The Department of Philosophy will be conducting on-campus interviews for potential candidates for a distinguished professor position within the Religion and Cultural Studies program. Part of the on-campus interview process will have candidates giving a research presentation that is open to students to attend and provide feedback to the department. Please join us for the research presentation of Dr. Cyrus Zargar, titled "Lost in Mecca, Found in Byzantium: Islamic Piety in all the Wrong Places."
Abstract:
How have Muslims mapped piety onto social spaces? How might this mapping inform our conception of premodern Islamic religiosity? An analysis of a pivotal subsection of the poem Speech of the Birds (Manṭiq al-Ṭayr) by the Persian Sufi poet Farīd al-Dīn ʿAṭṭār (d. 1221) considers these questions. That narrative describes an accomplished spiritual master, a pseudo-historical figure known as the “Shaykh of Ṣanʿān.” Led by a dream, he makes his way from the heart of Islam in Mecca, to the archetypal center of disbelief: Christian-ruled Constantinople. There he falls in love and, for the sake of his beloved, renounces his religion, finding instead a freedom of spirit and sincerity of intention that the poet associates with infidelity. Focusing on literary geography in Persian and Arabic Sufi poetry, this paper argues that spaces of infidelity, such as the wine-house, church, and ruins (kharābāt), represent real antinomian spaces in thirteenth-century Nishapur and elsewhere. This meeting of real and imagined spaces can be traced to Abbasid-era manuals and travel guides that chronicled Christian monasteries in Western Asia. It reflects, also, a sentiment expressed by Arabic writers that associated Byzantine life with unfettered and perilous sexual practices. Imagined spaces devoid of probity presented Sufi poets with more than a fitting metaphor for a spirituality devoid of religious pretension. Such spaces reflected a historical practice of antinomian groups—later claimed by Sufis—to gather in locations known for impropriety.