This inaugural talk seeks to anticipate themes in the Lady Fatima Chair in Women and Divinity lecture series, by asking generally: what thinking can we aspire to cultivate on our tattered planet? Weaving together notes on extreme heat, blazing over the planet through 2024, Prophetic lessons on sustainable living, and reverent memories of Hazrat Bibi Fatima (as), the talk revisits the themes of living tradition and life science, religion and hope, as well as the gender quarrel, ongoing under the conditions of ecostress in which we all participate.
5th Sept
ThursdayH. M. Habib Auditorium
Habib University5:00 PM - 6:30 PM
Pakistan Standard Time (PST)
Larisa Jasarevic works on climate ecology, climate futures, as well as in the sciences and metaphysics of the heart. She is especially keen on blending critical (eco) thinking with insights from Islamic metaphysics. Her books include Beekeeping in the End Times (IUP 2024) and Health and Wealth in the Bosnian Market: Intimate Debt (IUP 2017). Several books she authored for children and young readers are forthcoming, among them Habibee: Your Guide to Ecology, and Sultana: Your Guide to Islamic Cosmology. Dr Jasarevic is currently working on a climate fiction book, and is post-producing the documentary Beekeeping in the End Times with her sister Azra. She is also an anthropologist and a beekeeper, a hobbyist photographer, and a first-time filmmaker. An independent scholar, Dr Jasarevic dwells in a mountaintop village in Bosnia. Prior to that she taught at the University of Chicago, and was a visiting scholar at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin.
The Lady Fatima Zahra Endowed Chair in Women and Divinity at Habib University, will be the first chair in women and divinity in the world. The Chair will be housed in Habib University’s Comparative Humanities Program, and seeks to institutionalize in the Religious Studies component of the major, the scholarly study of the role of women, as well as the feminine aspects of divinity, in the Muslim tradition and beyond. There is a globally recognized need for a focus on women, and it is indeed a growing field that has produced some of the best scholars and scholarship over the past few decades.
In the tradition of the Ahl-e-Bayt (the Prophet’s household of which Lady Fatima Zahra is part), the Chair will also have an interfaith dimension, addressing the relation between women and divinity in a spectrum of faiths. An endowed chair is one of the highest academic awards that the University can bestow on an academic scholar. It is both an honor to the named holder of the appointment and also an enduring tribute to the donor who establishes it. The benefit of establishing an endowed chair benefits not only the scholarly community at the University, it also increases the depth of conversations in the wider society – locally and globally – highlighting the critical aspects associated with the title awarded to the endowed chair.
Comparative Humanities at Habib University offers an interdisciplinary undergraduate program that trains you to draw on resources in the arts and humanities degree to come to terms with the biggest challenges in the human sphere, such as, crises in the intersecting spheres of knowledge, ethics, and the ecology. While you learn to move flexibly across disciplinary boundaries, this is an education in forms, that is, in forms of inquiry, concept, and affect in the humanities disciplines, history, literature, philosophy, and religion.
