CAIS Lecture Series: Professor Tahera Qutbuddin

CAIS Lecture Series

Piety, Ethics, and Politics in the Friday Sermon of Islam 

Professor Tahera Qutbuddin

The Council Lecture Series brings leading world scholars to the ASU community to explore timely, critical, and related research topics surrounding Arabic Studies and Islamic Studies

The Friday sermon that is an intrinsic part of Muslim ritual across the globe today has a long history rooted in the first Friday sermon delivered by the Prophet Muhammad in Medina, and more broadly in the multifunctional orations of the early Islamic world. Across the mosques, homes, battlefields, and open town spaces of the Middle East in the 7th and 8th centuries AD, religion, politics, and aesthetics coalesced in the richly artistic public performance of spontaneous Arabic oration (khuṭba). Exquisite in rhetorical craftsmanship, interactive speeches and sermons by Muḥammad, ʿAlī, and other political and military early Muslim leaders were also the major vehicle of policymaking and persuasion, and the primary conduit for dissemination of ethical, legal, and religious teachings. Drawing on ten years of research for her recently published book, "Arabic Oration: Art and Function" (Brill, Handbook of Oriental Studies series, 2019), Qutbuddin will discuss the Prophet Muhammad’s first Friday sermon, and sermons by early Muslim political and military leaders, to explore their major themes of piety and ethics, in intersection with their religio-political goals. She will also offer remarks on echoes of this heritage, and divergences from it, in Friday sermons of the contemporary Muslim world.

Organized and Moderated by Professor Souad T. Ali

On Zoom: https://asu.zoom.us/j/3813141796