MENA-related Events Calendar

Organiser: Centre for the Study of Islam, Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies, University of Exeter

Speaker: Jan-Peter Hartung

This presentation is pivoting on my most recent book, The Pashtun Borderland: A Religious and Cultural History of the Taliban (CUP 2024), in which I make an attempt of approaching the “Taliban” phenomenon through a historically layered appreciation of the distinct geopolitical and sociocultural space from within which its most recent manifestations, the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan and the Taḥrīk i Ṭālibān i Pākistān, have emerged. I will provide an introduction to the conceptual framework underlying the book as well as highlight its most salient features which, I believe, does the subject greater justice than the currently still dominant works of investigative journalists and scholars of IR and security studies.

Organiser: Centre for the Study of Islam, Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies, University of Exeter

Speaker: Amira K. Bennison

This talk will explore the foundation of Marrakesh by the Almoravids c. 1070 and its life as the capital of the vast Almoravid and Almohad empires which controlled large parts of northwest Africa and the Iberian peninsula from the mid-eleventh to the mid-thirteenth centuries. It will consider the history and historiography of the city’s foundation and the purposes of dynastic narratives about the city from several perspectives. I shall start with ideas of garrison town (miṣr) and frontier post (ribāṭ), and then move to imperial urbanism, and the ways in which the Almohads transformed urban space to delegitimise their predecessors while also claiming their capital city. My ultimate objective is to think about Marrakesh from the perspective of its North African builders and rulers and to suggest how their actions in Marrakesh connected them to broader Islamicate tropes and positioned them as noble medieval heirs to Middle Eastern and Andalusi pasts that were no more.

Join us at the Digital British Islam Conference – Digital British Islam: Experiences, Responses and Impact, from Britain and Beyond – where leading scholars, researchers, and practitioners will explore how digital environments are shaping the experiences of Muslims in Britain and beyond. This two-day event will feature keynote addresses, panel discussions, presentations from a range of researchers of digital Islam, as well as insights from the ESRC-funded Digital British Islam project. See the conference programme here.