A one-day conference co-organized by the UCLA Center for Near Eastern Studies and Ibn Khaldun Endowed Chair in World History. This is a hybrid event - more details available in the registration form.

Friday, October 18, 2024
8:30 AM - 4:45 PM (Pacific Time)
Royce Hall, Room 314 and Online

Register here if attending online.

In his widely influential The Venture of Islam, the University of Chicago world historian Marshall Hodgson famously divided the world of Islam into two linguistically defined cultural hemispheres: an ‘Arabic zone’ and a ‘Persian zone.’ It was in reference to the latter that Hodgson introduced one of his most productive neologisms: the ‘Persianate.’ Over the half-century since the final volume of The Venture appeared in 1974—and in the past two decades especially—the concept of a ‘Persianate world’ has been used to frame studies of the intersections between Persian and many other ‘Persianate’ qua ‘Persianized’ literatures, ranging from Ottoman Turkish and Chaghatai to Pashto, Urdu, and Georgian and arguably Malay. However, neither Hodgson nor the many scholars who have written in his wake opted to coin and explore the meaning of an equivalent neologism: ‘Arabicate.’ Yet this term might be basically defined as referring to written languages, and their intellectual and literary traditions, that were shaped in substantial part through adopting and adapting from Arabic their orthographic, lexical, generic and broader intellectual apparatus.

Building comparatively on the rich scholarship on the Persianate world, this conference explores the parameters of the ‘Arabicate’ as a corresponding world historical process that unfolded across specific sectors of Africa, the Indian Ocean, and the Mediterranean, constituting a region that partly overlapped but was by no means coterminous with Hodgson’s ‘Arabic zone.’ The key difference is that the notion of an ‘Arabicate world’ explores not Arabic itself, or in isolation, but instead focuses on non-Arabic literatures that were shaped by Arabic in different ways and degrees. Those different ways and degrees are what this conference aims to explore, so as to map out the parameters, processes, and ‘frontiers’ (whether spatial, social, or intellectual) that defined such an ‘Arabicate world.’ The conference will form the basis for an edited book, The Arabicate World. 

Accompanying exhibit From the 'Persianate' to the 'Arabicate' World: A Display of Manuscripts from UCLA Special Collections will be open from 2 pm to 5 pm on Thursday, October 17, 2024 in the Distinctive Collections Classroom in Special Collections (on the A level of the Young Research Library).

CONFERENCE SCHEDULE:

8:30 am - 9:00 am 

Welcome, registration, coffee & pastries

9:00 am - 9:25 am

Opening Remarks

  Nile Green, Professor of History, Ibn Khaldun Chair in World History 

9:25 am - 10:45 am

An 'Arabicate Africa' (Part 1)

  Abdulbasit Kassim (Stanford University): Linguistic Dilemma on National Symbols: The Place of Arabic and 'Ajami in Nigeria's Competing Literacies and Vernacular Nationalisms

  Clarissa Vierke (Bayreuth University): The Language of the Prophet and the Poetry of the East African Coast: Swahili Literatures and the Changing 'Arabicate' Ecologies in East Africa

  Moderator: Harold Torrence (UCLA)

10:45 am - 12:05

An 'Arabicate' Africa (Part 2)

  Dmitry Bondarev (Hamburg University): Arabic Internalized, Parsed, Amplified: Grammatical Thought in West Africa

Seyni Moumouni (University of Niamey): The Art of Writing Arabic Letters in Africa: An Analytical Study of Some "'Ajami" Manuscripts

  Moderator: Ghislaine Lydon (UCLA)

12:05 pm - 1:35 pm

Lunch

1:35 pm - 2:55 pm 

An 'Arabicate' Mediterranean

  Lameen Souag (CNRS/LACITO): Amazigh and the Arabicate

  Michael Cooperson (UCLA): The (Non-) Arabicate Malta

  Moderator: Choon Hwee Koh (UCLA)

2:55 pm - 3:10 pm

Coffee Break

3:10 pm - 4:30 pm

An 'Arabicate' Indian Ocean (South and Southeast Asia)

  M. Keely Sutton (Birmingham-Southern College): Unpacking Arabicate: Contextualizing Global Connections in Mappila Pattu Literature

  Andrew Peacock (University of St. Andrews): Arabicate Literary Culture in the Malay World

  Moderator: Luke Yarbrough (UCLA)

4:30 pm - 4:45 pm

Closing Remarks

Cost : Free

Sponsor(s): Center for India and South Asia, Center for Southeast Asian Studies, African Studies Center