close this window
Complete the following form to e-mail a copy of this event to a friend.
Hello, The following event may be of interest to you: Law, Ethics and Social Sciences in Contemporary Islamic Thought Wednesday, March 2, 2016 Alexandre CaieroQatar Faculty of Islamic StudiesHamad Bin Khalifa University Since the turn of the millennium, state and non-state actors in the Middle East have energetically sought to regulate and reform Islamic authority in order to counter the fragmentation induced by mass literacy, new media technologies and global jihad. Various proposals have been formulated targeting state institutions, religious scholars, and wider publics. The call to incorporate social scientific knowledge into Islamic normative deliberation, notably through what is known as the jurisprudence or understanding of reality (fiqh al-wāqi'), and the emphasis on ethics rather than law have emerged as increasingly popular solutions. In this talk I ask what social scientific insights and conceptions of ethics are invoked in these debates, and how they relate to the modes of reasoning that characterize traditional Islamic law. I argue that the debates prompted by these proposals can be best understood as attempts to move beyond the jurists' methodological individualism in order to account for the impersonal powers of modern institutions. Alexandre Caeiro is Research Assistant Professor at the Center for the Study of Contemporary Muslim Societies located at Hamad Bin Khalifa University’s Qatar Faculty of Islamic Studies. He studied sociology and Islamic studies in France (Ecole des hautes etudes en sciences sociales) and the Netherlands (ISIM). He has taught in the Netherlands, Germany, Egypt and Qatar and is currently working on two book projects. The first deals with jurisprudence of minorities and the integration of Islam in Europe. The second examines debates about the chaos of fatwas in the Arab World. Time: 6:00 pm EST/GMT-5 Location: Olin Humanities, Room 102 Sponsor: Religion, Middle Eastern Studies, Historical Studies and Global and International Studies programs Contact: Tehseen Thaver. E-mail: [email protected] Phone: 845-758-7207 If you would like to see more events please visit the following URL: http://inside.bard.edu/religion/events/