Mariam Saeed El Ali, was the recipient of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship, Center for the Arts and Humanities at the American University of Beirut (2020-2021). She holds a doctorate in Arabic language and literature from the same university (2017). She received the Abdul Hadi Al-Debs Award for academic excellence, for her PhD dissertation that was supervised by Professor Tarif Khalidi. She transformed it into a book published by OIB in Beiruter Texte Und Studien series (volume 139) entitled Akhbar Khadija Bt. Khuwaylid in the Islamic Sources: Frames of Narration, Memory, and History (December, 2020). Mariam has several other publications in Arabic and Islamic studies and has taught Arabic and History at American University of Beirut and Université St Joseph.

Research Project

Memory at Work in Medieval Islamic Scholarship
Shaping Knowledge, Tradition, and Identities

This project examines some of the explicit expressions on memory and of memory in Islamic tradition, and how those expressions shaped its Scriptural, historical, literal, and architectural legacies.
The project is concerned with outlining the concept of memory in the nascent Islamic milieu, by chasing its textual expressions primarily in the Qurʾān. It investigates to what extent the Qurʾānic recurrent references to memory and related notions triggered interest of medieval Muslim scholars in this key concept. A comparison between memory and inimitability (iʿjāz) is sought. On the socio-historical level, the project considers the role of memory in the intellectual and cultural lives of these scholars and what values they attached to it. It looks closely at different attitudes to memory across the Muslim geographies, and communities. The project progresses along broad epistemological lines of enquiries around who, exactly, was responsible for the preservation of knowledge about the Islamic past, and what individuals, events, books, and monument pop up in the Islamic collective memory(ies) and why.