The Alireza Ahmadian Lecture in Iranian and Persianate Studies presents: Translating Persian, Universalizing Islam: The Case of Rumi’s “Moses and the Shepherd” on March 8, 2025.
The tale of Moses and the Shepherd is one of the best-known stories from Rumi’s Masnavi. In this lecture, Austin O’Malley examines how the episode has been translated and understood in English-speaking environments, paying special attention to the ways in which its form and meaning have been changed to accord with the universalizing religious expectations of the modern era. A close translation of the Persian text, he suggests, frustrates this surreptitiously Protestant universalism and thereby makes our own assumptions visible.
Speaker
Austin O’Malley is an assistant professor of Persian literature at the University of Chicago. His monograph, The Poetics of Spiritual Instruction: Farid al-Din ʿAttar and Persian Sufi Didacticism, was published by Edinburgh University Press in 2023.
Discussant
Francesca Chubb-Confer‘s research takes an interdisciplinary approach to the fields of religious studies and comparative literature to advance the study of Islamic literary and poetic traditions, particularly in South Asia and the Persianate world. With interests in Sufism, poetry, religion and colonialism, and translation, her current book project focuses on Muhammad Iqbal, the early 20th-century reformer, philosopher, and poet, and analyzes how the relationship between form and content in his work navigates between classical Islamic tradition and the demands of colonial modernity. Francesca’s published work has appeared in the International Journal of Islam in Asia; Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East; and Afghanistan.
Registration is required. Register here:
https://ubc.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_mw-Vxd26S-2Ki8kMCFH-Cw
