Rethinking Jihad: Ideas, Politics and Conflict in the Arab World & Beyond
About the Conference
The Centre for the Advanced Study of the Arab World (CASAW), led by Dr Elisabeth Kendall, is holding an international conference to rethink jihad.
Much like ‘fatwa’ the term ‘jihad’ has come to be used as a byword for fanaticism and Islam’s implacable hostility toward the West. But like other religious and political concepts, jihad has multiple resonances and associations, its meaning shifting over time and from place to place. Jihad has referred to movements of internal reform, spiritual struggle, and selfdefence as much as to ‘holy war’. Jihad, moreover, reflects principles and concerns by no means unique to Islam. Among Muslim intellectuals, as well as others concerned with the Arab and Islamic worlds, the meaning and significance of jihad remains subject to debate and controversy. Too often the diversity and sophistication of debate in the region, as well as scholarship on the religion, politics and history of the Arab and Islamic worlds stands in stark contrast to crude generalisations found in the media.
The conference will include keynote addresses from leading experts on Middle Eastern and Islamic history, politics, theology and society. These accomplished speakers will address, and put into context, broad issues pertinent to the subject of jihad. Keynote addresses will be interspersed with panel discussions that will examine specific themes in more detail. The panels will showcase cutting-edge research on jihad by scholars from five continents.
The conference will seek to improve our understanding of jihad through the work of these highly qualified academics and intellectuals who aim to free the term from media sensationalism and stereotypes of violence and terrorism. CASAW received far more responses to its call for papers than could be accommodated in three days. This scale of response indicates both the need and the will to “rethink” jihad.
About the Keynotes
Professor Fred Halliday
Fred Halliday is ACREA Research Professor at IBEI, the Barcelona Insitute
for International Studies. He was formerly Professor of International
Relations at the London School of Economics. He is a widely known and
authoritative analyst of Middle-Eastern affairs who appears regularly on the
BBC, ABC, al-Jazeera television, CBC and Irish radio. Among his many
books are The Middle East in International Relations: Power, Politics and
Ideology (2005) and 100 Myths about the Middle East (2005).
Professor Carole Hillenbrand OBE
Carole Hillenbrand was awarded the King Faisal Prize for Islamic Studies in
2005 and was the first non-Muslim to be awarded this prize. She has been
Vice-President of the British Society for Middle Eastern Studies since 2003,
Islamic Advisory Editor at Edinburgh University Press since 1982 and editor
of the series entitled “Studies in Persian and Turkish History,” published by
Routledge since 1999. She served as Head of the Department of Islamic
and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Edinburgh. She was Visiting
Professor at Dartmouth College and at the University of Groningen.
Professor Sherman Jackson
Sherman Jackson is Arthur F. Thumau Professor of Near Eastern Studies,
Visiting Professor of Law and Professor of Afro-American Studies at
the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. In addition to numerous articles,
including “Jihad and the Modern World” (2002) and “Beyond Jihad: the New
Thought of the Gama’a Islamiyya” (2009), he is the author of such works
as On the Boundaries of Theological Tolerance in Islam: Abû Hâmid al-Ghazâlî’s
Faysal al-Tafriqa (2002) and Islam and Blackamerican: Looking Towards the Third
Resurrection (2005).
Professor Rudolph Peters
Rudolf Peters is Professor of Islamic History at the University of Amsterdam.
In 2008 he was Visiting Professor and researcher at The Harvard Law
School (Islamic Legal Studies Programme) and Harvard Faculty of Arts and
Sciences, Near Eastern Languages and Cultures. He has acted several
times as an expert witness in trial against persons suspected of Islamist
terrorism, such as the trials against Mohamed Bouyeri, the murderer of
Theo van Gogh, and the group around him. Rudolph Peters is the author of
Jihad in Classical and Modern Islam (1996).
Professor Tariq Ramadan
Tariq Ramadan is Professor of Contemporary Islamic Studies at Oxford
University. Named by Time magazine as one of the 100 most important
innovators of the 21st century, he occupies a unique place among leading
Islamic thinkers. Ramadan has written more than twenty books, including
Western Muslims and the Future of Islam (2003), Islam, the West, and the
Challenges of Modernity (2000) and Jihad, Violence, War and Peace in
Islam (in French, 2002). He has also published a total of 700 contributions
or articles in collective books, academic reviews and magazines.
Sheikh Rached Ghannouchi
Rached Ghannouchi is a founder and current leader of the Tunisian
Islamist opposition party al-Nahda (Renaissance). Due to his opposition to
the Tunisian regime, Ghannouchi has been sentenced three times to life
imprisonment and has lived in the UK as a political refugee since 1991.
As well as being known for his political activism, Ghannouchi is renowned
internationally as a progressive and prolific Islamic thinker. Since the 1970s,
he has written numerous books and articles on Islam and politics, exploring
such issues as human rights, citizenship, democracy, civil society, intercivilisational
dialogue and the causes of Islamist violence.
Dr Roxanne Varzi
Roxanne Varzi is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Film and Media Studies at the University of California, Irvine. She is an affiliated
faculty member of the Dr. Samuel M. Jordan Center for Persian Studies
and Culture, Religious Studies, and the Center for Global Peace and
Conflict Studies. She is also on the editorial board of The Journal of Media
Sociology. In 2005 Dr Varzi was Iranian Visiting Fellow to St Antony’s
College, Oxford University, and was also a member of the faculty of
Anthropology at SOAS, University of London.
Professor Sami Zubaida
Sami Zubaida is Emeritus Professor of Politics and Sociology at the
University of London, Birkbeck College and Research Associate at the
Middle East Institute of SOAS (London). He has held visiting positions in
Cairo, Istanbul, Aix-en-Provence, Berkeley, Paris and was Visiting Global
Professor at the New York University Law School. Professor Zubaida’s
research and writing span religion, culture, law and politics in the Middle
East. His books include Islam, the People and the State (1994, re-issued
2008), A Taste of Thyme: Culinary Cultures of the Middle East (co-edited
with Richard Tapper, 2000) and Law and Power in the Islamic World (2003).
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