The first full day of the conference

The University of Erfurt, which has about 5500 students today, was founded in the fourteenth century. But it was refounded only in the late twentieth century, and so its campus is quite unromantically modern-functional.

The conference is almost entirely located on the university campus.

We began the day by listening to a keynote lecture on “The Biographical Trajectories of Political Islam,” by Abdulkader Tayob of the University of Cape Town.

Then we watched a film entitled Voices of Muslim Women that focused on interviews with young Muslim women at, of all places, the University of Alabama, where the creator of the film, Professor Maha Marouan, teaches women’s studies. I liked it very much, and saw a number of parallels with the Mormon experience of marginalization as a religious minority in America. Particularly because of that, I think it could make for some excellent discussion in my Introduction to Islam class, and Dr. Marouan is going to send a portion of the film to me for my use. (It’s currently being adopted by a distribution firm, so she’s not simply free to give the whole thing out.) There was a good discussion afterward.

The final session of the day that we attended concerned “The Ethnography of Contemporary Shi‘ism.”  I enjoyed it very much. The first paper was by a Swedish scholar and concerned, essentially, the use of thuggery in internal Iranian religious politics. (He might not agree with my summary.) The second paper drew on field work among displaced Twelver Shi‘ites in South London, and the third talked about Isma‘ili Shi‘ite approaches to the challenge of religious pluralism.

I’m suddenly really tired, though, so I’ll delay discussion of those presentations until later.

Posted from Erfurt, Germany