2023 ENSIE meeting program

The 2023 ENSIE meeting-in-conjunction with the ESSWE conference will be held at Copenhagen University on June 25, starting at 13:00.  The 2023 ESSWE conference, at which there will be two ENSIE panels, will be at Malmö University, June 26-28, starting at 09:00. There are trains between Copenhagen and Malmö every 12 minutes, and the journey takes 42 minutes. Copenhagen Airport is the best airport for Malmö. Hotels are cheaper in Malmö than Copenhagen.

The panels at the 2023 ENSIE meeting-in-conjunction will be:

Reviving Muḥyiddīn: The contemporary uses of Ibn ʿArabī’s thought and the reinventions of Islam.

• Hadi Fakhoury (Harvard Divinity School) "Ibn ʿArabī between 'East' and 'West': Tradition, orthodoxy, and the meaning of Islam."
• Gregory Vandamme (Université catholique de Louvain), "Akbarian Anarchism: The influence of Ibn ʿArabī’s thought in the modern West and the limiting case of Ivan Aguéli."
• Ricarda Stegmann (​​Université de Fribourg), "Re-spiritualizing the world: Ibn ʿArabī in the thought of Faouzi Skali."
• Marcia Hermansen (Loyola University Chicago), "Healing with the Divine Names: Western Sufi practices derived from Ibn ʿArabī’s Emanationist Metaphysics."

Spiritism and Esotericism from Nahḍa Egypt to the USSR

• Mariam Elashmawy (FU Berlin), “Seances, societies, and periodicals: Egyptian spiritism contextualized.”
• Mattias Gori Olesen (Aarhus University), “Perennial bonds: Esotericism and Egyptian-Indian nationalist solidarity in the early 20th century.”
• Oleg Yarosh (National Academy of Science of Ukraine), “Entangled Sufism in the Late-Soviet esoteric milieu.”

For joining instructions for the meeting-in-conjunction, contact secretary@ensie.site.

The ENSIE panels at the 2023 ESSWE conference will be:

Practical Esotericism in Islam, Ancient and Modern, West and East, and In Between.

• Liana Saif (University of Amsterdam), “The Astral Craft in the Arabic Pseudo-Aristotelian Hermetica.”
• Lisa Alexandrin (University of Manitoba), “Sufi Graphology in the Manuscript Traditions of Sa‘d al-Dīn Ḥamūyeh and Sitt ‘Ajam bint al-Nāfis al-Baghdadiyya.”
• Francesco Piraino (Ca' Foscari University, Venice), “Photography as a Spiritual Practice: The Metaphysical Art of Maïmouna Guerresi.”
• Ricarda Stegmann (Université de Fribourg), “Transmitting the Untransmittable: Sufi Teaching Practices in Twentieth- and Twenty-first-Century Europe.”

Core Esoteric Practices of the Sufis

• Simon Stjernholm (Copenhagen University), “Dhikr, the Body and the Senses.”
• Makhabbad Maltabarova (Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena), “Mevlevi Sufi Whirling Practice in the Works of Western Esoteric and Dance Teachers of the Early 20th Century.”
• Michele Petrone (Università di Napoli "l'Orientale"), “The Multiple Lives of the Verse: Ethiopian Sufi Mawlid between Manuscripts and YouTube.”
• Mark Sedgwick (Aarhus University), “Esoteric and Exoteric Practice: Sufi Approaches to the Sharia.”

For details of the ESSWE program, see 

https://sv-se.eu.invajo.com/event/departmentofsociety,cultureandidentity/esswe9.

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Contact: info@ensie.site

Postdoctoral fellowship in Spirituality and the Arts

The Center for the Study of World Religions at Harvard Divinity School invites applications for a one-year paid postdoctoral fellowship in Spirituality and the Arts, in collaboration with the Warburg Institute, the Giorgio Cini Foundation, and the Centre for the History of Hermetic Philosophy and Related Currents at the University of Amsterdam. This is a benefits-eligible position. The candidates will work under the supervision of the Director of the Center, Professor Charles Stang, as part of the Center’s initiative on “Transcendence and Transformation.” 

