In the first podcast episode of our "Climate Change and Muslim Societies" series, Dr. Safouan Azouzi discusses his research on Design for Social Innovation. Design, historically rooted in Eurocentric perspectives tied to capitalism and overconsumption, has contributed significantly to the climate crisis, disproportionately affecting the poor and disadvantaged. Safouan questions how Design, originating from the Global North, can be used by eco-social movements in the Global South as a tool for change that sustains their struggle. His focus is on decolonizing design and integrating it with alternative economics to promote sustainable futures.

Safouan examines the impact of extractive capitalism and water issues in Tunisia's oases, where social, ecological, and political factors intersect. His research underscores the urgent need to revive indigenous oasis practices facing imminent collapse. He critiques the concept of "design for the other 90%", arguing it often lacks a political dimension and perpetuates neocolonialism. Social designers, he argues, often overlook the systemic global mechanisms that produce the social problems they aim to solve.

In his field research, Safouan studies (among others) the oasis of his hometown, Gabes, Tunisia. Here, traditional commoning practices, especially around water, are disappearing due to state-led groundwater exploitation by the Tunisian Chemical Group. This has led to severe (air and sea) pollution and exacerbated ecological challenges in the region.

Dr. Safouan Azouzi is a postdoctoral fellow at the Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture at MIT. In 2023-34, he was a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard University and the Harvard Graduate School of Design. He earned his PhD in Architecture and Design at the Sapienza University in Rome.

Credits and transcript

In her recent book, The Making of the Modern Muslim State: Islam and Governance in the Middle East and North Africa (Princeton University Press, 2024), Professor Malika Zeghal shows how Muslim states negotiated the role of Islam in governance in the 19th-21st centuries by exploring the history of constitution making, the impact of religious minorities on debates about Islam and democracy, and state expenditures on Islamic public provisions in the longue durée in Middle Eastern and North African countries. Through her qualitative and quantitative research, Professor Zeghal demonstrates that the modern Muslim state’s custodianship of Islam as the preferred religion has continued from the premodern to the modern period, with vigorous debates as to how it should be implemented.

Malika Zeghal is Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Professor of Contemporary Islamic Thought and Life in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations and the Committee on the Study of Religion at Harvard University.

Credits and transcript

Dr. Shiraz Hajiani's research contributes to the scant scholarship on the early Nizari Ismaili community. After a succession crisis in the Fatimid Empire in 1095 divided the Ismailis, the community in Iran accepted the crown-prince, Nizar, as the legitimate Imam and successor to the Imam-Caliph al-Mustanṣir and established a polity in Iran at the fortress of Alamut. While the Nizaris, in Shiraz's view, did not write history qua history, he utilizes of a handful of Nizari doctrinal treatises such as the Ḥikāyat-i Sayyid Nāṣir-i Khusraw and Ilkhanid-era chronicles written by Sunni court-historians hostile toward the Nizaris to shed light on the founder of the polity at Alamut, Ḥasan-i Sabbāḥ, the event of the Qiyāma declared by Ḥasan ʿalā dhikrihiʾl-salām in 1164, and the Nizaris' relations with the Saljuqs and Mongols. Through his novel reading of the limited sources and use of the digital humanities, Shiraz uncovers important developments in the early history of this Shiʿī community usually relegated to a subaltern status in scholarship despite its important role in Islamicate intellectual and political history.

Dr. Shiraz Hajiani is Alwaleed Bin Talal Postdoctoral Fellow at Harvard University and Research Associate in Transcendence and Transformation at the Center for the Study of World Religions at Harvard Divinity School. He earned his PhD in Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago in 2019. His forthcoming book is The Life and Times of Our Master: A Biography of Ḥasan-i Sabbāḥ. More information about Shiraz’s work can be found at his website, islamicate.net.

Credits and transcript