دانشگاه زاپینزا رم کنفرانسی با عنوان «پیش از باستان ‌شناسی، معنی گذشته در اندیشه اسلامی کلاسیک و پیشا مدرن» را برگزار خواهد کرد. مهلت ارسال مقالات تا ۳۰ سپتامبر تعیین شده است. اطلاعات تکمیلی در اینجا

CALL FOR PAPERS: BEFORE ARCHAELOGY. THE MEANING OF THE PAST IN CLASSICAL AND PRE-MODERN ISLAMIC THOUGHT

The Atlas of the Ancient Near East (AANE) is a research program funded by Sapienza-University of Rome,  aimed at the description, display and analysis of Cultural Heritage and Landscapes in the ancient Near East. The project starts with an intensive multidisciplinary surveys and researches on the different natural and cultural landscapes of the ancient Near East and continues with a series of publications regarding the archaeological, historical, epigraphic and linguistic synchronic and diachronic assessment of the main near-eastern geographic macro-areas (Central and Southern Mesopotamia; Northern Mesopotamia and Northern Syria; Syria and Palestine; Iran; Anatolia and Armenia; Arabia and Ethiopia; Egypt and Sudan). 

A volume of the AANE project is directed by Leonardo Capezzone, associate professor at Sapienza-University of Rome, for which a call for paper is launched:

BEFORE ARCHAELOGY. THE MEANING OF THE PAST IN CLASSICAL AND PRE-MODERN ISLAMIC THOUGHT

The shocking attacks by the would-be Islamic State (Daesh) on the archaeological heritage in Near East seems to be assumed and perceived as  an intrinsic – although disconcerting – “muslim” hostility towards anything belonging to a pre-Islamic past. .

In fact, the use of history and the past - or an idea of the history and of the past - is a constant which can be found each time, in the Islamic world,  asserting political power and constructing a cultural narrative, focused on the recovery of the past and on the assumption of its meanings in terms of inheritance, legacy and continuation to be addressed to the territories and to the conquered peoples, were  intertwined aspects of an empire ideology. Almost all the great imperial achievements, in the history of Islam, drew a principle of legitimacy by articulating a discourse based on continuity and revival of past glories, from the Abbasids to the Ottoman Empire.

Beyond the political and cultural theme of continuity with the past - the latter seen as an ideal, if static, time of classicism to retrieve – a field of investigation still remains largely unexplored, except for isolated studies dedicated to individual places of particular resonance (e.g. the case of Babylon in the essay by Caroline Janssen, Bābil, the City of Witchcraft and Wine. The Name and Fame of Babylon in Medieval Arabic Geographical Texts, Ghent, Univ. of Ghent, 1995): the different ways by which the past appears in the form of object (the ruins, the monument, the inscription); how it shapes, or is concealed in, the landscape ; how the past and the discovery of the antique (as a form of written knowledge) becomes a substantial tool in order to justify, vindicate, legitimize or confirm  the overcoming of Islam as a religion of the Book as well as a political rule; how  its presence reveals an intrinsic nature capable to questioning that interacts with the present and calls upon the historian as well any cultural operator to an instance of interpretation. These are just a few examples along which investigation may be carried out, but other approaches are welcomed. 

The volume aims at sampling the multifaceted modalities with which classical and pre-modern Islamic thought  has imagined and narrated the past, developing from different points of view – literary, historical, philological, political, religious, or at the level of collective imagination – an intellectual and interpretive attitude to the past, and articulating a complex discourse on antiquity, its memory and its persistence in the cultural and geographical spaces of the Muslim Near East.

The volume will be published by an academic publisher of Sapienza-University of Rome by the year 2020. Contributions will be submitted to a double blind review.

Authors should send a 300-word proposal, along with a short CV, to leonardo.capezzone@uniroma1.it  by September 30^th, 2017. 

The proposals will be reviewed over the following month. The deadline for submitting papers (in English, not exceeding 8 000 words) is September 10^th, 2018.

منبع: طومار اندیشه