One-day workshop organised jointly by The Centre for Asian and Middle Eastern Architecture, The University of Adelaide Graduate Program in Architectural History and Graduate Program in Middle East Studies, Middle East Technical University (METU) Ankara.
Organizers
Assoc.Prof. Samer Akkach
Assoc.Prof. Ali Uzay Peker
Assoc.Prof. Recep Boztemur
Focus
In the European experience, the transition into modernity is normally seen as having been prompted by internal societal developments -intellectual, scientific, cultural, political, and economic- during both the Renaissance and the Enlightenment. In the Islamic experience, however, the transition is commonly viewed as being provoked and propelled by external forces, the European experiences. As Bernard Lewis asserts: “It has for some time been the custom to define the beginning of modern history in the Middle East, as in other parts of the world, with the impact of the West, or more specifically of European imperialism - its first arrival, its spread, and the process of transformation which it initiated” (The Middle East, 2000).
The workshop aims to rethink this widely held assumption by revisiting a neglected period in the Islamic intellectual history: the 17th and 18th centuries. It seeks to reframe the conventional questions concerned with when and how intellectuals engaged with the ideas and challenges of the European modernity, by asking what were they doing when the Europeans were transiting into the modern world? The workshop will focus on the intertwined intellectual history of the Ottomans and the Arabs in the early modern period, in order to explore the internal intellectual developments at a time when Muslim thinkers had their own intellectual program.
Topics
Possible topics include, but not restricted to, the following:
1. Faith and reason; science and religion
2. Developments in astronomy, geography, medicine and other sciences
3. Islamic cosmology and the Copernican system
4. Philosophy of science, natural philosophy, and mechanical philosophy
5. The body and mind debates
6. Rethinking causality and God's role in the world
7. Philosophical mysticism, and the philosophy of being
8. Philosophy of religion and the rationalization of faith
9. The emergence of the public sphere and print culture
10. Social change and secular trends
11. Landscape and the culture of entertainment
12. Art and architecture: modes of thinking and writing
13. Travel writing and modes of representations
14. Postal systems and the culture of correspondence
Please email your 500-word proposal together with one-page CV to:
Assoc. Prof. Samer Akkach
Founding Director, Centre for Asian and Middle Eastern Architecture (CAMEA).
E-mail: [email protected]
Deadline for receiving proposals: 25 January 2008
If you have any queries please contact:
Dr. Selen Morkoc
Centre for Asian and Middle Eastern Architecture (CAMEA)
Email: [email protected]