KARACHI: Habib University hosted the second lecture of ‘Imam Ali Lecture Series’ for the world’s first Faculty Chair in Wisdom and Humanities, emphasising the institution’s commitment to integrating wisdom and interdisciplinary studies in higher education.
The lecture featured distinguished scholar and Associate Professor of Religion, Dr Teena Purohit from Boston University.
Dr Purohit in her lecture explored how Muslim reformers of the 19th and 20th centuries sought to renew and revitalise Islamic tradition in the context of colonial modernity, negotiating between two models of religious authority: charismatic and exemplary. “Islamic leadership throughout history has been shaped by these two distinct but interrelated models.”
Speaking to the legacy of colonial modernity influencing contemporary Muslim societies, she said: “The conversions and translations of texts were all part of the Orientalist program that was very much has been the sort of, I suppose, the precursor and history for how we understand religious religion and religious identity.
This is not to say that there wasn’t religion before the colonial, you know, presence, of course, there was. It just didn’t have the sort of definitional and epistemic kind of logic and function that it started to have.”
Copyright Business Recorder, 2025
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