Munāẓara – Seeing Eye to Eye?

ALEA would like to warmly thank all participants for attending and for their fascinating presentations. Even though there was little dispute about what scholar was the best, there was still plenty of reflection and discussion about the truth. ʿUlamāʾ debated alongside laypeople, flowers, cities, bows and guns, knowledge and ignorance, and human vices in general, on stages ranging from the digital world YouTube and social media to the world of imagination. Numerous new perspectives and parallels have emerged between the literary and theological formats of Islamic debate culture. Finally, we would like to express our gratitude for a wonderful conference full of new ideas and inspiration, with stimulating encounters and new contacts.

The conference proceedings are in preparation.

Munāẓara – Seeing Eye to Eye?

10-12 June 2025 the conference "Munāẓara – Seeing Eye to Eye? Theological and Literary Arguing Practices in Comparison" will take place, a cooperation of ALEA, the Cluster of Excellence "Religion and Politics" and the Institute for Arabic and Islamic Studies.

Theological and literary disputations, munāẓarāt, were and are a popular and in many ways entertaining art in the Islamicate world.  Studying, practicing, writing and participating in debates was a tour de force from the Abbasids to modern times, from theologians debating the nature of God, to litterateurs imagining objects arguing over superiority. Western academia has only recently started to analyze and appreciate these vast and complex arguing practices, and yet so much still remains unknown. Through a comparison of theological and literary disputations with a focus on forms and functions, this conference aims to highlight continuities and differences over the
centuries. 

For more information, please see the conference's program.

As part of the themed issue of “Das Mittelalter” 2/2025 entitled “Sexualities in the Middle Ages - Norms and Deviance, Fantasies and Practices”, Johannes Ruhstorfer took part in an authors' workshop at the University of Bonn. In this issue, Johannes Ruhstorfer will publish an article on a gender dispute with an edition, translation and a lexicographical and literary analysis.

ALEA showed a strong presence during the symposium “Studies of Arabic Language, Literature and Rhetoric in the 8/14th Century,” held on the 6th and 7th of December 2024 at the Faculty of Theology of the Marmara University in Istanbul.

The symposium was part of a series investigating Arabic Linguistics, Rhetoric and Literature during the later centuries with a special focus on its relevance for the intellectual traditions in the Ottoman Empire.

Asmaa Essakouti, Andreas Knöll, Alfred El Khoury, Johannes Ruhstorfer, Luca Rizzo as well as Syrinx von Hees and Thomas Bauer participated in the two panels presented by ALEA. They discussed the current research on Ibn Nubāta and on Arabic rhetoric and used the great opportunity to network with scholars working on the same fields.

ENIS Spring School 2024

Last week, the ALEA-member Johannes Ruhstorfer participated in the ENIS Spring School 2024 “Peripheral Islam: Muslims on the Geographical, Normative, Political and Religious Margins”. His presentation was titled "A female voice? The Debate between the Pussy and the Dick about Who Can Claim Perfection". 

ALEA warmly welcomes new Postdoctoral Fellow

Alfred El Khoury is since March 2024 a new postdoctoral fellow in the ALEA team. We are glad to welcome him in Münster after his stays at the University of Bamberg and the American University of Beirut. El Khoury will be taking part in the Edition of Ibn Nubātah’s Diwan with Oxygen. His doctoral dissertation, “The Old and the New in Premodern Arabic Poetry: Metaphor as Vantage Point” (Bamberg 2023), will be published soon. 

ALEA warmly welcomes new Postdoctoral Fellow

In March 2024 Asmaa Essakouti joined ALEA as a Postdoc. We are grateful that she found her way to Münster University from the Berlin Graduate School Muslim Cultures and Societies. She will participate in the edition of Ibn Nubātah's diwan with Oxygen. Her dissertation was supported by DAAD scholarship and will be published end of this year with the title: "Realms of Strangers: Readers, Language, and Trickery in Maqāmāt al-Ḥarīrī".

