Imagining Muslim Difference: Najm al-Dīn al-Ghazzī (d. 1651) on Mimesis and Alterity in Islam
Ottoman-era Muslim scholar, Sufi-jurist and litterateur Najm al-Dīn al-Ghazzī (d. 1651) of Damascus, spent nearly forty years composing a magisterial treatise on mimesis and alterity in Islam, a weighty tome that spans twelve volumes in the published edition. Drawing from the entire repertoire of Islamic religious disciplines—hadith, law, Quran exegesis, theology—the treatise reflects a well-defined Islamic humanistic tradition. And yet, it has gone virtually unnoticed by modern scholars, Muslim and non-Muslim alike. This lecture situates this unprecedented text both discursively within a long tradition of inter-Muslim debates on imitating non-Muslims (tashabbuh) and historically amidst the disorienting transformations taking place in the Ottoman empire at the turn of the seventeenth century that disrupted established social distinctions and hierarchies. By drawing attention to these vanishing lines of social difference within the realm, this lecture demonstrates how Ghazzī resolved to bring discursive clarity to the meaning and value of Muslim difference.
Youshaa Patel is associate professor of Religious Studies at Lafayette College (Easton, PA USA), and author of The Muslim Difference: Defining the Line between Believers and Unbelievers from Early Islam to the Present (Yale University Press 2022). His scholarship explores Islamic scripture and tradition, with a focus on how Islam has shaped—and been shaped—by Muslim interfaith encounters in the Middle East and beyond. His work has been supported by grants from Mellon, Fulbright, and the American Institute of Yemeni Studies, and includes extended research stays in India, Qatar, Yemen, Jordan, and Syria where he studied the Islamic tradition with several of its modern-day custodians. Professor Patel is currently the Abdul Aziz Al-Mutawa visiting research fellow at the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies, an independent centre of the University of Oxford.
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