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CMES Modern Middle East Speaker Series presents
Nada Moumtaz
Assistant Professor, Department of the Study of Religion, University of Toronto
Please note: due to University precautions surrounding the Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID 2019) outbreak, this lecture has been **CANCELLED**
Professor Moumtaz received her Ph.D. in Cultural Anthropology from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Her research stands at the intersection of Islamic legal studies, the anthropology of Islam, and studies of capitalism, and spans the nineteenth and twenty-first centuries in the Levant. Throughout her work she addresses how, beginning in the nineteenth century, Islamic tradition has transformed while continuing to challenge and provide alternatives to dominant sensibilities, conceptions, and institutions of the modern world. Recent publications include: “From Forgiveness to Foreclosure: Waqf, Debt, and the Remaking the Islamic Legal Subject in Late Ottoman Mount Lebanon”, The Muslim World 108 (4): 593-612 (2018); “Is the Family Waqf a Religious Institution?’ Charity, Economy, and Religion in French Mandate Lebanon", Islamic Law and Society 25 (1-2): 37-77 (2018); Co-authored with Mona Fawaz, “Of Property and Planning: An Introduction”, Introduction to special section of Planning Theory and Practice 18 (3): 345-350 (2017).
Moumtaz is currently finishing her book manuscript, tentatively entitled Reviving the Waqf: Property, Law, and Religion in Modern Beirut, where she examines the contemporary Islamic revival of a centuries-old charitable practice of pious endowment under global capitalism and a regime of modern nation-states. She argues that these attempts to rekindle the practice of waqf reorder key concepts in the Islamic tradition, namely public benefit, family, and intent.
Contact: Liz Flanagan