Publikationen
Auswahl aktueller Publikationen unserer Wissenschaftler*innen:
Legitimating Sultanic Rule in Arabic, Turkish and Persian - Late Mamluk Rulers as Authors of Religious Poetry
in Rulers as Authors in the Islamic World (2024)
Using Visual Didactics to Teach Quranic Arabic in a Multilingual Context: ʿAbd al-Bāsiṭ al-Malaṭī’s al-Zahr al-maqṭūf fī makhārij al-ḥurūf (Christian Mauder)
in: Teachers and Students, Reflections on Learning in Near and Middle Eastern Cultures (2024) (brill.com)
The Potentials and Limits of Going Global (Florian Zemmin, open access)
Islam’s Social Contingency and Absolute Truth in Arabic Sociologies of Religion
in Interdisciplinary Journal for Religion and Transformation in Contemporary Society
Forms of Migration: Global Perspectives on Im/migrant Art and Literature (Stefan Maneval, Jennifer A. Reimer (eds.))
Forms of Migration explores the potential of art, literary and other forms of expression to shape our understanding of transnational migration. Addressing im/migrant culture around the globe, this book is a rich, illustrated collection of essays, poetry, creative nonfiction, interviews, and visual material. Written from a large variety of disciplines, it includes analyses of diasporic fashion, cinema, literature, performances, mixed media installations, photography, and drawings. Forms of Migration shows how innovative storytelling and art offer a chance to apprehend migration differently, to grasp the complexity of migration processes and to challenge common perceptions of im/migrant experiences.
Contributors: Ömer Alkin, Salma Ahmad Caller, Reine Chahine, Chaza Charafeddine, Karolina Golimowska, Piotr Gwiazda, Ikram Hili, Ronaldo Lopes de Oliveira, Stefan Maneval, Lisa Marchi, Stephanie Misa, James Nguyen, Enaya Othman, Matthias Pasdzierny, Anne Quéma, Jennifer A. Reimer, Susanne Rieser, Silvia Schultermandl, Wendy M. K. Shaw, Don E. Walicek, Hiba Yassin, Fatmeh Youssef, Ranin Youssef, Karen Tei Yamashita.
Stefan Maneval and Jennifer A. Reimer (eds), Forms of Migration: Global Perspectives on Im/migrant Art and Literature. Berlin: Falschrum, 2022. ISBN: 9783982077987 https://www.falschrum.org/#books
To watch a video about Forms of Migration, click here.
Der Architekt des Islamismus: Hasan al-Banna und die Muslimbrüder. Eine Biografie (Gudrun Krämer)
Der Gründer der Muslimbruderschaft Hasan al-Banna (1906 - 1949) zählt zu den bedeutendsten Vordenkern und Aktivisten des Islamismus. In seinem Kampf gegen Kolonialismus, christliche Mission und Verwestlichung verknüpfte er nicht nur islamische Tradtitionen mit europäischen Ideen der Selbsthilfe und Selbstermächtigung. Er übersetzte die Idee einer islamischen Reform und Erneuerung in organisiertes, praktisches Handeln. In ihrer glänzend geschriebenen Biographie führt Gudrun Krämer eine islamische Moderne vor Augen, die bislang weithin verkannt wurde. Die Muslimbrüder gehören seit ihrer Gründung im Jahr 1928 zu den einflussreichsten islamischen Bewegungen der Gegenwart, auf die sich islamische Aktivisten von der palästinensischen Hamas bis zur türkischen AKP beziehen. Auf der Grundlage vielfältiger, bislang kaum ausgeschöpfter arabischer Quellen zeigt Gudrun Krämer, wie Hasan al-Banna aus einem sufisch inspirierten Bildungs- und Wohltätigkeitsverein eine Massenorganisation mit Hunderttausenden von Anhängern schuf, die unter Berufung auf die Religion Politik machte. Neben einem eigenen Zweig der Muslimschwestern entstand im Schatten des Zweiten Weltkriegs auch ein Geheimapparat. Ende 1948 wurde die Muslimbruderschaft verboten, wenig später fiel al-Banna einem Attentat zum Opfer. Noch heute dient er nicht-jihadistischen Islamisten als Referenz. Gudrun Krämer erhellt die ideengeschichtlichen Grundlagen, das soziale Umfeld und den politischen Kontext der Bewegung, porträtiert Mitstreiter und Gegner und erschließt anhand der Biographie Hasan al-Bannas eindrucksvoll ein Schlüsselkapitel in der Geschichte des modernen Islam.