Staff Mobility for Trainings - Dr. Andreas Herdt

ALEA warmly welcomes back Dr. Andreas Herdt, who returned from his 'Staff Mobility for Trainings' October 2-November 30 at the University of Cádiz. His stay allowed him to meet with Spanish collegues working on ALEA-related subjects. During this time, he worked mainly with manuscripts of literary texts from the 14th century and edited the 'palmtree-maqama' by al-Bunnāhī al-Mālaqī as well as letters by Ibn al-Ḫaṭīb. In addition to that, he used this opportunity to dive into Spanish scholarship on Arabic Literature and took classes on the topic at the University of Cádiz. 

Arabic Literature in Dialogue with Nature

ALEA would like to thank the speakers and participants for making the journey to Münster. We are also grateful for a wonderful conference, full of new ideas and inspiration, with stimulating encounters and contacts. We heard about how nature in Arabic literature with its plants and animals were lined up in a parade, tamed, categorized, brought into a competition, experienced as destructive horror of the end times, used for "olfactory branding" to make faith tangible, used by poets who considered themselves the greatest authors in the world as a canvas to put beauty and worship into words, idealized into bucolic paradises, and much more. 

Information on the planned conference publication will follow.

Arabic Literature in Dialogue with Nature

December 7th to 9th, 2023

Research on “hunting poetry” used to declare the nonexistence of such courtly pleasure during the Mamluk period and research on “nature poetry” mainly focused on flowers, garden and spring up to around 1100.

This conference will explore the topic of hunting and nature more broadly in Arabic literature during Mamluk times in many diverse literary fields, poetry and prose, in order to explore some of those treasures that have been ignored far too long. Next to different kinds of hunting we will observe the Nile flood, a supernova, several earthquakes, a fruit contest, and nature in religious contexts as well as how nature is transformed into abstract concepts.

Find more information about the program etc. in our flyer.

Southern Greetings

Our dear collegue Dr. Andreas Herdt sends warm greetings from Cádiz, where he is currently resident to have an exchange of thoughts with our Spanish collegues, especially about the homme d'lettre Ibn al-Ḫaṭīb (1313-1374), a contemporary of Ibn Nubātah's.

Our dear former collegue Dr. Hakan Özkan is now Professor of Arabic language and literature in Aix-en-Provence at the Institut des recherches et d'études sur les mondes arabes et musulmans. He too is sending all the best wishes to his ALEA-team from the peak of Mont St. Victoire in the east of Aix-en-Provence on a cool October morning.

ALEA begrüßt neuen Wissenschaftlichen Mitarbeiter

Im Juli 2023 hat ALEA Johannes Ruhstorfer als wissenschaftlichen Mitarbeiter in das Team aufgenommen. Er wird sich im Rahmen seiner Promotion mit arabischer Rangstreitliteratur (ar. mufāḫara, munāẓara, etc.) 1100-1800 sowie im besonderen mit dem Nubātahschen "Rangstreit zwischen Schwert und Schreibrohr" ("al-Mufāḫara bayna as-sayf wa-l-qalam") befassen.

Er ist in die Arbeit an der Sammlung des Instituts für Arabistik und Islamwissenschaft eingebunden und die Betreuung der ALEA-Homepage.

Interview mit Prof. Dr. Thomas Bauer: "Im Rausch der sprachlichen Schönheit", wissen|leben Nr. 5, 12. Juli 2023

Ein „Goldenes Zeitalter“ der arabischen Kultur? Von wegen – es gab mit Sicherheit mehrere. Davon ist Islamwissenschaftler Prof. Dr. Thomas Bauer überzeugt. „Ich hatte schon lange den Verdacht, dass die bisher wenig beachtete Mamlukenzeit, die von 1250 bis 1518 reichte, lohnenswerte literarische Werke hervorgebracht haben muss.“ Als der Wissenschaftler vor zehn Jahren den „Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz-Preis“ der Deutschen Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) erhielt, nahm er das Preisgeld als Anschub, um sich die Quellen aus dem Zeitraum von 1100 bis 1500 genauer anzuschauen. Sein Team bestellte Handschriften und Microfiche-Abzüge aus Archiven, wälzte Bibliothekskataloge und durchsuchte das Internet nach Digitalisaten. Daraus ist 2020 ein Langfristvorhaben geworden. Gerade hat die DFG die Förderung für die kommenden drei Jahre ... weiterlesen.