THE HOLBERG PRIZE PROGRAMME

JUNE 2–5, 2014

HOLBERG PRIZE LAUREATE 2014 MICHAEL COOK

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The Holberg Prize wishes to contribute to greater understanding, interest and enthusiasm for research in the academic fields of the arts and humanities, social sciences, law and theology.

The Holberg Prize is awarded annually for outstanding scholarly work in the academic fields covered by the prize. The prize is worth NOK 4.5 million. The Holberg Prize laureate of 2014 is Michael Cook, a British historian and scholar of Islamic history. He is a leading expert on the history and religious thought of Islam. Michael Cook is University Professor of Near Eastern

Studies at Princeton University.

The Nils Klim Prize is awarded to a Nordic researcher under 35 years old within the academic fields of the Holberg Prize. The prize is worth NOK 250 000. The laureate of 2014 is Terje Lohndal, Professor of English linguistics, Department of Language and Literature, Norwegian

University of Science and Technology.

The Holberg Prize School Project is a research competition for students in Norwegian upper secondary schools. Three of the projects are awarded prizes of respectively NOK 15 000,

10 000 and 5 000. A teacher’s grant is also awarded.

The Holberg Prize was established by the Norwegian Parliament in 2003. It is named after Ludvig Holberg, the famous Norwegian-Danish playwright and scholar. He played an important part in bringing the enlightenment to the Nordic countries. The Nils Klim Prize is named after

the hero in Ludvig Holberg’s novel Nils Klim’s Subterranean Journey.

www.holbergprisen.no

MONDAY JUNE 2, 16.00–16.45

THE MULTILINGUAL SOCIETY AND UNIVERSAL GRAMMAR

Location: Chagall, Vaskerelven 1, 5014 Bergen

Nils Klim Prize laureate Terje Lohndal and Artemis Alexiadou, Professor at the Institute of Linguistics at the University of Stuttgart, discuss the human-specific capacity for language.

They will critically discuss the concept of Universal Grammar, which holds that there are abstract building blocks of language that all humans are born with. In particular, they will focus on how data from multilingual individuals can inform our understanding of Universal Grammar.

MONDAY JUNE 2, 17.00–18.00

MICHAEL COOK AT THE BERGEN INTERNATIONAL FESTIVAL

Location: Chagall, Vaskerelven 1, 5014 Bergen

Michael Cook in conversation with journalist and writer Alf van der Hagen on Cook’s scholar-ship on the history of Islam and his latest book Ancient Religions, Modern Politics: The Islamic

Case in Comparative Perspective.

The event is a cooperation with Bergen International Festival.

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09.00–09.15 Welcome

Professor Sigmund Grønmo (Chair, The Holberg Board)

09.15–10.45

PANEL 1: WHY MONOTHEISM?

TUESDAY JUNE 3, 09.15–15.30

HOLBERG PRIZE SYMPOSIUM 2014:

ANCIENT RELIGIONS, MODERN DISSENT

Location: Auditorium A, Studentsenteret, Parkveien 1, Universitetet i Bergen

VARIETIES OF MONOTHEISM IN LATE ANTIQUITY

While many religious and intellectual move-ments referred to the One God in Late Antiquity, they did so in a number of ways, with vastly different implications. In itself, “monotheism” may not be enough to characterize Muhammad’s religious revolution. A brief survey of religious and philosophical approaches to the unity of the Divinity in the Mediterranean and Near Eastern intercultural system might help us to better understand the emergence and nature of Quranic monotheism.

Guy G. Stroumsa is Martin Buber Professor Emeritus of Comparative Religion, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and Professor Emeritus of the Study of the Abrahamic Religions, and Emeritus Fellow of Lady Margaret Hall, University of Oxford. His main interest is the religious history of the Mediterranean world and the Near East in late antiquity, as well as in the history of the modern study of religion. Among his recent publications are The end of Sacrifice: Religious Transformations of Late Antiquity (2009) and A New Science: the Discovery of Religion in the Age of Reason (2010).

