Von Besnik Sinani

The Centre for Interreligious Studies based at the Almo Collegio Borromeo, Pavia organized in the last week of July the summer school titled “Protest and Proclamation: An Interreligious Perspective Towards the History of Prophetology”. Scholars, researchers and graduate students from several European, American and Middle Eastern countries came together at the Villa Vigoni in Como, Italy, and for five days engaged in dynamic conversations over the multidisciplinary study of notions of prophecy in the Abrahamic traditions. Participants engaged with primary sources, scriptural texts, historical accounts, and ethnographic reflections, exploring the significance of historical analyses and scriptural literacy on the topic of prophetology for contemporary academic, political, and cultural debates.

Three ZITh members participated in this summer school. Dr. Mujaddad Zaman, a fellow at the Chair for Islamic Doctrine, gave a lecture titled “Muhammad as a Man: Impressions of Masculinity in Islamic Prophetology”. His lecture was followed by a workshop that focused on the notion of imitatio Muhammad in the Muslim tradition, based on a classical text of Muslim pedagogy, written by Burhan al-Din al-Zarnuji (d. 1195). Likewise, from the Chair for Islamic Doctrine, doctoral fellow Abdullah Rıdvan Gökbel, presented his research project based on the study of prominent Ottoman theologian, the Shaykh al-Islam of his time, Ibn Kama (d. 1534) on the virtue and prominence of Prophet Muhammad. Finally, Besnik Sinani, a post-doctoral fellow at the Chair for Hadith Studies and Prophetic Traditions, presented both his project, on the transformations in prophetology and sira writing in the modern age, and the upcoming project of the Chair on the notion of ‘lived prophetology’. The project of the chair is intended to incorporate several research projects within, based on the topics of hadith, tradition, and society.