islamic world. He teaches sociology of religion, ideology, revolution, Islam and the Middle East. He also teaches statistics and research methods.

Cosponsor: Sociology Department

MOHSEN KADIVAR: "Islamic Reform through Human Rights: Legal and Theological Issues"

APR 2, 4:30 - 6:00pm, Room 136, Social Sciences Building

Kadivar is Associate Professor at the Iranian Institute of Philosophy in Tehran and the Visiting Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Virginia for 2008-09. Born in Iran in 1959, he obtained the certificate of Ijtihad (the highest level in Islamic Studies) from Grand Ayatollah H.A. Montazeri at Qom Seminary in 1997 and his Ph.D. in Islamic Philosophy and Theology from Tarbiat Modarres University in Tehran in 1999. Kadivar has authored 13 books (in Persian and Arabic) and over 50 articles in Islamic Studies (Philosophy, theology, jurisprudence and political thought). Kadivar's writing on the theology of freedom has been critical of the doctrine of Velayat-e Faqih (Rule of the Supreme Jurist), an innovation in Shi'te political thought instituted in Iran by Ayatollah Khomeini in 1979. This controversial theory places temporal and spiritual power in the hands of the most qualified religious scholar. Kadivar, together with an increasing number of religious scholars in Iran, have questioned the religious authenticity of this form of autocratic rule. In 1999, Kadivar was convicted by the Special Court for Clergy and sentenced to eighteen months in prison on charges of having spread false information about Iran's "sacred system of the Islamic Republic" and of helping enemies of the Islamic revolution.

Cosponsors: Religion Department and Duke Human Rights Center

 

 

                                 ISLAM IN THE PUBLIC SQUARE: FALL 2008

LISA BLAYDES: "One Man, One Vote, One Time? Modeling the Prospects for Spontaneous Democratization in the Middle East"

SEPT 15, 12:00 - 1:30, Breedlove Room, Perkins Lib., West Campus

Lisa Blaydes teaches Political Science at Stanford University. During 2008-9 Blaydes will be an Academy Scholar at the Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies. She is currently working on a book manuscript entitled Competition without Democracy: Elections and Distributive Politics in Mubarak's Egypt.

Her research investigates the determinants of durable authoritarianism as well as the impact of political, economic, and religious institutions on the Islamic world.

Cosponsor: Political Science, Comparative Politics Workshop

PDF: "One Man, One Vote, One Time?"

 

MALIKA ZEGHAL: “Bringing the State Back in the Analysis of Political Islam: Methodological Reflections on Some Arab Cases” [PDF]

SEPT 26, 2008, 1:00 - 2:30, McKinney Conf. Rm, 329 Soc/Psych Bldg, West Campus (light lunch served at 12:30)

Malika Zeghal is aprofessor of political scientist at the University of Chicago who studies religion through the lens of Islam and power. She is particularly interested in Islamist movements and in the institutionalization of Islam in the Muslim world, with special interests in Egypt and North Africa in the postcolonial period and in Muslim diasporas in North America and Western Europe. She has more general interests in the circulation and role of religious ideologies in situations of conflict and/or dialogue.

She has published a study of central religious institutions in Egypt (Gardiens de l'Islam. Les oulémas d'al-Azhar dans l'Egypte contemporaine Presses de Sciences Po, 1996), and a volume on Morocco (Les islamistes marocains: le défi à la monarchie La Découverte, 2005), the English revision and translation of which (Islamism in Morocco: Religion, Authoritarianism, and Electoral Politics [Markus Wiener, 2008]) has won the French Voices-Pen Amercan Center Award. She has edited with Marc Gaborieau a special issue of the French review Archives des Sciences Sociales des Religions, Archives de Sciences Sociales des Religions, Paris, éditions CNRS, 49ème année, no 125, Janvier-Mars 2004 [125, 2004], on religious authorities in Islam, as well as a special issue of the Intellectuels de l’Islam contemporain : Nouvelles générations, nouveaux débats, Malika Zeghal ed., Revue des Mondes Musulmans et de la Méditerranée, no 123, Aix-en-Provence, Presses de l’Université de Provence, in press, on new intellectual debates in contemporary Islam. She is now working on a book on states, secularism, and Islam in the contemporary Arab world, forthcoming at Princeton University Press.

Cosponsor: Sociology workshop

PDF of "Bringing the State Back . . . "

 

ALBERTO BISIN, "'Bend It Like Beckham': Identity, Socialization, and Assimilation" [PDF]

OCT 22, 4:00-5:30,

NOTE ROOM CHANGE: 139 Social Sciences, West Campus

Alberto Bisin is Professor of Economics at New York University and fellow of IGIER at Bocconi University and of CIREQ at the University of Montreal. He is also fellow of the Center for Experimental Social Sciences (CESS) at NYU. He is Associate Editor of the Journal of Economic Theory, of Economic Theory, and of Research in Economics. He holds a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago, obtained in 1994. He is founding Editor of Noisefromamerika.org. His main contributions are in the fields of General Equilibrium Theory, Financial Economics, Behavioral Economics, and Social Economics. He is a co-editor of the forthcoming Handbook of Social Economics.