THE HOLBERG PRIZE SYMPOSIUM, PANEL 1

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MODERATOR PANEL 1: Sarah Stroumsa is Professor Emerita of Arabic Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where she taught in the Department of Arabic Language and Literature and the Department of Jewish Thought. She served as Rector of the Hebrew University from 2008 until 2012. She studies the history of philosophical and theological thought in Arabic in the early Islamic Middle Ages, Medieval Judaeo-Arabic literature, and the intellectual history of Muslims and Jews in Islamic Spain. Her publications in English include: Freethinkers of Medieval Islam: Ibn al-Rawandi, Abu Bakr al-Razi, and Their Impact on Islamic Thought (1999); and Maimonides in his World: Portrait of a Mediterranean Thinker (2010).

THE PEOPLE OF JUSTICE AND MONOTHEISM: MUʿTAZILISM IN ISLAM AND JUDAISM

The Islamic theological movement of the so-called Muʿtazila, the “People of Justice and Monotheism” as they called themselves, flourished between the Eigth and Thirteenth Century CE. While the methodological tools of discursive theology had left their mark on Jewish (mainly Karaite) thinkers writing in Arabic since the early Ninth Century, there emerged a “Jewish Muʿtazila” around the turn of the Eleventh Century that dominated Jewish theological thinking for centuries to come.

Sabine Schmidtke is Professor of Islamic Studies and Founding Director, Research Unit Intellectual History of the Islamicate World at Freie Universität Berlin. She has published extensively on Islamic and Jewish intellectual history and religion. Her books include The Theology of al-ʿAllama al-Hill(d. 726/1325) (1991), A Jewish Philosopher of Baghdad. ʿIzz al-Dawla Ibn Kammuna (d. 683/1284) and His Writings (2006, with Reza Pourjavady), and Rational Theology in Interfaith Communication. Abu l-Husayn al-Basr ’s MuʿtazilTheology among the Karaites in the Fatimid Age (2006, with Wilferd Madelung).

THE PROPHETS OF MONOTHEISM IN AL-ANDALUS

The noted Cordoban scholar Ibn Hazm (d. 1056) had no patience with the Biblical story of Loth because of the many shameful things it attributes to prophets. The protection of prophecy (tahsin al-nubuwwa) was a major concern for him and for other Andalusi and Maghrebi scholars. One of them, Qadi Iyad of Ceuta (d. 1149), produced a work in praise of the prophet Muhammad that enjoyed huge and lasting success in the Islamic world. In order to understand Ibn Hazm’s and Iyad’s defence of prophecy and prophets, the views of those who took different views need to be analyzed, since they indicate that the Muslims’ understanding of prophecy—and more specifically, of the last Prophet, Muhammad—has been more complex than current treatments often indicate.

Maribel Fierro is Research Professor at the Centre of Human and Social Sciences at the Higher Council for Scientific Research (CSIC—Spain). She has worked and published on the religious and intellectual history of al-Andalus and the Islamic West, and on Islamic law. Among her recent publications are Abd al-Rahman III, The first Cordoban Caliph (2005) and The Almohad Revolution: Politics and Religion in the Islamic West during the Twelfth-Thirteenth Centuries (2012). She is the editor of volume 2 (The Western Islamic World, Eleventh-Eighteenth Centuries) of the The New Cambridge History of Islam (2010) and together with Camilla Adang and Sabine Schmidtke, of Ibn Hazm of Cordoba. The Life and Works of a Controversial Thinker (2012).

