Agenda
NISIS Autumn School ’26: “Religious, Social and Political Non-Conformism in Islam”
In older works on Islamic history, it was not uncommon for academic authors to refer to certain trends within Islam as “orthodox”. While this label, which such studies invariably applied to (specific forms of) Sunnism as opposed to Mu‘tazilism (Gibb 1958; Hitti 1970), certainly has its uses in the study of Islam, its straightforward application to Sunnis often hides an anti-Shi‘i bias that has long characterised Islamic Studies (Bdaiwi 2025). More recent studies, by contrast, have not only emphasised the diversity of Islam throughout its history, but have also shown the extent to which “un-orthodox” forms of the religion have been shared by many Muslims for centuries (Ahmed 2016; Bauer 2021 [2011]). Indeed, many of such “non-conformist” trends, groups and individuals – frequently associated with Sufism and mysticism – have often had a major impact on the development of Islam throughout its history. Abu Hamed Muhammad Ghazzali placed Sufism in his epoch-making Revivification of Islamic Sciences at the heart of Islam, condemning other mystic and antinomian groups as heretics, whose blood could be shed without impunity (Seyed-Gohrab 2024).
Despite his enormous impact, non-conformism in Islam has remained a phenomenon both in Sunni and non-Sunni communities. Indeed, many Sunni minorities in non-Muslim countries around the world who do not conform to the social norms of their country through their beliefs, their behaviour or their dress have faced discrimination and Islamophobia, as the rise in anti-Islamic populism in various European countries attests to. This social non-conformism is often abetted by political concerns about Muslims, who – particularly after the terrorist attacks in the United States of 11 September 2001 – were sometimes seen as security concerns, especially if they strongly adhered to their religion (Mamdani 2005). Such political non-conformism is not limited to Western countries, however, as the experiences of repression against the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt show (Ghyoot 2025).
As such, non-conformism in Islam comes in many shapes and sizes and can be expressed in forms that deviate from supposedly normative Islamic and non-Islamic traditions, beliefs, customs and practices, with each leaving their distinctive imprint on Islam as a whole. It is also interesting to see how influential mystics such as Jalal al-Din Rumi employed a constellation of non-conformist tropes to define piety. This NISIS Autumn School intends to gather all these different forms of non-conformism in Islam – ranging from Qalandariyya to Qur’an-only Muslims, from Sufis to Salafis and from mullahs to mystics – to study what they believe, how their non-conformism took shape and what they have contributed to Islam. Research MA-students and PhD-candidates engaged in research focussing on these and other topics – all clustered around the theme of “Religious, Social and Political Non-Conformism in Islam” throughout Islamic history – are invited to participate in the 2026 NISIS Autumn School, convened at Utrecht University, by uploading the relevant documents on the NISIS website by Sunday October 4th.
Speakers:
Keen to attend this School? Please register HERE.
References
– Ahmed, Shahab. 2016. What Is Islam? The Importance of Being Islamic. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
– Bdaiwi, Ahab. 2025. Blinde vlekken in de islamologie. Bespiegelingen op de universitaire studie van het sjiisme. ZemZem: Tijdschrift over het Midden-Oosten, Noord-Afrika en islam 21, no. 2: 37-44.
– Bauer, Thomas. 2021 [2011]. A Culture of Ambiguity: An Alternative History of Islam (translation Hinrich Biesterfeldt and Tricia Tunstall). New York: Columbia University Press.
– Gibb, H.A.R. 1958. Mohammedanism: An Historical Survey. New York: Mentor Books.
Ghyoot, Mathias. 2025. Brothers Behind Bars: A History of the Muslim Brotherhood from the Palestine War to Egypt’s Prisons. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
– Hitti, Philip, K. 1970. History of the Arabs. London: The MacMillan Press.
Mamdani, Mahmood. 2005. Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War and the Roots of Terror. New York: Harmony.
– Seyed-Gohrab, Asghar. 2024. Of Piety and Heresy: Abu Hamid Muhammad Ghazzali’s Persian Treatises on Antinomians. Berlin: De Gruyter.
