All are welcome. Please send an email to Christian Suhr (suhr@hum.au.dk), if you wish to attend the conference.

Click here for full program and abstracts

The concept al-ghayb refers to the hidden, unseen, and invisible, and encompasses a range of important phenomena in Islam and in the everyday lives of Muslims. The dominion of the unseen (‘alam al-ghayb) includes both those parts of reality that cannot be seen simply because they are covered by other visible objects and those phenomena that cannot by their nature be perceived (e.g. the face or throne of God, paradise, hell, the past, or the future). Al-ghayb for instance plays a role in relation to barzakh (the intermediary realm between life and death); to the issue of veiling; to visions of deceased saints or true dreams of Prophet Muhammad; and to the uncontrollable powers of jinn, angels, magic, evil eyes, and omens. The unseen is in other words full of power and potential; but the lure of the territories of the unseen is also disturbing, troublesome, even dangerous.

The conference explores the sensual, existential, spiritual and political interfaces between visibility and invisibility in Islam. It invites papers that probe ethnographically or historically how this-worldly affairs are imagined, understood, and managed in various ways through connections to invisible worlds. In the process, the conference seeks to address the methodological, analytical, and epistemological questions that al-ghayb raises for anthropology and other social sciences.

• How can we approach the unseen world of al?ghayb empirically? 

• In what ways might an appreciation of Islamic understandings of invisibility inform a re-thinking of the role of the unseen as a trope in social analysis? 

• And how does the realm of the unseen engage debates within contemporary social theory about (in)visibility, embodiment, affect, imagination, and self-cultivation? 

The aim of the conference is to bring reflection on these questions of theory, analysis, and method together in an attempt to build a phenomenological and social understanding of the unseen in Islam.

Thursday, December 12

09.30-10.00   Morning coffee

10.00-10.20 Introduction   

Christian Suhr, Nils Bubandt and Mikkel Rytter, Aarhus University

10.20-11.10 On the anthropology of al-ghayb

Amira Mittermaier, University of Toronto

11.10-12.00 Rejected visions: The haunting of dream omens in Bishkek, Kyrgystan

Maria Louw, Aarhus University

12.00-13.00 Lunch

13.00-13.50 Islam in Europe and the problem of ontological doubleness

Nadia Fadil, KU Leuven

13.50-14.40 Longing for the Prophet: Connection and affective presence of the absent beloved

Mikkel Rytter, Aarhus University

14.40-15.00 Coffee break

15.00-15.50 Did Muh?ammad possess knowledge of the Unseen? Puritan Muslims arguing against the concept of?ilm bil-ghayb

Martin Thomas Riexinger, Aarhus University

15.50-16.20 Wrap-up and general discussion of Day 1

Friday, December 13

09.00-09.30 Morning coffee

09.30-10.20 Al-ghayb in classical Sufism and in Late Antique Philosophy

Mark Sedgwick, Aarhus University

10.20-11.10 The invisible in Islamic exorcism

Christian Suhr, Aarhus University

11.10-11.30 Break

11.30-12.20 Metaphors and paradoxes: Secrecy, experience and embodiment in the Sufi mystical initiation in Aleppo, Syria

Paulo G. Pinto, University Federal Fluminense, Brazil

12.20-13.30 Lunch

13.30-14.20 Spiritual governance in Pakistan

Ida Sofie Matzen, Institute of Anthropology, Copenhagen

14.20-15.10 From the spirits’ point of view: The ambivalent politics of the gaib in Indonesia

Nils Bubandt, Aarhus University

15.10-15.30 Coffee break

15.30-16.00 Wrap-up and general discussion of Day 2