The Alireza Ahmadian Lecture in Iranian and Persianate Studies presents: Debating Islam at the Court of the Great Mughal on February 22, 2025.
How did Muslims in early modern South Asia debate what constituted correct Muslim practice? This presentation explores the intersection of politics and piety by examining religious debates around the arrival of a Prophetic relic to the court of the Mughal emperor Akbar in the late sixteenth century.
Speaker
Usman Hamid (Northwestern University) is a historian of Islam in early modern South Asia with its connections across the Persianate and Indian Ocean worlds. His research explores the devotional and cultural histories of Muslim communities, focusing on the discursive and material expressions of their lived experiences. His current book project examines the role of early modern travel between North India and the Hejaz on Muslim discourses and practices of devotion focusing on the Prophet Muhammad. By examining the histories of the Prophet’s textual and material traces, the work shows how circulation of books, people, and objects gave rise to new and times overlapping religious sensibilities and subjectivities. Usman Hamid received his PhD from the University of Toronto and taught at Hamilton College before joining Northwestern University as Assistant Professor of Religious Studies. He has published on relics of the Prophet Muhammad, gender and politics in late-15th century Iran and Central Asia, and early modern circulation between South Asia and Iran.
Discussant
Sajjad Nejatie (PhD, University of Toronto) is Assistant Professor in the Department of History and Sociology at The University of British Columbia Okanagan. His current research focuses on processes of empire- and state-building in the early modern Persianate world, how the activities and ideologies of polities in this region are commemorated in the historiography, and the ways in which pre-modern histories are re-imagined and re-presented in modern nationalist discourses.
Registration is required. Register here:
https://ubc.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_A8jdwK4_Rp-JfXgK-6kDNQ
