On 28 April, at 7 p.m., American associate professor Justin Stearns will close the Foros 2021 lecture series with an online lecture entitled “Religion, Contagion, and Plague in the Premodern Islamicate World”. 

“Covid-19 has shone a harsh light on the faultlines of the countries of the twenty first century, on the inequalities within our societies, but also on how our attitudes to science and to religion shape our sense of responsibility to our neighbors. In this talk, I will look back over the intellectual responses to epidemic disease in the Muslim world in the pre-modern period, addressing attitudes towards contagion, God’s omnipotence, medicine, and the believer’s duty to fellow Muslims. My aim is not to draw lessons with our own current predicament as to deepen our understanding of how prior generations of mankind responded to a challenge we are all-too familiar with today.” 

Justin Stearns is an associate professor of Arab Crossroads Studies at New York University in Abu Dhabi. His research interests focus on the intersection between law, science, and theology in the pre-modern Islamic Middle East. He earned his bachelor's degree in English and History from Dartmouth College in 1998 and his Ph.D. in Middle Eastern Studies from Princeton University in 2007. His first book was called Infectious Ideas: Contagion in Pre-Modern Islamic and Christian Thought in the Western Mediterranean (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011). He has published articles in Islamic Law and Society, Medieval Counters, Al-Qantara and History Compass. His book on the social situation of the natural sciences in Morocco at the beginning of modern times, entitled Revealed Sciences: The Natural Sciences in Islam in Early Modern Morocco, will be published by Cambridge University Press this year. The first volume of his edition and translation of al-Yusi’s (d. 1102/1691) Discourses was published by the Arab Literature Library in 2020. 

Entitled “Expectations” the Foros 2021 lecture series will undertake a reflection on the reconstruction scenario as a result of the COVID-19 crisis in all sectors of society, with a special focus on architecture and urban planning.

Language: English
Link for free access: https://zoom.us/j/96681977008