IFAO

Call for Papers - deadline June 21, 2025

Workshop dates : April 6-8, 2026

Venue :  NVIC - Nederlands-Vlaams Instituut in Cairo    &    Ifao - Institut français d'archéologie orientale in Cairo

As part of the NWO-funded VICI project, “Land, space, power: Landscapes of the early caliphate”, this conference aims to bring together both senior and junior scholars to present case studies of burial practice and memory throughout the WANA (West Asia and North Africa) region from ca. 650 to 1500 CE as a mechanism of anchoring Islamic rule.This workshop examines Islamic funerary landscapes as dynamic intersections of memory, space, and practice and explores how the politics of burial and memory shaped and reflected the discursive processes of the new Islamic consciousness. Against this backdrop, the workshop seeks to explore the politics of burial, space, and memory by focusing on two central themes: ‘Death and Memory’ and ‘Death and Space’.

To explore these themes, we invite contributors to examine the following questions:

• What are the commemorative and appropriative aspects of funerary practice and how do the places of interment represent a personal experience of death and serve as focal points for collective remembrance and memorialisation?
• How do burial locations and visual strategies reflect cultural dynamics, social stratification, and acts of place-making which imbue spaces with multivocal meanings shaped by community, memory, and use?
• What role did the materiality of tombs and spatial organisation of cemeteries play in communicating meaning and shaping early Islamic landscapes? How are death and memory in different communities and social classes reflected and expressed in funerary landscapes?

Please send your proposal of ca. 300 words by the deadline of June 21 2025 to: k.mokranova@hum.leidenuniv.nl

For updates and more information: https://www.universiteitleiden.nl/en/news/2025/05/call-for-papers-burial-and-memory-in-the-early-islamic-world