(Online) Devil's Lair: An Ottoman Muslim Scholar on Danger of Coffeehouses

March 25, 4:15pm - 5:30pm
Mānoa Campus, https://stream.meet.google.com/stream/672e79b1-9c79-4091-b5a1-430ec94826f6

The Ottoman empire at the turn of the seventeenth century witnessed several disorienting transformations — a currency inflation catastrophe, population swells, peasant lawlessness, climate change, and new forms of entertainment that disrupted established social distinctions and hierarchies.

In this lecture, Dr. Youshaa Patel shows how one Muslim scholar, Sufi-jurist and litterateur, Najm al-Din al-Ghazzi (d. 1651) of Damascus, responded to these transformations by spending nearly forty years composing a magisterial treatise on the power of imitation, which included a fatwa, in the form of a short poem, on drinking coffee and hanging out in coffeehouses.


Event Sponsor
Religion, Mānoa Campus

More Information
Kapali Lyon, (808) 956-6949, kapali.lyon@hawaii.edu

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