Privacy in Islam: The Public and Private Spheres, Part III
11th Social Research Conference December 5-7, 2002
For the past three years, Social Research has engaged in an international exploration of the subject of Privacy. Because the concept of privacy, and therefore of what constitutes a threat to privacy, is socially constructed, and as such contingent on particular cultures, a full understanding of what “privacy” means demands cross-cultural exploration.
Islam: The Public and Private Spheres, will be the third and final conference in this series, and will take place at New School University in December 2002. This conference will look at the great variety in Muslim societies (both Shi’i and Sunni), and the way notions of public and private are understood and articulated across these societies. Definitions of public and private are central to the relationship between religion and state, as well the development of civil society. These distinctions are also key to defining boundaries between the state, the community, the family, and the individual. A primary concern will be addressing these distinctions in as many different societies as possible, including Islamic theocracies, non-theocratic Muslim states, and Islamic communities in the diaspora, whether these societies are located in the Middle East, South Asia, Indonesia, or the West.
This conference is funded by a grant from the Open Society Institute, the Rockefeller Foundation, and an anonymous donor
To order the related issue of Social Research: An International Quarterly
PROGRAM
Thursday, December 5th
Keynote Address: Understandings of public and private in Islamic societies
Mohsen Kadivar, Professor, Department of Philosophy, Tarbiat Modares University, Iran; Visiting Scholar, Islamic Legal Studies, Harvard Law School, Harvard University; author of Theories of State in Shiite Fiqh.
Friday, December 6th
Islamic Law - Boundaries and Rights: Case Studies
How are questions of boundaries and rights negotiated in states governed by Sharia? How do these negotiations compare with those in predominantly Muslim states governed by civil law, or possibly Islamic communities in the diaspora?
Moderator: Talal Asad, Professor of Anthropology, CUNY Graduate Center Baber Johansen, Director d'etudes at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris, France
Brinkley Messick, Professor of Anthropology, Columbia University
Roy Mottahedeh, Gurnery Professor of History, Harvard University
Frank Vogel, Two Holy Mosques Adjunct Professor of Islamic Legal Studies, Harvard Law School, Harvard University
Individual, Family, Community and State: Case Studies What is the concept of the individual? How are distinctions between public and private articulated within and across the boundaries of individual, family, community and state?
Moderator: Leila Ahmed, Professor of Women's Studies and Religion, Harvard Divinity School, Harvard University Juan Cole, Professor of History, University of Michigan
Nilufer Gole, Professor of Sociology, Bogazici University, Istanbul, Turkey
Mehrangiz Kar, Human Rights Lawyer, Writer, Essayist, and Former Editor of the now-banned Zan literary review
Saba Mahmood, Assistant Professor of the History of Religions, the Divinity School, University of Chicago
Media and Information: Case Studies
Moderator: Kian Tajbakhsh, Senior Research Fellow, Milano Graduate School, New School University & , Sociology, Tehran University Jon Anderson, Professor of Anthropology, Catholic University
Geneive Abdo, Author and Former Tehran correspondent for The Guardian (London)
Hafez al-Mirazi, Washington Bureau Chief, Al-Jazeera Television Hassan Mneimneh, Journalist and Co-director, Iraq Documentation Project
Saturday, December 7th
Representations of Privacy in Literature and Film: Case Studies. How are the concepts of privacy and the private sphere interpreted and represented in literature and film? Art imitating life/life imitating art?
Moderator: Farhad Kazemi, Professor of Politics and Middle Eastern Studies, New York University Hamid Dabishi, Professor and Chair of the Department of Middle East and Asian Languages and Cultures and Director of Graduate Studies at the Center for Comparative Literature and Society, Columbia University Assia Djebar, Novelist, Filmmaker and Professor of French, New York University
Azar Nafisi, Visiting Professor and Director of the SAIS Dialogue Project at the Foreign Policy Institute, School of Advanced International Studies, Johns Hopkins University\
Orhan Pamuk, Novelist
Film Screening and Discussion
WAITING (Iran, 1975), A film by Amir Naderi The film will be followed by a discussion between Mr. Naderi and Hamid Dabashi focusing on how privacy is represented in this and other of his films. Moderator: Hamid Dabashi
