Date: July 23-24, 2021

Venue: Online (via Zoom)

This virtual conference is co-organized by Huda Fakhreddine (University of Pennsylvania), David Larsen (New York University), and Hany Rashwan (University of Birmingham), and hosted by the Oxford Comparative Criticism and Translation Research Centre (OCCT), University of Oxford, 23-24 July 2021.

The premodern Islamic world was multilingual and multicultural, and by necessity was continually engaged in comparative critical practices. Mapping the interconnected trajectories of these practices, everywhere they arose between Urdu, Persian, Turkish, Arabic, and other language traditions of Asia and Africa, is the aim of this conference. We invite scholars to employ methodologies based on direct engagement with primary sources that negotiate the multilingual Islamic world(s) in ways that are overlooked or misunderstood by Comparative Literature.

For most of Islamic intellectual history, the literary analysis of discourse has been carried out in the domain of balāghah, and its Arabic terms—e.g., sariqah (theft, but also intertextuality), muʿāraḍah (rivalry, but also parody), muṭābaqah (correspondence, but also antithesis), muwāzanah (collation, but also comparison) etc.—signify concepts and categories that are different from those of Western criticism. Likewise, the traditions of grammar, lexicography, poetic meter, Quranic exegesis, hadith criticism, jurisprudence, theology, philosophy, and mysticism developed their own Arabophone conceptual resources, which were applied throughout the Islamic world.

Topics

• Translation and non-translation in the Islamic world
• Translinguistic adaptations of genre and form
• Multilingual scholars and scholarly practice
• Nationalism and polyglossia
• Minorities, shibboleths, and Arabolects
• Multilingual lexicology and exegesis
• Catachresis and Creative Misreadings
• Textual practices, media, and reception

More information on: Oxford Comparative Criticism and Translation Research Centre