Lecture: Sunni constitutional theory in light of an early hadith about obedience
Wednesday 12 November 2025
17:00 – 19:00
The lecture is followed by a reception
Location: Lipsius
Cleveringaplaats 1
2311 BD Leiden Room0.05
Abstract
Secondary scholarship usually characterizes Sunnism as politically quietist, but this is an oversimplification. A largely overlooked hadith report that circulated already in the first Islamic century indicates that early Sunnis saw acquiescence to political authority as conditional. According to versions of this report, Muḥammad declared that “there is no obedience when it would entail disobedience to God.” My presentation traces the spread of the report and the principle it embodies among Muslim scholars and highlights its absorption into Umayyad and Abbasid political rhetoric.
Biography
Ahmed El Shamsy (PhD Harvard, 2009) is professor of Islamic thought at the University of Chicago. He studies the intellectual history of Islam, focusing on the evolution of the classical Islamic disciplines and scholarly culture within their broader historical context. His research addresses themes such as orality and literacy, the history of the book, and the theory and practice of Islamic law. He has published two books, The Canonization of Islamic Law: A Social and Intellectual History (2013) and Rediscovering the Islamic Classics: How Editors and Print Culture Transformed an Intellectual Tradition (2020). He is now writing a book about the emergence and early history of Sunni Islam.
Past lectures
Juynboll Lecture: Towards connected histories of Muslim Qur’an translation
Wednesday 20 November 2024
16:00 – 18:00
Academy Building
Rapenburg 73
2311 GJ Leiden
The First G.H.A Juynboll Lecture
The Juynboll foundation commemorates the life and work of Dr. Gautier Juynboll. It strives to promote the study of Arabic and Islam at Leiden university and to keep his legacy alive. This year the Juynboll association will organize a celebratory lecture to advance this goal.
Towards connected histories of Muslim Qur’an translation
Muslims have translated the Qur’an into Persian, Turkic, Malay or Kanembu for at least a thousand years in a variety of ways. Today, they translate the Qur’an in Bogotá and Cape Town, in Jakarta and Ankara, in Port Louis and Tokyo, into dozens of languages from all over the world. How can we connect the dots? How can we gain an understanding of global dynamics, patterns and connections in a discipline that has traditionally been defined by philological expertise, and hence privileged studies on corpora in a particular language? How can we transcend conventional center-periphery models without neglecting hierarchies based on religious authority and linguistic prestige? The study of Muslim Qur’an translation provokes questions that are relevant to the wider field of Islamic studies. This talk explores promising venues of research that will allow us to address these questions, providing insights into the multilingual discourses that shaped the Islamic tradition.
Speaker
The lecture will be given by Freiburg university’s Prof. Dr. Johanna Pink. Whose research interests are mainly early modern and modern Qur‘anic exegesis, Qur‘an translations with a special focus on Indonesia, the status of non-Muslims in Muslim majority societies and religious discourses, and the recent history of Egypt.