Cosponsor: Economics, Applied Microeconomics Workshop

 

SABIHA KHEMIR: “Islamic Art: A Celebration of Unity and Diversity,” OCT 27, 4:00-5:30, John Hope Franklin Center, Rm 240

"The Art of Calligraphy: Beauty and Significance,"                                  OCT 28, 4:00-5:30, East Duke Parlors (Pink Parlor), East Campus

"Reading from a Historical Novel: 'The Blue Manuscript'"                       OCT 29, 5:00-6:30, 107 Friedl, East Campus

Sabiha Al Khemir was born in Tunisia and obtained her M.A. (1986) and Ph.D (1990) in Islamic Art history and Archaeology from London University. She was post Doctoral fellow at the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, US and has lectured world wide on Islamic art and Islamic culture. She has taught Islamic art in the British Museum, London and has worked as a consultant and museum director. She is also a writer and artist and her published work includes fiction: Waiting in The Future for The Past to Come (1993), The Absent Mirror (2005) and The Blue Manuscript (2008); cultural essays: Mobile Identity and the Focal Distance of Memory (2004); several publications on Islamic Art, including an essay in Al Andalus: Islamic Arts of Spain to accompany the exhibition at the Alhambra and The Metropolitan Museum (1992), and a catalogue to accompany an Islamic Art exhibition at the Louvre: From Cordoba to Samarqand, Masterpieces from the Museum of Islamic Art in Doha (2006). Her book illustration includes The Island of Animals (1994) and the cover of Naguib Mahfouz's novel Respected Sir. She has also written and presented television documentaries.

Cosponsors: Art, Art History and Visual Studies; Asian and Middle Eastern Studies; Women's Studies

 

DAVID COOK:  "Abu Musa'b al-Suri, The Apocalyptic Theorist and Abu Musa'b al-Zarqawi, the Apocalyptic Practitioner"

OCT 29, 2008, 12:00 - 1:30, Breedlove Room, 205 Perkins, West Campus

David Cook is assistant professor of religious studies at Rice University, specializing in Islam. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 2001. His areas of specialization include early Islamic history and development, Muslim apocalyptic literature and movements, historical astronomy, and Judeo-Arabic literature. His first book, Studies in Muslim Apocalyptic, was published by Darwin Press in 2003 as part of the series Studies in Late Antiquity and Early Islam. Two further books, Understanding Jihad and Contemporary Muslim Apocalyptic Literature, were published in 2005. Cook has completed Martyrdom in Islam for Cambridge University Press (released in January 2007) and is working on a book (together with Olivia Allison), Understanding and Confronting Suicide Attacks, focusing on the policy ramifications of radical Muslim suicide attacks for the United States.

Cosponsor: Political Science, Political Theory Seminar

 

MOHAMMAD FADEL:  “The True, the Good and the Reasonable: The Theological and Ethical Roots of Public Reason in Islamic Law" [PDF]

NOV 5, 2008:  4:00-5:30, Breedlove Room, Perkins Lib., West Campus

Mohammad Fadel is a professor at the University of Toronto Faculty ofLaw. Prior to joining academia, he was a General Practice Associate in the New York office of the law firm of Sullivan & Cromwell. Professor Fadel has served as a law clerk for the Honorable Anthony A. Alaimo, United States District Court Judge for the Southern District of Georgia and the Honorable Paul V. Niemeyer, Judge for the United States Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals. Professor Fadel earned his J.D. from the University of Virginia School of Law in May 1999, where he was a member and Articles Development Editor of the Virginia Law Review, a John M. Olin Fellow in Law and Economics, and Order of the Coif. Professor Fadel earned his BA in Government and Foreign Affairs from the University of Virginia with High Honors, and received a Ph.D. in Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations from the University of Chicago where he wrote his dissertation on legal process in medieval Islamic law. In addition to giving regular public lectures in Islamic law, he has published numerous papers in this area.

Cosponsor: Philosophy

 

RANDI DEGUILHEM: "Waqfs and Property Rights in Ottoman Damascus" [PDF]                                                                    

NOV 20: 4:00 - 5:30

327 Social Sciences, West Campus

Randi Deguilhem is a Permanent Senior Researcher (CR1 habilitée) with the CNRS (National Center for Scientific Research) at IREMAM (Institute for Research and Study on the Arab and Muslim World), Aix-en-Provence. She holds a PhD from NYU and a habilitation from the U. of Aix-Marseille. She has lived for a number of years in Damascus both in the 1980s (Fulbright-Hays recipient) and in the 1990s (researcher at IFEAD) and returns every year for her research. She has been directed a doctoral seminar in Middle East history at the MMSH in Aix-en-Pce. She is past president (2001-2003) of the Syrian Studies Association, former scientific coordinator (1997-2001) of the Individual and Society in the Mediterranean Muslim World ESF research program and Editor-in-Chief of The Islamic Mediterranean series, London, IB Tauris. She has published on a variety of topics, with a particular interest on the pious foundations in modern and contemporary Syria, the intellectual life and educational systems in late Ottoman Damascus and on the French Secular Mission in Mandate Syria. Among her most notable publications: Le waqf dans l’espace islamique. Outil de pouvoir socio-politique, ed. Randi Deguilhem, IFEAD, Damascus, 1995 in which she has written 2 chapters; “The wakf in the Ottoman Empire until 1914”, Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2000, pp. 87-92; “Reflections on the Secularisation of Education in the 19th Century Ottoman Empire: The Syrian Provinces”, The Great Ottoman-Turkish Civilisation, Ankara, Yeni Turkiye, 2000, pp. 662-668; “Turning Syrians into Frenchmen: the cultural politics of a French non-governmental organization in French Mandate Syria (1920-67) – the French Secular Mission Schools”, Islam and Christian-Muslim Relations, vol. 13, n° 4, 2002, pp. 449-460