I am no poet, just a historian of Islamic thought, but last year a student at a local high school invited me to read, edit, and write responses to her poetry. The resulting collaboration has now been published:
Callie Grey. Persephone: Collected Poems with Notes from David Vishanoff. Green Heron, 2024.
It was a transformative experience, and one of the best and most difficult acts of sacrificial listening I have done.
The book is available from amazon.com as a nice and inexpensive hardback as well as a cheaply made paperback and a Kindle ebook.
The Al-Mahdi Institute’s 2024 annual summer workshop on Islamic law was a spectacular demonstration of scholarship on classical and current Shi`i legal theory, focused on highly technical questions of language and meaning. My contribution was:
“Clarity, Ambiguity, and Interpretive Flexibility in Islamic Legal Theory from al-Shāfiʿī to Hassan Hanafi.” The 12th Annual AMI Contemporary Fiqhī Issues Workshop “Language and Meaning in Islamic Legal Theory,” Al-Mahdi Institute, Birmingham, UK, July 4, 2024.
The papers will be published by the Al-Mahdi Institute Press in 2025, in a volume edited by myself and Professor Mohsen Kadivar.
Many thanks to Adam Mestyan and Sabine Schmidtke for their wonderful hospitality during the March 2024 workshop on digital publication of right-to-left editions at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. My contribution was:
“Are Current Trends Leading to a Dead End? Two Case Studies on the Limits and Potential of Digital Methods for Arabic-Script Scholarly Editions.” Scholarly Digital Editions of Arabic-Script Texts, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, March 22, 2024.
My slides are available as a pdf here.
Islamic Studies as Sacrificial Listening
