Religion and Culture Seminar
2022 – 2023
University Center for the Study of Religion; Center for Advanced Study, Sofia

General Theme for 2022 – 2023: "Center and Periphery in Religion and Society"
Session 4: Professor Livnat Holtzman, Bar-Ilan University, "Ignaz Goldziher and Gesture Studies: From Periphery to Center?"
31 May 2023

The seminar was moderated by the CSR Director, Professor Simeon Evstatiev of the Department of Arabic and Semitic Studies at Sofia University. The session was attended by around twenty participants from various departments of Sofia University and the Institute for Historical Studies at the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, as well as by guest researchers from the United Kingdom and Ukraine.

Livnat Holtzman is an Associate Professor in the Department of Arabic at Bar-Ilan University. She specializes in Islamic traditionalism and the Ḥadīth. Her publications include Anthropomorphism in Islam: The Challenge of Traditionalism (700–1350) (Edinburgh University Press 2018) and articles and book chapters on the religious thought of traditionalist thinkers like Aḥmad b. Ḥanbal (d. 855), Abū Yaʿlā (d. 1066), Ibn al-Jawzī (d. 1201), and Ibn Taymiyya (d. 1328) and his pupil Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya (d. 1350). She is currently working on the gestures, physical mannerisms, and the body language of the Prophet Muḥammad as reported in the Ḥadīth and other literary genres.