Mona Hassan is a new addition to Duke's growing interdiscipinary effort in Islamic studies. | Duke University Photography
Mona Hassan: The History of Emotions and Religious Imaginations
Religion professor explores how the Muslim past shapes imaginations of the future
Friday, October 16, 2009
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Durham, NC -- Growing up outside Washington, D.C., and in New Jersey, Mona Hassan remembers neighbors predicting she would become the first female president of the United States.
“I think they saw I was good at envisioning and organizing people to do things,” she says with a laugh, recalling the memory.
Hassan channeled those skills into a passion for teaching and research in Islamic studies. An American Muslim of Egyptian descent, Hassan says her fascination with Muslim cultures led her to want to share their history with others.
As an undergraduate at Rutgers University, where she graduated as valedictorian with a degree in history and Middle Eastern studies, she gave guest lectures on issues including Muslim women and Islam in Africa. She went on to receive her masters and doctorate in Near Eastern studies at Princeton University where her doctoral research tapped a range of sources including the works of Muslim historians, poets, scholars and journalists, among others.
This year Hassan came to Duke as assistant professor of Islamic studies and history in the department of religion. She said the first time she flew into Durham she knew this would become home.
“Duke is a dynamic place to be,” she says. “The vision of the university as a whole, the intellectual community that’s here – there’s a creative energy here that attracted me.”
Hassan and her husband Mustafa Tuna, who graduated with a doctorate from Princeton’s history department and is now assistant professor of Russian and Central Eurasian history and culture in Duke’s department of Slavic and Eurasian studies, moved to Duke this year with their son. Both Hassan and Tuna are affiliated faculty with the Duke Islamic Studies Center (DISC) and hold secondary appointments in the department of history.
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Hassan is settling into an office on the third floor of the Gray Building that overlooks West Campus. She is spending the fall semester writing articles and working on her first book, an outgrowth of her doctoral dissertation, which examined the disappearance of the Islamic caliphate at two key points in history: 1258, when the Mongols destroyed Baghdad, the capital of the Abbasid caliphate; and 1924, when the Turkish Grand National Assembly moved to abolish the Ottoman caliphate based in Istanbul.
In addition to exploring the emotional outpouring among contemporaries to these events, the project also looks at how the dream of resurrecting a caliphate in the current era differs significantly among Islamist groups.
“The question I’m asking is how Muslims remember and imagine the past while re-imagining their future,” she said. “How does the disappearance of a political institution affect a religious community? How do they navigate the religious crisis that ensues?”
Longing for the Lost Caliphate: A History of Emotions and Religious Imaginaries among Premodern and Modern Muslims examines the impact of these pivotal events upon Muslim cultural memory and political formations.
Hassan noted that Duke’s religion department appealed to her because of its high-caliber profile and interdisciplinary focus – integrating faculty strengths in the arts, humanities and social sciences, grounded in a wide range of religious traditions.
This environment will support Hassan in pursuing her research interests, which include questions of pre-modern and modern religious authority and interpretation, cultural memory and representation as well as Islamic political thought and jurisprudence, and female religious authority among Muslims.
“I am fascinated by cross-cultural exchanges, not only in the modern era but throughout history,” she said.
This interest nourishes her teaching. In the spring she will teach an undergraduate class focusing on global expressions of classical Islam and examining the diversity of Muslims across Afro-Eurasia. She also will teach a thematic graduate seminar on Muslim societies in a global perspective.
Hassan also hopes to engage with the greater Durham community through outreach and education. She said in the past she has gotten involved with speaking at local churches and public libraries, training school teachers and educating state government officials about subjects such as Islamic civilization, Islam in the Americas and Arabic culture.
“I love discovering new connections in my research and am passionate about sharing that with the wider community,” she said.
