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 - 6:00 PM (Pacific Time)
Royce Hall 306 & 314 and Online


Click here to register

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. 

TENTATIVE SCHEDULE:

8:30 am - 9:00 am 

Welcome, registration, coffee & pastries

9:00 am - 9:25 am

Opening Remarks

9:25 am - 10:45 am

An 'Arabicate Africa'? (Part 1)

10:45 am - 12:05

An 'Arabicate' Africa? (Part 2)

12:05 pm - 1:35 pm

Lunch

1:35 pm - 2:55 pm 

An 'Arabicate' Mediterranean?

2:55 pm - 3:10 pm

Coffee Break

3:10 pm - 3:50 pm

An 'Arabicate' Indian Ocean (South Asia)?

3:50 pm - 4:30 pm

An 'Arabicate' Indian Ocean (Southeast Asia)?

4:30 pm - 6:00 pm

Roundtable discussion

Cost : Free

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