10.45–11.15 Coffee

THE HOLBERG PRIZE SYMPOSIUM, PANEL 1THE HOLBERG PRIZE SYMPOSIUM, PANEL 1

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11.15–12.45

THE HOLBERG LECTURE: MONOTHEISM AND THE RISE OF ISLAM

The success of monotheism in world history is clearly related to power—but power of what kind? Is it the intrinsic power of the monotheist idea, for example an unusual capacity to focus the energies of large numbers of people in pursuit of a common purpose? Or is the power extrinsic, the result rather of historical contingencies that have forged an adventitious link between monotheism and powerful states? Or does the truth lie in some

combination of the two—and if so, just what combination would that be? In my lecture I plan to review the extensive historical record of the rise and spread of Islam—the process by which it became a world religion—to see what light it can shed on these questions. The issue is one that I have been aware of for a long time, but this lecture will be my first attempt to grapple with it.

THE HOLBERG PRIZE SYMPOSIUM, THE HOLBERG LECTURE

RESPONDENT: Robert Hoyland is Professor of Middle East History at NYU’s Institute for Study of the Ancient World. He is the author of Seeing Islam as Others Saw it: A Survey and Analysis of the Christian, Jewish, and Zoroastrian writings on Islam (1997), and Arabia and the Arabs from the Bronze Age to the Coming of Islam (2001). His recent books include Theophilus of Edessa’s Chronicle: the Circulation of Historical Knowledge in Late Antiquity and Early Islam (2011), Doctrine and Debate in the East Christian World, 300-1500 (2011), and In God’s Path: A New History of the Arab Conquests (2014). His scholarly interests lie in the history, languages, and literature of the late antique and early Islamic Middle East, specifically in the relations between Muslims, Jews, and Christians, the links between identity, religion, and ethnicity, and the transmission of knowledge from the Ancient world to the Islamic world.

MODERATOR: Professor Sigmund Grønmo (Chair of the Holberg Board)

THE HOLBERG PRIZE SYMPOSIUM, THE HOLBERG LECTURE

Michael A. Cook, Holberg Prize Laureate 2014

Michael Cook is Professor of Near Eastern Studies, Princeton University. He previously taught at the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London. His early research on Ottoman population history resulted in Population Pressure in Rural Anatolia, 1450-1600 (1972). Subsequently, the focus of his research shifted to the for-mation of Islamic civilization and the role played by religious values in that process, leading to Early Muslim Dogma: A Source-Critical Study (1981). He is the author of a study of a particular Islamic value over the entire range of Islamic history, that of al-amr bi`l-ma’ruf—the duty of each and every Muslim to rebuke those who violate God’s law—published as Commanding Right

and Forbidding Wrong in Islamic Thought (2000). His introduction to The Koran (in the OUP “Very Short Introductions series”, 2000) was followed by A Brief History of the Human Race (2003). His previously published articles were collected as Studies in the Origins of Early Islamic Culture and Tradition (2004). He is the general editor of the New Cambridge History of Islam (2010), which won the 2011 American Historical Association Waldo G. Leland Prize. His most recent book, Ancient Religions, Modern Politics: The Islamic Case in Comparative Perspective (2014), asks why Islam plays a larger role in contemporary politics than other religions.

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12.45–13.45 Lunch

13.45–15.15

PANEL 2: LAW AND DISSENT IN ISLAMIC THOUGHT

SHAVING HAIR AND BEARDS IN EARLY ISLAMIC EGYPT: AN INNOVATION

OR A UNIVERSAL PUNISHMENT?

Arabic narrative sources abound in references to the punishment of shaving beards and hair, both in an official juridical context and in more popular descriptions of public chastisements and shaming ceremonies. Papyrological evidence dating from the first 80 years after the Arab conquest of Egypt record the Arab authorities in Egypt imposing a punishment by shaving hair and beards on some Egyptian Christians. But there are no attestations of a systematic use of this punishment from pre-Islamic Egypt, nor does the context fit later narrative accounts. In this paper I want to examine two questions about early Islamic Egypt: (1) what does this practice come from? (2) Why is it deemed an effective punishment? For what crimes was it used, how did it function for the Arab authorities who imposed it and for the Christian Egyptians who underwent it?

