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BOOK TALK: AFGHANISTAN RISING WITH FAIZ AHMED
April 4, 2019 @ 6:00 pm - 8:00 pm

August 19, 2019 marks the 100th anniversary of Afghanistan’s independence from Britain. Commemorating the roots and legacies of that watershed event, Faiz Ahmed presents a vibrant account of the first Muslim-majority country to form a fully sovereign government, ratify a constitution, and promulgate an original body of national laws after the fall of the Ottoman Empire. Debunking conventional narratives of Afghanistan as a perennial war zone and remote frontier, his recently published book Afghanistan Rising rediscovers a time when Kabul stood proudly as a center of constitutional politics and contested visions of reform in the greater Islamicate world.

Cosponsors:

Faiz Ahmed is Associate Professor of History at Brown University. He specializes in legal and constitutional history in the Ottoman Empire, Middle East, and South-Central Asia, as well as the social history of diasporic communities connected to these regions. His first book, Afghanistan Rising: Islamic Law and Statecraft between the Ottoman and British Empires, was published with Harvard University Press in November 2017.
Our discussant, Ayşe Baltacıoğlu-Brammer, is currently an Assistant Professor of History and Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies at NYU. Ayşe is a specialist in Middle Eastern history with a focus on early modern Ottoman and Safavid Empires. Her research interests are centered around questions surrounding the Sunni-Shi‘ite conflict during the early modern period and its enmeshment with issues of political, religious, and fiscal legitimacy in inter-confessional and inter-imperial contact zones.