Boundaries of Belief

Northumbria University, Newcastle upon Tyne, 18-19 May 2023

This workshop addressed the question of ‘boundaries’ in belief and religion, within the Ottoman lands but with an emphasis on the Arab provinces. Such boundaries included those between different religions or notations of belief, but also between orthodoxy and heterodoxy, the religious and the non-religious, religion and science or magic, or faith and doubt or unbelief. The workshop covered the establishment and enforcement of boundaries, their crossing and transgressing; intellectual traditions, microhistorical case-studies, and the social and political enactment of boundaries.

Programme:

Thursday 18 May

9.00-9.30 Welcome, introductions, coffee

9.30-11.00 Panel 1 (standard papers)

Umar Ryad (KU Leuven), Amr Moneer, and Father Bigol Abdallah. Wine-drinking and Fasting among the Copts in late eighteenth-century Egypt in the light of a Popular Tale

Yahya Nurgat (Sabancı). “Sacred signs” or portent of the apocalypse? Interpreting the destruction of the Kaaba after the great Meccan flood of 1630

11.00-11.30 Break

11.30-12.30 Panel 2 (standard paper)

Ines Aščerić-Todd (Edinburgh). Setting the boundaries of orthodoxy during the Ottoman ‘Sunnitisation’ period: the case of the Kızılbaş and the Melami-Bayrami Sufis in the late 16th century

12.30-1.30 Lunch

1.30-3.00 Panel 3 (standard papers)

Hilary Kilpatrick (independent). Linguistic boundaries: who draws them, when and where? The case of Arabic in Ottoman Bilād al-Shām

Peter Hill (Northumbria). Impiety, magic, and unbelief in Arab Christian confessors’ manuals and Muslim fiqh texts, 17th-19th centuries

3.00-3.30 Break

3.30-5.00 Panel 4 (methodological contribution)

Ethan Menchinger (Manchester). Why Ottoman History Needs a Theological Turn

7.30 Workshop dinner, at Pani’s Italian restaurant on High Bridge St (map here)

Friday 19 May

9.30-11.00 Panel 5 (methodological contributions)

Simon Mills (Newcastle). Carolus Rali Dadichi (c.1693-1734): An Eastern Christian’s Account of the Syrian Churches

Christopher Bahl (Durham). Interpreting the prosopographical community of a sixteenth-century Sayyid from Medina

11.00-11.30 Break

11.30-12.30 Panel 6 (methodological contribution)

John-Paul Ghobrial (Oxford). Where Imagination (Mis)Leads?:  Views of Ottoman Belief in the Manhattan Writings of Norman Duncan

12.30-1.30 Lunch

1.30-3.00 Panel 7 (plenary)