It’s a Wednesday afternoon at the Institute for the Study of Muslim Civilisations in London. Associate Professor Philip Wood’s class in “The Sacred Across Cultures” is discussing the ways different cultures regulate marriage and socialising between the sexes, and how such rules enable the transmission of faith, and empower some while disempowering others.
So far, the first-year master’s degree students have scrutinised advertisements for marriage partners in Pakistani newspapers, explored a stud
"You don’t have to agree with me. I’ve deliberately set out an argument for you to respond to."
Dr Philip Wood
y of marriage among Americans of Gujarati origin and considered the impact of the concept of izzat, or honour, on young women in South Asia. And now Wood, an Oxford-trained historian of late antiquity, is summing up. The day before, he reminds his students, they discussed the work of Pierre Bourdieu, Michel Foucault and Antonio Gramsci, and the ways power shapes knowledge.
“What I’ve argued is that marriage restrictions and limitations on female socialisation reflect two sets of interests,” Wood says. “One, the patriarchal interest in a household – a father who wants to make sure his daughters don’t marry against his material interest. The second, the wider interests of communal elites, who will lose their authority if the community ceases to exist. In other words, there is a coincidence of communalism and patriarchy.”
He continues: “I’m trying to use some of the things we looked at yesterday, but in a study-of-religions context. You don’t have to agree with me. I’ve very deliberately set out an argument for you to respond to.” It is only one class, but it illustrates the ethos that animates ISMC – a liberal arts ethos marked by interdisciplinary inquiry, diverse viewpoints and a commitment to connecting scholarship to contemporary dilemmas.
Recently, that spirit was on display not only in classroom discussions, but at ISMC’s conference “Exploring Media in Muslim Contexts,” its ongoing project on Governance for the Public Good in Muslim Contexts, and a workshop designed to help academics reach a wider audience.
Jointly organised with the Graduate School of Media and Communications, the two-day media conference attracted 40 papers from scholars and journalists and more than 100 attendees. In his keynote lecture, Professor Marwan Kraidy of the University of Pennsylvania analysed the insurgent art of the Arab Spring. Other presenters discussed satire in an interconnected world, the shaping of foreign coverage of the revolution in Egypt, Muslim radio stations in Kenya and the use of social media by young people in Tunisia, Morocco and Turkey.
With the arrival of Associate Professor Gianluca Parolin at ISMC, the Institute’s project on Governance for the Public Good in Muslim Contexts has a new leader. Parolin has brought scholars to ISMC to discuss constitutionalism in the Muslim world, including Asifa Quraishi Landes of the University of Wisconsin School of Law, who sought to show how constitutions might manage the apparently impossible task of satisfying both liberals and Islamists.
Bridging the gap between academia and the public is central to ISMC’s mission. With a British Academy grant, Associate Professor Wood organised a workshop that gave early-career academics a chance to get advice from journalists and media experts on reaching new audiences.
One thing he hopes he might draw attention to: the role of marriage practices in determining the degree to which immigrants are able to integrate into British society. It is a subject his students already know something about.
