Conference Report

By Sadaf Jaffer (Postdoctoral Fellow in Literary Cultures of Muslim South Asia)

I recently participated in the 13th annual Duke-UNC Islamic Studies Graduate Student Workshop with a focus on “Global Muslim Modernities and the Post-Secular,” hosted by the University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill on February 27 and 28, 2016. 

Many of the papers at the conference centered on efforts to move away from thinking of modernity as a European construct, but rather as a global experience. Workshop participants also worked towards taking seriously the ideas of non-Western theorists as thinkers, not just native informants. In my presentation for this workshop, I questioned the notion that the origins of the concept of the secular reside only in Euro-America. By focusing upon the history of Islamic humanism and Ismat Chughtai’s advocacy of a secular legal and political system, I argued that intellectuals like Chughtai are part of a longer legacy of Islamic humanism.
 
The workshop was very fruitful in helping me to hone my arguments, form connections with junior scholars across the country, and build relationship with faculty at Duke University, the University of North Carolina, and North Carolina State University.