A History of Jeddah: The Gate to Mecca in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Prof. Dr. Ulrike Freitag)
Known as the 'Gate to Mecca' or 'Bride of the Red Sea', Jeddah has been a gateway for pilgrims travelling to Mecca and Medina and a station for international trade routes between the Indian Ocean and the Mediterranean for centuries. Seen from the perspective of its diverse population, this first biography of Jeddah traces the city's urban history and cosmopolitanism from the late Ottoman period to its present-day claim to multiculturalism, within the conservative environment of the Arabian Peninsula. Contextualising Jeddah with developments in the wider Muslim world, Ulrike Freitag investigates how different groups of migrants interacted in a changing urban space and how their economic activities influenced the political framework of the city. Richly illustrated, this study reveals how the transformation of Jeddah's urban space, population and politics has been indicative of changes in the wider Arab and Red Sea region, re-evaluating its place in the Middle East at a time when both its cosmopolitan practices and old city are changing dramatically against a backdrop of modernisation and Saudi nation-building.
The Heritage of Edirne in Ottoman and Turkish Times (Prof. Birgit Krawietz, Dr. Florian Riedler eds.)
Modern scholarship has not given Edirne the attention it deserves regarding its significance as one of the capitals of the Ottoman Empire. This edited volume offers a reinterpretation of Edirne’s history from Early Ottoman times to recent periods of the Turkish Republic. Presently, disconnections and discontinuities introduced by the transition from empire to nation state still characterize the image of the city and the historiography about it.
In contrast, this volume examines how the city engages in the forming, deflecting and creative appropriation of its heritage, a process that has turned Edirne into a UNESCO heritage hotspot. A closer historical analysis demonstrates the dissonances and contradictions that these different interpretations and uses of heritage produce. From the beginning, Edirne was shaped by its connectivity and relationality to other places, above all to Istanbul.
This perspective is employed at many different levels, e.g., with regard to its population, institutions, architecture, infrastructures and popular culture, but also regarding the imaginations Edirne triggered. In sum, this multi-disciplinary volume boosts urban history beyond Istanbul and offers new insight into Ottoman and Turkish connectivities from the vantage point of certain key moments of Edirne’s history.
The Library of a Madrasa in Aleppo at the End of the Ottoman Era (Dr. Said Aljoumani)
Dr. Said Aljoumani's study provides a unique insight into the book culture of Aleppo in the 19th century. The document at the heart of this book is the ‘renewed register of the books endowed by ʿUthmān Pāshā’. This register allows a new perspective on what subjects were taught in madrasas and what subjects such a madrasa library covered. Among its over 1200 titles we find a variety of different subjects, most importantly those concerned with the transmitted fields of knowledge. Yet, this document also sheds light on the day-to-day working of the library as it sets out the job description of the librarian, the intended audience as well as the usage conditions in previous book endowments. In a second part, this study follows the 20th-century trajectory of the books that once sat on the shelves of this library. Most importantly, it succeeds in identifying for almost half of the titles the actual manuscript among the holdings of the Syrian National Library in Damascus.
Beiruter Texte und Studien (Ausgabe 124) 2020, Rund 390 S., Gebunden, ISBN 978-3-95650-634-5
A Monument to Medieval Syrian Book Culture: The Library of Ibn ʿAbd al-Hādī
n his fourth book Prof. Dr. Konrad Hirschler studies the history of a medieval Syrian library and traces its trajectory until the present day. In the late medieval period, manuscripts galore circulated in Middle Eastern libraries. Yet very few book collections have come down to us as such or have left a documentary trail. Konrad Hirschler's book discusses the largest private book collection of the pre-Ottoman Arabic Middle East for which we have both a paper trail and a surviving corpus of the manuscripts that once sat on its shelves: the Ibn ʿAbd al-Hādī Library of Damascus. The book shows that this library was part of the owner’s symbolic strategy to monumentalise a vanishing world of scholarship bound to his life, family, quarter and home city.
In the words of Prof. Dr. Jo Van Steenbergen (Ghent University) 'this book is not only a much needed contribution to current understandings of the social and intellectual milieus of late medieval Damascus. It is itself a monument to how a turn to combining history and material philology is substantially refining, and changing, modern imaginations of Middle Eastern and Islamic history in general.'
The book is published open access with support by the Freie Universität's university library. Much of the research for the book was untertaken during a sabbatical granted by the university's Department of History and Cultural Studies.