Petra Sijpesteijn holds the chair of Arabic language and culture at Leiden University. After obtaining her PhD in Near Eastern Studies from Princeton University in 2004, she was a junior research fellow at Christ Church Oxford (2003-2007) and “chargée de recherche” at the Institut de Recherche et d’Histoire des Textes at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique in Paris (2007-present). Her research concentrates on early Islamic history and Arabic papyrology. She is the author of The Formation of a Muslim State. The World of a mid- eighth-century Egyptian Official (OUP 2013). She is the PI of the ERC project (2009-2015): The Formation of Islam: The View from Below, which examines the impact of the Arab conquest on Egypt using Arabic, Coptic and Greek papyri.

THE SOVEREIGNTY OF GOD IN MODERN ISLAMIC THOUGHT

The sovereignty of God and related ideas have had a prominent place in Islamist discourses. In influential formulations, twentieth-century Islamist ideologues like Mawdudi of Pakistan and Qutb of Egypt argued that anything less than exclusive submission to God’s law and all that it entailed in religious and political terms was idolatry. Yet the idea of the sovereignty of God has resonated with many more people than the Islamists, and it has meant quite different things in different quarters. This paper seeks to shed some light on the provenance of this idea, on how and to what purpose it has been invoked in religious and political argument, and what the contestations over it might tell us about competing conceptions of Islam in the modern world.

Muhammad Qasim Zaman is Robert H. Niehaus Professor of Near Eastern Studies and Religion at Princeton University. He has written on the relation-ship between religious and political institutions in medieval and modern Islam, on social and legal thought in the modern Muslim world, on institutions and traditions of learning in Islam, and the flow of ideas between South Asia and the Arab Middle East. He is the author of Religion and Politics under the Early Abbasids (1997), The Ulama in Contemporary Islam: Custodians of Change (2002), Ashraf ‘Ali Thanawi: Islam in Modern South Asia (2008) and Modern Islamic Thought in a Radical Age: Religious Authority and Internal Criticism (2012), and the co-editor of Schooling Islam: The Culture and Politics of Modern Muslim Education (2007); and Princeton Readings in Islamist Thought (2009).

THE HOLBERG PRIZE SYMPOSIUM, PANEL 2THE HOLBERG PRIZE SYMPOSIUM, PANEL 2

WEDNESDAY JUNE 4, 10.30–11.30

AWARD CEREMONY: THE HOLBERG PRIZE SCHOOL PROJECT

Location: Bergen Katedralskole, Kong Oscars gate 36

The Holberg Prize School Project is a research competition for students in Norwegian upper secondary schools. Twelve schools are selected each year and more than 400 students participate.

The Prize is awarded by Torbjørn Røe Isaksen, Minister of Education and Research.

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FROM CLASSICAL LAW TO LAWYER’S LAW

The Islamic juristic tradition remains the most contentious area of Islamic thought today. This paper explores how the pluralist landscape in many European countries has led to a renewed and contested interest in shari`a and Islamic thought more broadly, creating various definitions of shari`a and the place of classical jurisprudence, which is more strictly the domain of fiqh. How do the two words differ or connect in Islamic thought? While some scholars argue that the place of classical law is dead, whether as a discursive intellectual exercise or as a normative living tradition, it is clear that Muslims use the word shari`a in all kinds of ways, but always to mean a connection to God. When the word shari`a is used as part of the legal process in western countries, in civil, family, and criminal cases, the complex relationship between law as an intellectual exercise, law as a living tradition, and law as a mode of difference and source of suspicion between communities becomes clearer.

