Time: 20 April 2023  (Thursday)  3：00-5：00pm  (Beijing Time)

Venue: Room 1017, Block A, Creative Building, Zijingang Campus, Zhejiang University

Language:  English

Topic: Imaginative Landscapes of Islamist Politics: An Introduction to Takhayyul

Abstract:

This paper offers takhayyul (tahayyul/تخيل) as a heuristic concept to study imaginative elements in populist Islamist movements across Balkan-to-Bengal complex (BtB). The historical interconnectedness imposed by the imperial Islamic past across BtB informs and shapes the ways these political actors tap into the imaginative capacities of their audience, their audiences’ various social references, religious cosmologies, nationalist discourses, resentments, and other imaginative realms. Takhayyul is often translated simply as ‘the imaginative’, although it has deep roots in Classical Arabic scholarship and refers to a particular type of imagination. Takhayyul is the terrestrial imagination that is realistic and worldly yet also prophetic; it informs doxastic thinking and political action. This paper explores this non-Eurocentric and somewhat autochthonous theory developed in the geography that it studies, and studies it vis-a-vis the political dreams that expand the imaginative capacity beyond physical and actual possibilities and which develop a shared Islamic vision and community.