Application deadline April 7. 2023.  See https://academicpositions.harvard.edu/postings/12280 and https://cswr.hds.harvard.edu/about/transcendence-and-transformation.

Art, Aesthetics and Islamic Mysticism

From Fachbereich Interreligiöser Dialog, Akademie der Diözese Rottenburg-Stuttgart:

During the 20th and 21st centuries, Islamic mysticism, or Sufism, spread extensively throughout Western society. Today’s Sufis, whilst still practicing the traditional arts, also express themselves through plastic and visual arts, performing arts, architecture, music and other forms of artistic conceptualizations.

This conference will focus on the aesthetic engagement of contemporary artists with Sufi practices, rituals, and discourses in the two-day international interdisciplinary online Conference Art, Aesthetics and Islamic Mysticism: Contemporary Perspectives on March 30th - 31st 2023

The Conference will bring together international scholars as well as artists, and will include the screening of two movies, “Light upon Light” und “Wajd Sufi (Sufi Ecstasy)”. The conference language will be English. You can register via our online form here.

Deadline extension

  

Deadline Extension!

The new deadline to submit a paper for the ENSIE panels in Malmø is December 15!

Please see below for further details.

ENSIE is again organising panels for the biannual conference of ESSWE, which in 2023 will be in Malmø, Sweden from Monday 26 June to Wednesday 28 June. The theme of the conference is "Western Esotericism and Practice." Proposals are therefore invited for papers dealing with any aspect of Islam, esotericism, and practice. ​Practice includes, but is not limited to, ritual, initiation, textual practices, preparation and consumption of food and beverages, amulets, and techniques for generating exceptional states of consciousness. ENSIE will then assemble proposals for papers into proposals for sessions, and forward these to ESSWE. Each session will have four papers. 

 

ENSIE will also be holding an additional ENSIE workshop with round-tables purely for ENSIE members in conjunction with the ESSWE conference, on Sunday 25 June, in Malmø.  

 

Proposals for ESSWE panels and/or the ENSIE workshop should be submitted by 15 December 2022 to esswe9@ensie.site. It is possible to participate in both events, but only one paper may be submitted. Please include name, title, and institutional affiliation, and then 3-5 keywords and, for paper proposals, a title and an abstract of no more than 300 words. 

 

For further information, visit https://www.esswe.org/current-conferencehttps://www.esswe.org/current-conference and http://ensie.site/conferences.html. 

ENSIE Call for Papers for ESSWE9

 

ENSIE is again organising panels for the biannual conference of ESSWE, which in 2023 will be in Malmø, Sweden from Monday 26 June to Wednesday 28 June. The theme of the conference is "Western Esotericism and Practice." Proposals are therefore invited for papers dealing with any aspect of Islam, esotericism, and practice. ​Practice includes, but is not limited to, ritual, initiation, textual practices, preparation and consumption of food and beverages, amulets, and techniques for generating exceptional states of consciousness. ENSIE will then assemble proposals for papers into proposals for sessions, and forward these to ESSWE. Each session will have four papers. 

 

ENSIE will also be holding an additional ENSIE workshop with round-tables purely for ENSIE members in conjunction with the ESSWE conference, on Sunday 25 June, in Malmø.  

 

Proposals for ESSWE panels and/or the ENSIE workshop should be submitted by 9 December 2022 to esswe9@ensie.site. It is possible to participate in both events, but only one paper may be submitted. Please include name, title, and institutional affiliation, and then 3-5 keywords and, for paper proposals, a title and an abstract of no more than 300 words. 

 

For further information, visit https://www.esswe.org/current-conferencehttps://www.esswe.org/current-conference and http://ensie.site/conferences.html. 

Change to status of ENSIE

When the European Network for the Study of Islam and Esotericism (ENSIE) was established in 2016, it was a network of the European Society for the Study of Western Esotericism (ESSWE). Since then, ENSIE has worked well as a scholarly network, not only within ESSWE but also independently, with three ENSIE conferences and one book. 

