Speakers on “Panel 6: Islam in South Asia” will be presenting their work from 3:25-4:45pm in Allard 123.
Fatima Afzal (UBC) | “Islam in the Vernacular: Creating a Muslim Lexicon in Late Colonial Punjab”
With the rise of religious nationalism in nineteenth century colonial India, religious identity became closely associated with linguistic politics; Hindi became the representative language of Hindus, Urdu of Muslims, and Punjabi of Sikhs. My paper considers how Punjabi, Muslim writers responded to this Muslim disavowal of other vernaculars by creating more Punjabi literature that was identifiably Islamic.
By close reading the text of three Punjabi translations of Bāgh-o-Bahār – an Urdu epic about the travels of four dervishes through the Ottoman empire and arguably one of the most influential Urdu prose text of the nineteenth century – published in 1904, 1912 and 1928, I will argue that the Punjabi authors display an attempt to make Punjabi more “Muslim. These translations mark an important moment for Shahmukhi (Persian script) Punjabi, where its predominant disposition is to be like Urdu, both in popularity and its ability to perform Muslimness through a diction that can articulate and coalesce Muslim concerns and religious identity. Anindita Ghosh has described in the case of Bengali that “the attempt to get rid of naturalized Perso-Arabic words from its active vocabulary made for a separation between a ‘purer’ Sanskritized Hindu style and lesser Islamic variant, leading to the creation of the term Muslim-Bengali (2006; 51). In a similar fashion, I argue that the attempts of Punjabi translators were directed towards the creation of a ‘Muslim-Punjabi’ in the Shahmukhi script; one which articulated religious reform through a Persian-Arabic dominated lexicon woven into Punjabi grammar.
Amina Ejaz (UVic) | “Repetition and Texts: Conceptual and Contemporary Islamic Pakistani Art and Calligraphy”
This paper seeks to examine works of local and diaspora Pakistani artists who use repetitive patterns and texts to create illuminating works that direct towards the Islamic calligraphic tradition. Even though these works have an absence of figures and are an-iconic, the intentional use of words from Urdu script and the repetition of the similar and repetitive words transform these transcendental works into the political, once deconstructed. Islamic Republic of Pakistan being the only country in the world to gain independence from British Raj in the name of religion Islam, faced and continues to encounter multiple social and political challenges that resonate in the works of Pakistani artists. These encounters are then reflected by artists who use calligraphy as a medium to tackle with anxieties of a postcolonial yet a Muslim state.
Works of Muhammad Ali Talpur (b. 1976), Ghulam Muhammad (b 1979), Rashid Araaeen (b. 1935), and Tazeen Qayyum (b.1973) will be analyzed in this paper to analyze the relation between calligraphy, text, and religion. These artists’ works are not only unique because of their engaging patterns and use of binary colors, but significant because these artworks fall under the category of contemporary Islamic Art from South Asia, which is an understudied location when it comes to Islamic art history.
Mahnoor Lone (UBC) | “The Allegorical Meaning and Experience of Beauty in Two Persianate Stories”
This paper compares descriptions of beauty in two Persianate texts. The first of these, Mirigāvatī (The Magic Doe, 1503) by Qutban Suhrāwardi is a premākhayan. This genre of Hindavi masnavīs— pioneered by Chishti Sufi’s towards the end of the Delhi Sultanate—employed a set of narrative tropes to allegorize the sufi disciple’s experience of searching for the divine. For instance, Mirigāvatī uses a prince’s desire for union with a magic doe-woman as the driving force of its plot. The imagery depicting the female beloved’s beauty in these texts played a significant role in imbuing them with deeper religious meaning and allowing readers to experientially engage with the story. Premākhayans used the formal set piece of the sarāpa (head to toe description) to draw a parallel between feminine beauty and divine beauty by imbuing this description with the traits of being fearsome (jalālī) and beautiful/fascinating (jamālī) ascribed to Allah in the Quran. These aesthetic and poetic choices made by authors of premākhayāns were central to their ability to create a text that simultaneously worked on a literal and allegorical level.
My paper compares the religiously meaningful depiction of beauty in Mirigāvatī with descriptions of beauty in Mazhab-ē-Ishq (The Religion of Love, 1803) by Nihāl Chand Lahorī. The latter is a colonially patronized Urdu qiṣṣa which resembles the premākhayān genre in its narrative but is stylistically less complex. I will explore how the stylistic constraints placed on the latter text affect the multi-layered meaning of its narrative and distance the reader from the emotions evoked in the story. Through such a comparison, My paper will examine how multilayered and ambiguous storytelling traditions were affected by colonial institutional environments where Persianate literary and aesthetic principles were sidelined. Ultimately I hope to reiterate the significant role of Indo-islamic aesthetic principles in upholding a rich and complex landscape of storytelling and religious expression in South Asia.
Ambreen Hussaini (UVic) | “Bin Qalandar’s Mystical Pop Calligraphy”
The Qur’an is a part of everyday cultural life in Pakistan. People engage with the Qur’anic text and the Arabic script in multitude of ways and on various objects. Their reading of the text is guided by their experiences, needs, and interests. During my doctoral research fieldwork in 2019, I observed the use of Qur’anic text on objects of material culture ranging from a grain of a rice to monumental architectures. I will present a case-study of Tahir Bin Qalandar (b. 1980), a son of a Sufi sage who builds his artistic oeuvre by combining the elements of miniature art, Arabic calligraphy, and graphic design. Since Qalandar’s mystical pop calligraphy manifests artistic modes of Sufi whirling, Arabic calligraphy, Mughal miniature, and graphic design, according to Jerrold Levinson’s theory, his work could be classified as “hybrid art.
Another way of analysing Qalandar’s work is to contextualise it in the tradition of Islamic calligraphy. Much scholarship has been devoted to the evolution of Arabic calligraphy. For example, Alain George maps the rise and demise of angular scripts, and Yasser Tabbaa discusses the transformation of Qur’anic calligraphy from an angular script to a cursive, perfectly proportioned legible script. In Tabbaa’s reading, the proportioned script was symbolically used to reflect the triumph of Sunni political ideas and theological views.
Reflecting on Tabbaa’s and Levinson’s works, I question whether Qalandar’s mystical pop calligraphy can be examined using art historical term “hybridity that acknowledges the interaction between diverse technical, semiotic, and aesthetic elements. Ialso ask whether his work could be used as a device to trace the rise of Sufi theological ideas in the context of Pakistan.