Visiting Author – Simon Wood in conversation with Abla Hasan – The Caliphate or Supreme Imamate
October 8 @ 5:30 pm - 6:30 pm
Join us on Tuesday, October 8th at 5:30 as Simon Wood joins in conversation with Abla Hasan. Simon’s most recent work of translation brings the 1923 work The Caliphate or Supreme Imamate by Muhammad Rashid Rida to English-speaking professors and students for the first time.
About the Book:
A translation of Muhammad Rashid Rida’s best-known work, which examines the compatibility of Islamic political and legal tradition with modern thought.
Muhammad Rashid Rida (1865–1935) was a prominent Muslim intellectual and reformer. Born in a village near Tripoli in present-day Lebanon, he was renowned for his founding of Al-Manar, an independent and successful Islamic magazine in which he published The Caliphate or Supreme Imamate as a series beginning in 1922. The work showcased Rida’s faith in the Islamic tradition as the origin of notions such as self-determination and popular sovereignty, as well as his opposition to Western politics. A realist, he nevertheless argued that a revived Caliphate was viable and held the keys to Muslim empowerment and universal salvation.
This skillful translation by Simon A. Wood will make The Caliphate or Supreme Imamate accessible for the first time to English-speaking scholars and students of political theory and the modern Middle East.
About the Speaker:
Simon A. Wood is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at UNL, where he has been faculty since 2004. He has degrees from the University of Otago (pronounce: oh-taa-go) in New Zealand, and Temple University in Philadelphia. His teaching and research focus on modern Islam and comparative religious studies. His books include:
-The Caliphate or Supreme Imamate (Yale UP, 2024). This book is a translation and introduction of a 1923 book on the caliphate written in Arabic by Rashid Rida, a seminal Syrian Muslim intellectual.
-Fundamentalism: Perspectives on a Contested History (U of South Carolina Press, 2014). This book is an edited volume that discusses how the idea of religious fundamentalism has influenced our understanding of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.
-Christian Criticisms, Islamic Proofs: Rashid Rida’s Modernist Defense of Islam (Oneworld, 2008; paperback 2012). This book is a translation and introduction of Rashid Rida’s 1905 book about Christianity and Islam.