The ENSIE management committee has now decided, in agreement with ESSWE, that it would be better for ENSIE to proceed as an independent scholarly association, still affiliated to ESSWE, but independent of it. In some ways this means that nothing will change--ENSIE will continue doing what it has been doing since 2016. However, the change will also allow us to expand our activities, and we are about to launch an expanded blog/newsletter and an additional ENSIE workshop in years where there is not an ENSIE conference. It also changes financial arrangements. Previously, there has been no fee for being a member of ENSIE, because it was assumed that members of ENSIE were also members of ESSWE who had paid the ESSWE fee. In fact, many ENSIE members were never actually members of ESSWE, and that is now no longer required. Instead, we are asking ENSIE members in future to pay a small annual fee (€10/£10/200TRY/US$10) to ENSIE to pay for administration costs and support ENSIE initiatives. This fee will apply from January 1, 2023. As a member of ENSIE, you will be able to attend ENSIE conferences and workshops, receive the new ENSIE Newsletter, and vote for members of the ENSIE board in future years.

If you are already registered as an ENSIE member, all you need to do is pay the fee to one of the following accounts before 31 December 2022. If you are unable to pay the fee because you reside in a country that is cut off from the international financial system by sanctions, please email the treasurer at treasurer@ensie.site and we will offer you free membership. If you do not wish to pay the fee, please email the secretary at secretary@ensie.site so that we can remove you from the membership list and avoid sending you emails requesting payment in future. If you are unable to pay the fee for some other reason but wish to remain a member, please also email the secretary.

Payments may be sent to:

In euros, ENSIE, IBAN BE07 9674 3342 5466, BIC TRWIBEB1XXX (address: Bank Wise, Avenue Louise 54, Brussels1050, Belgium),

in pounds sterling: ENSIE, sort code 23-14-70, account number 85764464 (address: Bank Wise, 56 Shoreditch High Street, London E1 6JJ).

in Turkish Lira, ENSIE, IBAN TR02 0010 3000 0000 0049 4253 80, no other details required.

in US dollars: ENSIE, routing number 084009519, account number 9600009305579785 (address: Wise US Inc, 30 W. 26th Street, Sixth Floor, New York NY 10010).

For other currencies, please contact the treasurer, treasurer@ensie.site.

Call for articles on the contemporary uses of Ibn ʿArabī

Call for Articles – Special Issue – Religiographies, Vol. 3, n. 1, May 2024: "Reviving Muḥyiddīn: The contemporary uses of Ibn ʿArabī’s thought and the reinventions of Islam."

The intellectual and spiritual legacy of Muḥyiddīn Ibn ʿArabī (d. 1240) has been the object of multiple socio-political and religious interpretations. The fact that his thought is at the same time intensely innovative and deeply rooted in the tradition may explain in part why it had such a lasting influence, both among followers and detractors (Knysh 1999). 

In the West, Ibn ʿArabī appears today as a central reference in contemporary debates concerning Islamic spirituality, and his thought is one of the main sources of inspiration of the proponents of various creative adaptations of traditional Sufism in contemporary societies, ranging from the most conservative forms to openly New Age and syncretic movements (Morris 1986; Sedgwick 2017). 

This special issue aims to explore and analyze contemporary cases of the use of Ibn ʿArabī’s thought, and to shed light on the motivations, dynamics and methods underlying its interpretations. 

We invite scholars from all backgrounds in the humanities and social sciences, as well as social and political actors and artists, to propose contributions focusing on Ibn ʿArabī in connection with one or more of the following topics: 

• Sufism, Sufi institutions, and the spiritual path 
• Theology, metaphysics, and epistemology 
• Anthropology, cosmology, and world vision 
• Normativity, Islamic law, and rituals  
• Ethics, ecology, and politics 
• Social issues, gender, and diversity 
• Art, media, and creativity 

Download the call – Reviving Muḥyiddīn 

Guest Editors:

• Mark Sedgwick (Aarhus University)
• Gregory Vandamme (Université catholique de Louvain

Deadline: 5th of January 2023