| Reprinted from the Middle East Studies
Association Bulletin, Summer 2001 (with changes in orthography to HTML standards). Copyright 2001 by the Middle East Studies Association of North America |
| Winner, Humanities The Legal-Theoretical Content of the Risala of Muhammad B. Idris Al-Shafi’i Joseph E. Lowry, University of Pennsylvania Shafi’i’s Risala is generally thought to represent the very first work on legal theory in the Islamic legal tradition. Yet, despite its widely recognized importance, its actual content has received only superficial attention. Most students of it have contented themselves with reducing its message to a four-part outline (Qur’an, Sunna, ijma and ijtihad/qiyas) and have completely ignored the many concrete examples of legal reasoning offered in it by the author to illustrate the application of his theory. A comparison of these examples of legal reasoning with the theoretical claims made in the Risala reveals a tightly constructed, highly systematic theory of law. The entire Risala is organized around Shafi’i’s concept of the bayan, the notion that all law is reducible to a finite number of combinations of Qur’an and Sunna. Shafi’i’s major hermeneutic rubrics—amm/khass, naskh, jumla/nass, ikhtilaf al-hadith, nahy, and ijtihad/qiyas—are all subsumable under these categories of the bayan. Shafi’i’s example problems illustrate the application of his hermeneutic rubrics, which, in turn, prove the validity of his use of the bayan as an overarching description of the law as a whole. |
| Honorable Mention, Humanities The Satanic Verses Incident in the Memory of the Early Muslim Community An Analysis of the Early Riwayahs and Their Isnads Mohammed Shahab Ahmed, Princeton University This dissertation is an attempt to study the place of the Satanic verses incident in the memory of the early Muslim community on the life of the Prophet Muhammad. The Satanic verses incident or qissat al-gharaniq is the occasion on which Muhammad is reported to have mistaken words of Satanic suggestion as being Divine Revelation. The historicity of the Satanic verses incident is rejected by modern Muslims as violating the orthodox theological concept of the Prophet as the infallible (ma`sum) bearer of Divine Revelation, and as having been transmitted by isnads that are considered unreliable by Hadith methodology. Nonetheless, the incident is reported in the early Muslim sources. In this dissertation, all the available early reports (thirty-seven) on the Satanic verses incident are collected. The respective texts and isnads of the reports are subjected to individual and comparative analysis aimed at dating the reports, identifying the individual scholars who transmitted them, locating the reports in terms of geographical circulation, and understanding how the early community viewed the incident. This study concludes that the Satanic verses incident constituted a standard element in the historical memory of the Muslim community in the first 150 years of Islam, and was recorded by almost all prominent scholars working in the fields of tafsir and sirah-maghazi. These tafsir and sirah-maghazi scholars did not transmit reports in accordance with the isnad methodology of the scholars of the Hadith movement which rose to prominence in the second half of the second century. The reports of the incident enjoyed wide geographical circulation during the first 105 year of Islam, when the incident was viewed as doctrinally unobjectionable. The incident illustrates a concept of the Prophet Muhammad prevalent among the early Muslims: that of a man whose own understanding of his Prophetic mission developed only gradually, in the course of which development he was subject to error and Divine correction. This dissertation constitutes the necessary first step towards a larger project aimed at tracing the development of Muslim attitudes towards the Satanic verses from the earliest period to the modern day. |
| Winner, Social Sciences Plastic Sandals, Tea and Time: Shop Floor Politics and Culture in Egypt Samer Shehata, Princeton University This dissertation examines shop floor culture and politics in Egypt. I analyze how working class identity emerges at the point of production; how ‘economic relations’ inside the factory are simultaneously relations of signification and meaning; and how the production of things is, at the same time, the production of categories of identity, patterns of interacting and understandings of self and other. What many have taken for granted—individuals becoming conscious of themselves as workers’ with distinct identities and interests—must, in fact, be explained. People do not become proletarians simply by entering factories or because of the positions they occupy in the division of labor. The question, therefore, becomes how is proletarian identity constructed? Through participant-observation, working as a winding machine operator in two Egyptian textile factories, I found that the social relations in production are essential in determining how individuals come to understand themselves and their interests. The way the factory is organized profoundly shapes how individuals come to think of themselves and others. ‘Worker’ is a category of identity whose substantive content is produced and reproduced daily through both material and discursive practices. Social class turns out to be a system of meaning as well as a system of production. In the factory, small, everyday, mundane occurrences and practices that workers experience in common (plastic sandals, tea, and time, for example)—seemingly insignificant in themselves—serve as crucial rituals in a continuous process of class formation. These common experiences and the shared culture they generate are the invisible cement that make collective identity possible. The dissertation explores what class means concretely for ordinary Egyptian factory workers and provides, for the first time, a detailed account of the texture and fabric of their lives. Through an ethnographic analysis of everyday life inside the factory, the dissertation presents a unique perspective on the micro-dynamics of group formation, organization and collective action. |
