Digital Project Shares Insights on Islam
In Arabic, the word mizan means balance. And that’s just what Mizan – a multi-channel, multimedia initiative sharing scholarship and insight on Muslim societies – attempts to provide.
“We want to improve online discourse about Islam,” said Michael Pregill, Interlocutor at the Institute for the Study of Muslim Societies and Civilizations (SMSC), an affiliated regional studies center of the Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University. “Mizan was originally conceived as an Islamic e-journal, but over time the project has grown to become a multifaceted digital scholarship initiative incorporating publishing and multimedia.”
As Interlocutor, Pregill facilitates content curation across Mizan’s three channels. The first, mizanproject.org, went live earlier this year.
“Mizan Project is dedicated to fostering public scholarship and supporting research on Muslim societies across the world,” states the Mizan mission statement. “Under the supervision of the Interlocutor and the Advisory Board, it provides a platform for community outreach, engagement, and participation for scholars and students of Muslim societies and civilizations.”
On a semiweekly basis, Mizan Project will update with a new piece of public scholarship, published under a Creative Commons license.
“Our goal is to provide an interdisciplinary approach to Muslim societies,” Pregill said. “We want our scholarship to provide a bridge between the past and present, and allow academics to connect more directly with their diverse audiences.”
The second component of Mizan is Mizan Pop, a multimedia channel for sharing and commenting on various aspects of pop culture throughout the Islamic world, including art, music, and video. It will launch in the spring of 2016.
The final leg of the project is Mizan: Journal of Interdisciplinary Approaches to Muslim Societies and Civilizations, an open-access, peer-reviewed journal of Islamic Studies launching April 2016. Pregill said that the journal intends to publish two issues a year.
Additionally, Mizan has organized a number of events, both at the Pardee School and beyond. Pregill co-organized a conference on Islamic stories of the prophets in Naples in October; the conference was co-sponsored by ILEX Foundation, which supports the Mizan initiative. He also organized a panel on the Islamic State held at the Pardee School earlier this year; video from the panel is available on the Mizan website, and papers from the panel will constitute the first issue of the Mizan Journal.
It’s all in service of an important and timely goal.
“As I came to BU from Elon University in North Carolina to start up Mizan over the last year, our development of the project coincided with the rise of the Islamic State, an organization that calls itself a new caliphate,” Pregill said. “It really hammers home the notion that we can’t understand the present without studying the past. This is a moment in the Muslim world that cries out for sophisticated interpretation.”
Mizan is supported by a grant from the ILEX Foundation. You can follow it on Twitter at @mizan_project.