The Annual York-Noor Lecture Series 2010-20101: Recent Publications on Islam and Muslim Societies

presents

Two lectures by Dr. Fred Donner, author of Muhammad and the Believers at the Origins of Islam (Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2010)

How Islam Began: New Views

Date: Sunday February 6, 2011
Time: 3:00 pm
Location: Auditorium, Noor Cultural Centre
Admission: $5

and

The Development of Early Islamic Political Vocabulary

Date: Monday February 7, 2011
Time: 11:30 a.m.
Location: 010 Vanier College Senior Common Room, York University
Admission: Free

Fred M. Donner received his PhD in Near Eastern Studies (1975) from Princeton University, with study of Arabic in Lebanon (1966-67) and of Oriental Philology at the University of Erlangen, Germany (1970-71). He has taught at Yale University (1975-1982) and the University of Chicago (since 1982). An early interest in the relationship between pastoral nomads and the Islamic state resulted in his first book, The Early Islamic Conquests (1981). This led him to investigate the early development of Islamic historical writing, resulting in his second book, Narratives of Islamic Origins (1997). He then turned to the question of how early Islam formed as a religion, explored in his most recent book, Muhammad and the Believers: at the origins of Islam (2010). He has translated a volume of the chronicle of al-Tabari (1993) and written over forty scholarly articles and scores of reviews, and has received research fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. He is currently (2011) President-Elect of the Middle East Studies Association of North America, and in 2008 received MESA’s Jere L. Bacharach Award for Service to the Profession of Middle Eastern Studies.

See here for the full series of this year’s York-Noor lectures.