| Honorable Mention, Social Sciences Genealogical Figures in an Arabian Indian Ocean Diaspora Engseng Ho, The University of Chicago This study concerns a history of diasporic experience. It pays attention to representations of the past which give shape to that history in consciousness. Genealogies are such representations. They are found as prose narrations, charts, chants, performed liturgy, and poetry. These provide a discursive ground on which history may be traversed and explored in different directions, over and over again. In genealogical travel, one sees new places and encounters other peoples. In it one even finds strangers: the past is indeed a foreign country. Genealogy cultivates an ethnographic sensibility, making the foreign familiar. The dissertation examines episodes in a diasporic history via the forms of a genealogical tradition. The presentation begins in the homeland of Hadramawt in Yemen, in the ethnographic present of the 1990s, then moves abroad, tracing the curve of the Hadrami diaspora around the Indian Ocean in South and Southeast Asia between the fifteenth and twentieth centuries CE. By examining articulations between mobile groups in historical and diasporic space simultaneously, the dissertation demonstrates how genealogy provides a culturally—and transculturally—coherent discourse for articulating relations between groups brought into new relations of domination, taxation, religious identity, kinship, clientage, civil intercourse, and spatial cohabitation. Genealogy serves as a language for negotiating cultural boundaries and navigating personal intimacies. As texts created within the historico-geographical movement of diaspora itself, genealogies challenge us to understand both their historical content and their cultural form. The study which emerges from this research is an exercise in what might be called ethnographic history. |
| Notices of the Best Dissertation of the Year Award Foundation for Iranian Studies (1998-1999 & 1999-2000) The Foundation for Iranian Studies is pleased to announce that the Committee on the Selection of Best Dissertation of the Year on a Topic of Iranian Studies has chosen Dr. Negar Mottahedeh’s dissertation, “Representing the Unpresentable: Historical Images of Reform from the Qajars to the Islamic Republic of Iran,” submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of the University of Minnesota, as the recipient of the Foundation’s annual Ph.D. dissertation award for the academic year 1998-1999. In making its decision, the Committee noted, in part, “exceptional contribution to the field of Iranian Studies through an imaginative and innovative approach to the study of culture, nation, and self…creative use of text and image as intellectual and artistic devices to translate and decode expressive forms of Iranian national behavior…clear statement of the study’s problematic and judicious use of method to relate general theory to specific arguments…original use of historical and sociological data to embed image and intellection in history and society…efficient use of primary source material to elucidate the historical meaning of a religious group’s impulse to reform…sensitivity to signification, symbolism, and nuance in explicating women and modernization in the Iranian culture…clarity of language and meaning…attention to detail…good organization of the work.” The Committee also cited the following dissertations for honorable mention: Dr. Sunil Sharma, “Poetics of Court and Prison in the Divan of Mas’ud-e Sa’d-e Salman,” The University of Chicago; and Dr. Maziar Lotfalian, “Technoscientific Identities: Muslims and the Culture of Curiosity,” Rice University. The Committee on the Selection of Best Dissertation of the Year on a Topic of Iranian Studies has chosen Dr. Christoph Werner’s dissertation, “An Iranian Town in Transition: A Social and Economic History of the Elites of Tabriz, 1747-1848,” submitted to the Graduate Faculty of the Otto-Friedrich University, Bamberg, as the recipient of the Foundation’s annual Ph.D. dissertation award for the academic year 1999-2000. In making its decision, the Committee, following the criteria established by the Foundation Board, noted, in part, “exceptional contribution to the field of Iranian Studies through an imaginative approach to social change and modernization in Iran…clear statement of the study’s problematic and theoretical foundation…judicious use of method to relate multivariate historical, intellectual, and sociological data to the specifics in the development of the city and people of Tabriz…efficient and intelligent use of primary source material to elucidate the socioeconomic as well as family interconnections of religious and non-religious elites…grounding theory in facts through methodological rigor and judicious use of primary and archival source material…sensitivity to signification and nuance in archival analysis…clarity of language and meaning…attention to detail…good organization of the work.” Professor Bert Fragner, Dr. Werner’s dissertation advisor, nominated the dissertation. The Committee also cited for Honorable Mention two dissertations—“‘A World Unto Himself’: The Rise of a New Human Image in the Late Seljuk Period (1150-1250)” by Dr. Oya Pancaroğgu of Harvard University, advised and nominated by Professor Gülru Necipoglu, and “The Formation of Modern Iran, 1858-1909: Communications, Telegraph and Society” by Dr. Michael Allan Rubin, Yale University, advised and nominated by Professor Abbas Amanat—for high scholarship, originality, extraordinary clarity, and contribution to their respective fields. |
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