The final Personally Speaking series event of the year explores how down-on-their-luck messiahs and wandering poets in the sixteenth-century Afghan highlands challenge us to rethink what we know about Afghanistan, the history of Islam, and our relationship to the past and to language. Using research from the recently published Singing with the Mountains: The Language of God in the Afghan Highlands, William E. B. Sherman explores a remarkable Muslim movement known as the Roshaniyya—or the ‘illuminated ones’—who believed not only in following the word of God, but in making their own words divine and revelatory. │religiousstudies@charlotte.edu

5:15 p.m. with a reception at 4:15 p.m.