CANCELLED: Convivencia: Towards a Just Coexistence

THIS EVENT HAS BEEN CANCELLED

CANCELLED

Various Speakers

About this event

What is the Convivencia Initiative?

The Convivencia Initiative invites communities of all faiths and none who share a commitment to the values of justice and peace and the principles of human rights to come together to explore what can be learnt from peaceful co-existence in the past to inform the present and build for the future.

Convivencia - past and present

The world as we know it today was transformed by periods of Convivencia in the past. The most celebrated is Al Andalus, in southern Spain, where people of the three monotheistic faiths (Muslims, Jews and Christians) lived in relative harmony during Moorish Muslim rule for a few hundred years, until the Christian Reconquista expelled Jews and Muslims from 1492 onwards. That period has been retrospectively described as the Convivencia. A great flowering of the arts and sciences, as well as of philosophy, literature and poetry turned the cities of Al Andalus into centres of art and architecture without equal. Moorish rulers created an intellectual haven that preserved and extended classical knowledge, serving as a basis for the Renaissance and, later, the Age of Reason or the Enlightenment, by encouraging a culture drawing on shared religio-cultural values.

Palestine under the Ottoman Empire is another example of coexistence where the three monotheistic communities lived in relative harmony. The three faiths shared a common Arabic culture, coexisting in the same social spaces..Such islands of comparative calm existed elsewhere, for example in the Balkans and parts of Turkey, as well as in late Mughal India. This heritage offers a cultural resource to the movement seeking just, sustainable coexistence in Palestine/Israel.

Building Convivencia

The purpose of the Convivencia initiative is to examine past forms of just coexistence to discover better international modes of race/faith relations in the coming decades. The existence of historical junctures which developed complex models for peaceful, beneficial and collaborative interactions, based on common understandings, is an important resource; to study its implications for our own era promises the potential of better understanding.

The Convivencia initiative proposes a programme of teaching, research, public events and publications at SOAS. Through this, we will explore the potential of Convivencia as a model for just and sustainable peace in the Middle East and as a foundation to re-casting community relations in other locations, including in SOAS itself. Such programmes of Convivencia could spread a message of peaceful coexistence for the common good, between communities, nature and the environment, for the benefit of all.

Programme

The programme will begin with a symposium hosted by SOAS in March 2022: Convivencia – Towards a Paradigm Shift in Race/Faith Relations in the International Context. Two hybrid events, combining physical and online presentations, will be organised by SOAS in collaboration with US and Middle East universities. This initial symposium will run over a period of two days, each based in a different time-zone, facilitating international participation.

The visual, audio and written output from the symposium will be used to open up conversations in classrooms and the public sphere, giving rise to a further, more ambitious, event: a conference, to be held in the autumn of 2022 that will re-convene those who participated in the symposium creating a wider constellation of scholars and people from faith communities to explore the potential of Convivencia as an approach to establishing just peace in contexts of intractable, polarised, conflict. Keynote presentations from a range of international leading researchers will be at the heart of the different events.

Keynotes

• Professor Jocelyne Cesari, Professor of Religion and Politics, University of Birmingham and J. Dermot Dunphy Visiting Professor of Religion, Violence, and Peacebuilding at Harvard Divinity Schoo - ' Al Andalus Today: Nostalgia for a Lost Paradise or Model for Civility in the Global Age?'
• Professor Nabil Matar, Professor of English, Samuel Russell Chair in the Humanities, Department of English, University of Minnesota - ' From John Locke to ‘Abd al-Ghanī al-Nābulusī: Toleration to Coexistence '
• Professor Gil Anidjarr, Professor in the Departments of Religion and the Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies (MESAAS), Columbia University - 'The Destruction of History'
• Professor Amina Yaqin, Associate Professor in World Literatures and Publishing, University of Exeter.
• Professor Mashood Baderin, Professor of Laws, SOAS

Organiser: Centres & Institutes (SOAS), ICOP (SOAS).

Contact email: convivencia@soas.ac.uk