Branigin Lecture by Christopher Melchert

Dear friends/colleagues,Indiana University Institute for Advanced Study presents a Branigin Lecture by

Christopher Melchert

Agreeing to Disagree (or not): The Shaping of Islam In the Early Middle Ages

Thursday, February 24, 2011 - 4:00 p.m. - Wright Education Building, 1120 (201 N. Rose Ave.) IU Bloomington

The Sunni community formed in the ninth and tenth centuries CE around a series of agreements to disagree. Multiple texts of the Qur?an were accepted, multiple collections of sound hadith, and most importantly multiple schools of law. In the area of piety, Sufism evolved so as to avoid offence to the legal-minded, although tensions here have persisted to the present. Agreement was even more elusive in the area of theology, although with diminishing effects in time except as to the Sunni-Shi`i divide. Probabilism was the most important mechanism for keeping the peace: one felt sure that one?s own way was the closest to what God wanted but recognized that there was a certain chance that other ways were actually closer.

Christopher Melchert is University Lecturer in Arabic and Islam at the Oriental Institute and a Fellow of Pembrook College at the University of Oxford, England. He is one of the leading experts on Islamic law, focusing on the formation of Islamic legal traditions and on the early Hanbali school. His 1997 book, The Formation of the Sunni Schools of Law, 9th-10th Centuries C.E. has already become a modern classic.