Nov 15: Humanity and the Humanities Workshop. Rob Ames (NELC)

Date: 

Tuesday, November 15, 2016, 5:30pm to 7:00pm

Location: 

6 Divinity Ave # 201. Harvard Semitic Museum

 

The third meeting of the GSAS Workshop on Humanity and the Humanities will take place tomorrowTuesday, November 15, at 5:30pm in Semitic Museum 201. 

(NB: please aim to arrive before 6pm, as the doors to the Semitic Museum lock at that time)

Our speaker this week will be Rob Ames, PhD candidate in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations (NELC). 

His paper and presentation is titled, "Humanity and/as Modern Religion: Adamiyat, Insaniyat, and Qanun in Mirza Malkum Khan and Safi ‘Ali Shah" Click here to download the paper.

An abstract can be found just below. Workshop attendees are expected to read the paper ahead of time and use the discussion questions provided by Rob as an point of entry in thinking about his project. 

As with previous sessions, we will use these questions along with Rob's paper and presentation to broach conversation about his project with reference to the big picture questions we have in mind regarding humanity and its study.

We look forward to your joining the conversation on tomorrow evening!

Best,

Nora and Joe

noralessersohn@g.harvard.edu
vignone@fas.harvard.edu

Abstract:  

Among the many Persian terms that can be rendered into English as “humanity,” one, adamiyat, was particularly central in the work of the Qajar reformist, diplomat, and publisher Mirza Malkum Khan (1833-1908): he named a semi-secret society he founded Majma‘-i Adamiyat, and, there and in the pages of his newspaper, Qanun (Law), called for the establishment of a “religion of humanity” capable of transcending the differences of the particular religions through dedication to the intellectual and material progress safeguarded by this titular law. Meanwhile, in a roughly contemporary Sufi treatise on knowledge and ethics entitled Mizan al-Ma’rifa (The Scale of Knowledge), Mirza Hasan Isfahani (known to his fellow Sufis as Safi ‘Ali Shah), uses another word we could render as humanity, insaniyat, as the text’s titular “scale of knowledge.” In that text, to truly be human entails the cultivation of virtue and the correct performance of one’s role, as coded in norms of class, profession, and gender. More than this, though, the text takes these norms to originate in the law, qanun. In this paper, I examine the writing of Malkum Khan and Safi ‘Ali Shah to suggest that their texts’ humanities (adamiyat and insaniyat) undergird their particularly modern ethical directives. Previous studies of both authors have tended to understate this common vocabulary, but I suggest that by emphasizing this vocabulary’s specificity to their period in addition to its appearance in both authors’ works, a clearer picture of the relationship between intellectual and political life in late nineteenth-century Iran will emerge.