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Conference Announcement Theme: Historicity and Islamicity Subtitle: Perceptions of Early Islamic History in Contemporary Muslim Thought Type: International Conference Institution: Center for Islamic Studies, Goethe University Frankfurt am Main Location: Frankfurt am Main (Germany) Date: 12.–14.12.2019 __________________________________________________ The early history of Islam has served as an important point of reference for the construction of Islamic identities and Islamicity in general, particularly in the modern Muslim thought. Beginning with the 19th Century, scholars of Western Oriental studies have shown a strong interest in the study of the early period of Islamic history. About the same time, the globalization of ideas in the advancing global public sphere, including modern conceptualizations of history in the newly emerging science of history, influenced the ways history was imagined and construed among intellectuals and religious thinkers in the Muslim world. The transfer of ideas resulted both in defensive stances among Muslims as well as in their adaptations of modern philosophical and political concepts to older epistemes of Islamic intellectual history. The modern reconstruction of the concept of ‘Islam’ as a historical subject, which emerged out of these entanglements, facilitated new forms of collective identity construction that in turn were justified by historical references. For Muslim intellectuals and theologians of the 20th Century, it was especially the early period of the history of Islam that assumed an important role as such a point of reference and identification. Modern Muslim understandings of early Islamic history include the sacralization of historical processes in terms of salvation history, the construction of the complex of the ‘Golden Age’ and of the ‘times of origin’ as well as the turning of the early Islamic polity into an ideal paradigm for the justification of modern social orders. Despite the emergence of critical Muslim perspectives rooted in the methodologies of modern historical scholarship. the implications of the above-mentioned constructs have proved profoundly vital over time, especially with regard to the interpretations of religion. On the other hand, mainly since the second half of the 20th century, some Muslim thinkers have elaborated more sophisticated approaches to the notion of historicity and developed a serious involvement with the state of the art of historical scholarship, with important consequences for the diversification of the modern Islamic theological thought. Yet, even these modern academic approaches tend to take the early history of Islam and the early texts of Islamic intellectual traditions as the main point of reference for the understanding and the normative formulations of Islamicity. Such is, for example, the case with the historical hermeneutics of the Qur’an championed by Fazlur Rahman and expressed in his double-movement-method, which focuses on the early period of Islamic history as the context for the original formulation of universal ethical principles of Islam. In a similar manner, some feminist interpretations of Islam seek to reconstruct the alleged egalitarian spirit of the early Islamic community and to ‘liberate’ the Islamic traditions from their patriarchally charged historical overload. However, recent approaches of academic Islamic theologies developed over the past decade at European universities — and increasingly in some parts of the Islamic world – attempt to enter an interdisciplinary exchange with modern historical and textual scholarship and to integrate its results into an Islamic theological reflection that goes beyond the ideological and dogmatical distortion of history. It is against this background that our conference attempts to shed light on the contemporary Muslim perceptions and perspectives on the early history of Islam. It will first address the mechanisms of construction of ‘early Islamic history’ and its use in the processes of identity building among Muslims (Part One) and, in a next step, the critical and revisionist approaches to history developed by Muslims scholars (Part Two). Finally, the last part will address the current interactions and interdisciplinary exchange between Islamic theological approaches and modern historical scholarship on Islam as well as the consequences of these involvements for the Muslim reimagination of Islamic history and for religious interpretations. Programme Thursday, 12.12.2019 18.00 - 18.30 Reception 18.30 - 19.00 Opening Remarks Armina Omerika (Goethe University Frankfurt) Soumaya Louhichi-Güzel (Goethe University Frankfurt) 19.00 - 20.00 Keynote Angelika Neuwirth (Free University of Berlin) Reading History in Reverse: The Concept of the umma wasat (Q 2:142) and the Muslim Shrines on the Temple Mount 20.00 Buffet Friday, 13.12.2019 Session 1 09.00 - 09.45 Stefan Reichmuth (Ruhr University Bochum) The Prophet in a Muslim Age of Revolutions, ca. 1775-1850 09.45 - 10.30 Hüsein Yılmaz (George Mason University) The Archetyping of Early Islamic History as a Paradigm for Modernization among Late Ottoman Intellectuals 10.30 - 11.00 Coffee Break Session 2 11.00 - 11.45 Peter Webb (Leiden University) Al-Jāhiliyya for Modern Times 11.45 - 12.30 Dietrich Jung (University of Southern Denmark) Islamic Modernism: The Search for Modern Authenticity in an Imaginary Past 12.30 - 14.00 Lunch Break Session 3 14.00 - 14.45 Asma Afsaruddin (Indiana University, Bloomington) Muslim Feminist Hermeneutics and the Rereading of Early Islamic History 14.45 - 15.30 Ayşe Başol (Goethe University Frankfurt) What Remains Unspoken: Representations of the Life of Zaynab Bint Muḥammad in Past and Present 15.30 - 16.00 Coffee Break Session 4 16.00 - 16.45 Carool Kersten (King’s College London) Historicized Acculturation and A-historical Enculturation: Perceptions of Islamization in Southeast Asia 16.45 - 17.30 Jamal Malik (Erfurt University) The Making of History Islamic: Memory and Narrative in Early Muslim South Asian Expansion 18.00 Dinner Saturday, 14.12.2019 Session 1 9.00 - 9.45 Rainer Brunner (CNRS, Paris) Rectifying Hadith - Correcting History? Aḥmad al-Qabānjī’s Self-Criticism of Shiite Islam 9.45 - 10.30 Ata Anzali (Middlebury College) Between Ethnic Nationalism and Perennialism: The Encounter between Iran and Islam in the Writings of Kazemzadeh Iranshahr 10.30 - 11.00 Coffee Break Session 2 11.00 - 11.45 Bacem Dziri (Goethe University Frankfurt) The Modern Career of an Ancient Heretic: Antisemitic Stereotyping of ʿAbdallāh b. Sabaʾ in the 20th Century 11.45 - 12.30 Idriss Jebari (Bowdoin College) Hichem Djaït’s Original Islam Between the Orientalist and the Historian’s Gaze (1960s-90s) 12.30 - 14.00 Lunch Break Session 3 14.00 - 14.45 Ebrahim Moosa (University of Notre Dame) Time and Method in Muslim Historical Thinking 14.45 - 15.30 Nimet Seker (Goethe University Frankfurt) Revelation as Communication in History. Historical References in Methodological and Hermeneutical Discussions in the Exegesis of the Qur‘an 15.30 - 16.00 Coffee Break Session 4 16.00 - 17.30 Final Discussion Bekim Agai Mira Sievers Mahmoud Bassiouni Mark Bodenstein Venue: Goethe University Frankfurt am Main Campus Westend, Casino 1.802 Theodor-W.-Adorno-Platz 2a 60323 Frankfurt am Main No registration required. Organizers: Prof. Dr. Armina Omerika Dr. Soumaya Louhichi-Güzel Email: [email protected] Conference website: https://www.uni-frankfurt.de/82649176/Historicity___Islamicity__Perceptions_of_Early_Islamic_History_in_Contemporary_Muslim_Thought __________________________________________________ InterPhil List Administration: https://interphil.polylog.org InterPhil List Archive: https://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/ __________________________________________________
