Armageddon after Ankara

Journalism and Media, Terrorism Issue, Turkey

ankara
The Ankara bombing: Presaging the end of the Turkish Republic?

What we have witnessed in the last two years, culminating in the horrible scenes of 10 October in Ankara, is the end of the Turkish Republic as we know it. A commentary by Umut Ozkirimli

There is something fundamentally wrong with the journalistic coverage of the twin blasts at a peace rally in Ankara – the deadliest terror attack on Turkish soil – which left more than a hundred people dead (128 according to the unofficial tally of the People′s Democracy Party, HDP), several hundred wounded and an almost ″anomic″ country behind. As if writing a detective story or crime novel, most commentators begin by asking the ″who″ question, religiously following the basic rules of the genre and creating suspense for the sensation-seeking audience – after all, the killer is usually unknown until well after the initial investigation is completed.

This is the burden of Simon Tisdall′s otherwise insightful commentary on the Ankara attacks in ″The Guardian″ which points to the Islamic State, the ultra-nationalist Grey Wolves or other right-wing groups within Turkey′s security apparatus as the most likely culprits. One might add, as the caretaker Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu did, the PKK and the left-wing DHKP-C to this list, not to mention foreign intelligence agencies for the conspiracy-minded. Yet the question is redundant, if not entirely spurious, considering the immediate and the broader context in which the bombing took place.
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Digital Islamic Humanities Project

Conferences and Talks, Islamic History, Islamic Law, Islamic Sciences, Islamic Texts, Miniatures, Teaching Resources

The Digital Islamic Humanities Project at Brown University is pleased to announce its third annual conference, titled “Distant Reading and the Islamic Archive,” which will be held on Friday, October 16, 2015.

Paper abstracts and the full event program may be found on the conference website (http://islamichumanities.org/conference-2015/).

Please note that event will be live-streamed over the web. You may access the webcast beginning tomorrow morning (Friday) at 9:00 am EST.

Speakers and paper titles:

David Vishanoff, “A Customizable Exaptive “Xap” for Charting Currents of Islamic Discourse across Multiple Bibliographic and Full Text Datasets”

Peter Verkinderen, José Antonio Haro Peralta, and Hannah-Lena Hagemann, “Which Muḥammad? Computer-Based Tools for the Identification of Moving Elites in the Early Islamic Empire”

Alexander Magidow & Yonatan Belinkov, “Digital Philology and the History of Written Arabic”

Elias Muhanna, “Modeling Mannerism in Classical Arabic Poetry”

Maxim Romanov, “al-Ḏahabī’s Monster: Dissecting a 50-Volume Arabic Chronicle-cum-Biographical Collection From the 14th Century CE”

Seyed Mohammad Bagher Sajadi & Mohammad Sadegh Rasooli, “Automatic Proper Names Extraction from Old Islamic Literature”

Karen Pinto, “MIME and Other Digital Experimentations with Medieval Islamic Maps”

Nir Shafir, “Distant Reading the Material and Bibliographic Record of the Early Modern Islamic Archive”

Eric van Lit, “A Digital Approach for Production and Transmission of Knowledge in Islamic Intellectual History”

Taimoor Shahid, “Mobile Ethics: Travel and Cosmopolitanism in the Islamic Archive”

Center for Islamic Law and Civilization at Yale Law School

Islamic Law, Scholars, Teaching Resources

Yale University Announces Gift to Establish Center for Islamic Law and Civilization at Yale Law School

Yale University President Peter Salovey and Yale Law School Dean Robert C. Post announced today a $10 million gift to create the Abdallah S. Kamel Center for the Study of Islamic Law and Civilization at Yale Law School.

This generous gift is from Abdallah S. Kamel, chief executive of the Dallah Albaraka Group, LLC, a banking and real estate enterprise based in Saudi Arabia.

“Mr. Kamel’s extraordinary generosity will open up exciting new opportunities for Yale Law School and for the entire university,” said President Salovey. “The Abdallah S. Kamel Center for the Study of Islamic Law and Civilization will enhance research opportunities for our students and other scholars and enable us to disseminate knowledge and insights for the benefit of scholars and leaders all over the world.”

The center will bring prominent scholars of Islam to the Yale campus for public lectures, seminar discussions, visiting fellowships, and visiting professorships, attracting students from the Law School and other schools at the university to its lectures and other opportunities for collaboration.
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H&M and Hijabi Fashion

Ethics, Gender and Sexuality

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H&M: Where Pseudo-Sustainability Meets Diversity Porn
by Melody Moezzi, MS Blog, September 30, 2015

The world’s second largest fashion retailer recently made a deliberate move to attract members of the world’s second largest religion, and people have taken notice.

More specifically, H&M featured a Muslim hijabi woman for a split second in this video advertising spot that deftly disguises a sly cost-saving measure as an eco-friendly call for “sustainable fashion.” The spot concludes, “Leave your unwanted garments in any of our 3,300 stores. We reuse them or recycle them into new clothes. Recycling one single T-shirt saves 2,100 liters of water.” Makes you wonder how much money it saves H&M—though unsurprisingly, the ad doesn’t say.

More notably, the ad includes a sort of festival of other “others,” resulting in an awkward spectacle of diversity porn that begs to be shared and tweeted by all those progressive and free-thinking folks who have no problem letting multinational companies into their hearts, minds and closets.
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