The Majewski Lecture - The Colloquy between Muhammad and Saytān: The 18th-century Bangla Iblichnāmā of Garībullā
Professor Stewart’s talk is organised jointly with the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies as the Majewski Lecture for Hilary Term, 2017.

In 1287 b.s. [=1879/80 c.e.] a short Bangla work was published in Calcutta under the title of Iblichnāmār punthi by the highly productive scholar Garībullā, who had composed the text about a century earlier. This somewhat unusual text is a colloquy between the Prophet Muhammad and the fallen Iblich (Ar. Iblīs), also called Saytān. The reader is offered humorous, often naughty descriptions of the depraved and licentious acts of Saytān’s lackeys, parodies of the standard ’aḥādīth literatures regarding proper conduct—everything a good practicing Muslim is not! This fictional inversion of all that is good and proper titillates the reader in its mad escape from the Bakhtinian monologic of theology, history, and law that governs the discourse of the conservative Sunni mainstream. It is the exaggerated negative image of the law as seen from the imagined squalid underbelly of Bengali society.

Professor Stewart will give another guest lecture on a related topic, ‘When Muslim and Hindu Worlds Meet in Fiction: Mapping the Bengali Imaginaire’ on Thursday, February 16th at 2 p.m. in the Library of the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies.
Date: 31 January 2017, 14:00 (Tuesday, 3rd week, Hilary 2017)
Venue: St Antony's College, 62 Woodstock Road OX2 6JF
Venue Details: Fellows' Dining Room
Speaker: Tony K. Stewart (Vanderbilt)
Organising department: Asian Studies Centre
Organiser: Faisal Devji (St Antony's College)
Organiser contact email address: asian@sant.ox.ac.uk
Booking required?: Not required
Cost: None
Audience: Public
Editor: Maxime Dargaud-Fons