Annual Ghadeer Conference

The second Ghadir conference focuses on “Genealogies of Shiism: Political, Economic, and Intellectual Formations (13th–15th Centuries CE).” 

 

The goal is to bring scholars in the field together in examining the historical processes through which Shi‘i identities, institutions, and intellectual traditions underwent change and eventually crystalized again during the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries. 

 

Zooming in on the aftermath of the Mongol conquests the conference aims to analyze the complex transformations that reshaped religious authority, communal belonging, and intellectual expression. As new economic networks emerged—linking Iran, Iraq, Syria, Egypt, and Central Asia—significant shifts occurred in the circulation of scholars, texts, and patronage. Within this context, Shi‘i thought developed through both scholarly production and changing institutional settings. Figures such as Naṣīr al-Dīn al-Tūsī (d. 1274), Ibn Muṭahhar al-Ḥillī (d. 1325), and Seyed Ḥeydar Āmolī (ca. 1396) who systematized Twelver Shi‘i theology, jurisprudence, and norms of practice exemplify the intellectual dynamism of the period. 

 

By situating doctrinal developments alongside broader social and political transformations, the conference aims to trace this specific phase of development of the Twelver Shia not merely as a static confessional group identity but as a historically evolving constellation of ideas, institutions, and practices. Manuscript cultures, numismatic specimens, patterns of patronage, regional mobility, and the interaction of scholarly will be surveyed.

 

Professor; Class of 1950 Herman B. Wells Endowed Professor

Indiana University Bloomington

 

Professor of Islamic Intellectual History

University of Exeter

 

Richard W. Bulliet Assistant Professor of Islamic History

Columbia University

 

Assistant Professor of History & Near Eastern Studies

University of Massachusetts Amherst

 

Associate Professor; Associate Chair of Undergraduate Studies

University of Colorado Boulder

 

Clinical Professor Urdu Language and Literature 

Dept of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies,

New York University

 

Associate Professor

Zaytuna College

 

Assistant Professor of Islamic Studies 

Graduate Theological Union, Berkeley, California

 

Organizer:

Inaugural Fellow, Imam Ali Research Center/HIU and Assistant Professor of History at the University of Maryland