Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies Research Seminar Series: Tasneem Yousef and Khairul Amal

About the event

This IMES Research Seminar consists of two separate presentations by two IMES PhD candidates.

Tasneem Yousef: The Fence Does Not Hold: Glimpses of Utopia in the Palestinian Speculative

What does it mean to speculate towards liberation? While the liberated future of Palestine is rarely articulated as a utopia, when we consider the force that pulls people towards futurity, that propels their dreams and imaginations, it is often utopian desire and longing that can be found in those spaces, even if it is not named as such and even if it does not resemble the common perception of utopia.

This talk is concerned with how utopianism is constructed within Palestinian speculative texts as much as what a utopian framework and affect allows the texts to do and achieve. In order to construct utopia as a speculative affect, the presentation will ponder utopia as space, utopia as future history, and utopia as potentiality.

The first section first examines the spatial history of utopia and the limitations of utopia’s spatiality, for if “there is a transformation of the topos [of utopia] from space into time” (Bloch 2), then what might it mean to imagine a future Palestine—whose struggle is so rooted in a specific land—as a space and a place? Utopia as future history posits historicization as a constitutive formal element of Palestinian utopian texts that responds to the obscuring of historical processes, and attempts to make the passage into futurity more legible and imaginable.

The third section, utopia as potentiality, builds on the previous sections to explore the tension between constructing utopia as an image of a possible better future, and utopia as a futurity that is always in flux and open to speculation.

Finally, all three sections culminate in a conclusion that attempts to articulate what a Palestinian utopian affective mode is, and what its response to the intensification of political and historical forces within and around Palestine can tell us about the road to the future, and what it demands of us.

Khairul Amal: The Shīʿa of Damascus: Ibn ʿAsākir and Sunnī-Shīʿa Relationship in the Twelfth-Century Syria

Modern scholarship tends to describe Ibn ʿAsākir (d. 1176) as someone who held an anti-Shīʿi tendency and was heavily involved at the vanguard of his patron’s (Nūr al-Dīn Zengī, d. 1174) jihād against the Shīʿite Fāṭimids (and the Crusaders). However, I argue that it is the opposite.

The next generation of Muslim scholars never described Ibn ʿAsākir as having an anti-Shīʿi tendency. More recent studies have also suggested otherwise; Ibn ʿAsākir was a traditionist who advocated Muslim unity in the face of the Crusaders’ threat. He achieved this by reshaping the past to act as an ideal for his divided contemporary Muslims.

My research contributes to the scholarship in advancing our understanding of this scholar and the twelfth-century Syria. Since Ibn ʿAsākir did not compose any anti-Shīʿite treatise, his magnum opus, the Tārīkh madīnat Dimashq (TMD), is the one source that we have to take recourse to. The work was composed over a very long time, which makes it very likely to conceive Ibn ʿAsākir’s comprehensive thought and his understanding of his world.

This talk examines Ibn ʿAsākir’s use of the terms related to Shīʿa in the TMD (for example, the derogatory term rāfiḍa) and analyses his use of these terms. My initial hypothesis is that Ibn ʿAsākir’s supposed anti-Shīʿi tendency is a modern scholar’s construct whose simplistic “Sunnī hates Shīʿa or vice versa” outlook fails to comprehend the complex and often dynamic relationship between the members of both communities in the twelfth-century Syria.

About the seminar series

The IMES Research Seminar for this first semester of 2026/27 will showcase some of the latest research across the broad field of Islamic and Middle East Studies, both within the department and beyond, setting it within the context of IMES as it moves towards its 50th year.

How to attend

Events are free and everyone is welcome. No booking is required. If you wish to join online, you can email a colleague in IMES for joining information.

All talks are followed by a reception.

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