Mona Siddiqui joined the University of Edinburgh’s Divinity school in 2011 as the first Muslim chair in Islamic and Interreligious Studies where she also serves as Assistant Principal for Religion and Society. Her research areas are primarily in the field of Islamic jurisprudence and Christian-Muslim relations. Amongst her publications are Christians, Muslims and Jesus (2013), The Good Muslim: Reflections on Classical Islamic Law and Theology (2012), The Routledge Reader in Christian-Muslim Relations (2012), and How to read the Qur’an (2007, repr. 2014). Her book recounting her personal theological journey, On Faith and Freedom: A Personal Journey, is in press. Her current research is on the legal and theological limits of hospitality (forthcoming 2015). She holds four honorary doctorates, is a fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh and chair of the BBC’s Religious Advisory Committee. She will deliver the Gifford lectures in 2016 at the University of Aberdeen.

15.15–15.30 Closing discussion

Final remarks: Professor Ivar Bleiklie (Director, the Holberg Prize Secretariat)

THE HOLBERG PRIZE SYMPOSIUM, PANEL 2THE HOLBERG PRIZE SYMPOSIUM, PANEL 2

MODERATOR PANEL 2: Knut S. Vikør is former Director of the Centre for Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies, University of Bergen. His focus has been the history of Sahara and North Africa. He has studied the intellectual traditions of the new Sufi brotherhoods of the Nineteenth Century, in particular the Sanusiyya order. His books include Sufi and Scholar on the Desert Edge: Muhammad B. Ali al-Sanusi and his Brotherhood (1995), Between God and the Sultan: A History of Islamic Law (2006), and The Maghreb Since 1800 (2013). His current research interest is the history of Islamic law, where he has been working on the renewed demands for “re-interpretation” in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries.

WEDNESDAY JUNE 4, 14.00–15.00

AWARD CEREMONY: THE HOLBERG PRIZE AND THE NILS KLIM PRIZE

Location: Håkonshallen, Bergenhus Festning, Bergen

The prizes are awarded by HRH Crown Prince Haakon and Torbjørn Røe Isaksen, Minister of Education and Research.

(By invitation only)

THURSDAY JUNE 5, 18.00

THE LONG-TERM GEOPOLITICS OF THE MIDDLE EAST - MICHAEL COOK AT

THE HOUSE OF LITERATURE IN OSLOLocation: Amalie Skram, Litteraturhuset i Oslo, Wergelandsveien 29, 0167 Oslo

If you look at the Middle East today, you see a region of medium-sized and small countries—there is no giant country like the US, Brazil, Russia, China, or India. But if you go back over the past two and a half millennia, you quite often find large empires in the Middle East. What has driven the changing geopolitical shape of the Middle East since late antiquity, and why are we currently in a phase in which there is no giant state—in contrast to several other regions of the world? This topic is also connected to Muslim discontent with the current world

order and the desire of many Islamists to restore the Caliphate.

Michael Cook, Holberg Prize laureate 2014, in conversation with Jarle Simensen, historian and professor emeritus at the University of Oslo.

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Graphic design: Margareth Haugen, Communication Division, University of Bergen Photos: Denise Applewhite (cover, p.4,9), NTNU/Mentz Indregaard (p.3), Zahi Lerner (p.5),

Freie Universität Berlin (p.6), Luis Mariano Martínez Calvo (CSIC) (p.7), Leiden University (p.11), Scanpix/Marit Hommedal (p.13), Karianne Østrem (p.14)

CALL FOR NOMINATIONS 2015The Board of the Holberg Prize invites nominations for the Holberg Prize 2015 and

the Nils Klim Prize 2015.

Scholars holding positions at universities and other research institutions, including academies, are entitled to nominate candidates. The letter of nomination should be written in English and state the reason for the nomination in 2 to 3 pages. The nomination should also include the candidate’s CV and suggest referees who know the scholar’s work. Joint nominations do not

strengthen a candidacy.

Deadline for nominations is June 15, 2014.

For more information on how to nominate candidates, see holbergprisen.no

a: Holberg Prize, University of Bergen, Post box 7800, N-5020 Bergen t: (+47) 55 58 69 92 e: info@holbergprisen.no w: www.holbergprisen.no

facebook.com/holbergprisen twitter.com/holbergprisen #holberg14