Events: Fall 2021

E-mail laurenmancia@brooklyn.cuny.edu for the zoom links.

Friday, September 10, 2 p.m.

Religion Program Meet and Greet

Students, Faculty, Prospective Students welcome!
Prof. Andrew Arlig (Philosophy)
Prof. Brian Sowers (Classics)
Prof. Lauren Mancia (History)
Prof. Namita Manohar (Sociology)
Lisa Schwebel, and more!

Friday, October 22, 2-3:30 p.m.

Time and Temporality in Quran's “Ashab al-Kahf”: An inquiry of modern Tafsir in South Asia through Manazir Ahsan Gilani's interpretation

Arooj Alam (BC Alumna!, Graduate Center M.A. ’21, now Ph.D. student)
Prof. Andrew Arlig (Philosophy) responding

It is something of a truism that the Quran’s narrative defies modern texts’ linear chronology demarcated by definitive beginnings, middles, and ends. Quranic studies specialists have expended considerable effort investigating its narratology, foreign vocabulary, conception of ethics, and transmission history. However, an exploration of time and temporality within the Quran remains a minor concern in the field. To address this lacuna, I investigate how one twentieth-century South Asian alim Manazir Ahsan Gilani (d.1956) grappled with time and temporality in the Ashab al-Kahf story of Chapter 18 of the Quran titled Surat al-Kahf.

I make a modest contribution to Quranic studies, philosophy of religion, Islamic intellectual history, and post-colonial studies by comparing Gilani’s Tafsir on this surah with his classical and modern Middle Eastern counterparts. I ask how some Islamic reformers’ response, in nineteenth-century South Asia, to modernity’s challenges, later influenced Gilani’s interpretation of this surah? Specifically, how did the rise of scientism within the South Asian Tafsir tradition genre shaped Gilani’s subjectivities and sensibilities? In what ways was Gilani resisting against the pervasive influence of modern, capitalistic, and homogenous time? Most importantly, why did Gilani reinterpret this story’s significance as a protection against the arrival of al-Masih al-Dajjal?