Link to the open access publication: "A Monument to Medieval Syrian Book Culture" by Prof. Dr. Konrad Hirschler.
Medieval Damascus: Plurality and Diversity in an Arabic Library - The Ashrafiya Library Catalogue (Konrad Hirschler)
"The written text was a pervasive feature of cultural practices in the medieval Middle East. At the heart of book circulation stood libraries that experienced a rapid expansion from the twelfth century onwards. While the existence of these libraries is well known our knowledge of their content and structure has been very limited as hardly any medieval Arabic catalogues have been preserved. This book discusses the largest and earliest medieval library of the Middle East for which we have documentation - the Ashrafiya library in the very centre of Damascus - and edits its catalogue. This catalogue shows that even book collections attached to Sunni religious institutions could hold rather unexpected titles, such as stories from the 1001 Nights, manuals for traders, medical handbooks, Shiite prayers, love poetry and texts extolling wine consumption. At the same time this library catalogue decisively expands our knowledge of how the books were spatially organised on the bookshelves of such a large medieval library. With over 2, 000 entries this catalogue is essential reading for anybody interested in the cultural and intellectual history of Arabic societies. Setting the Ashrafiya catalogue into a comparative perspective with contemporaneous libraries on the British Isles this book opens new perspectives for the study of medieval libraries."
Der inspizierte Muslim (Schirin Amir-Moazami)
Zur Politisierung der Islamforschung in Europa
Muslime in Europa stehen im Fokus. Sie werden beäugt, beforscht und vermessen. Von diesem geballten öffentlichen und politischen Interesse ist auch die akademische Forschung nicht ausgenommen. Der Band hält hier inne und fragt: Wer wird auf welche Weise als Muslim in den Blick genommen? Von wem und warum? Welche Fragen sind prägend und welche erkenntnistheoretischen und normativen Annahmen liegen ihnen zugrunde?
Die Beiträge des Bandes beleuchten (selbst-)kritisch die Zusammenhänge von akademischem Wissen und politischem Eingriff. Denn nicht ein Mehr an Wissen über Muslime führt zu einer wirksamen Kritik an ihrer vermehrten Diskursivierung, sondern eine kritische Reflexion über die Voraussetzungen der Wissensproduktion.
Race, Religion, and the ‘Indian Muslim’ Predicament in Singapore (Torsten Tschacher)
Indian Muslims form the largest ethnic minority within Singapore’s otherwise largely Malay Muslim community. Despite its size and historic importance, however, Singaporean Indian Muslims have received little attention by scholarship and have also felt side-lined by Singapore’s Malay-dominated Muslim institutions. Since the 1980s, demands for a better representation of Indian Muslims and access to religious services have intensified, while there has been a concomitant debate over who has the right to speak for Indian Muslims. This book traces the negotiations and contestations over Indian Muslim difference in Singapore and examines the conditions that have given rise to these debates.
Despite considerable differences existing within the putative Indian Muslim community, the way this community is imagined is surprisingly uniform. Through discussions of the importance of ethnic difference for social and religious divisions among Singaporean Indian Muslims, the role of ‘culture’ and ‘race’ in debates about popular religion, the invocation of language and history in negotiations with the wider Malay-Muslim context, and the institutional setting in which contestations of Indian Muslim difference take place, this book argues that these debates emerge from the structural tensions resulting from the intersection of race and religion in the public organization of Islam in Singapore.
Neue Fischer Weltgeschichte. Band 9: Der Vordere Orient und Nordafrika ab 1500 (Gudrun Krämer)
Eine neue Geschichte des Mittleren Ostens vom 16. Jahrhundert bis heute – erhellend, exzellent und hoch aktuell. Verfasst von der Historikerin und Islamwissenschaftlerin Gudrun Krämer, eine der renommiertesten Expertinnen zum Thema in Deutschland. Sie erzählt die gesamte Geschichte des islamischen Raums, der sich von Nordafrika über die Türkei und Syrien bis zum Irak und Iran erstreckt, ab 1500. Warum ist der Islam in Saudi-Arabien sunnitisch, in Iran aber schiitisch geprägt? In welche Tradition stellt sich der türkische Präsident Erdoğan mit seinem Herrschaftsstil? Und gibt es in der Geschichte des Mittleren Ostens auch demokratische Ansätze? Von den Anfängen des Osmanischen Reichs bis zu den heutigen arabischen und islamischen Staaten schildert Gudrun Krämer Religion, Wirtschaft, Kultur und soziale Beziehungen, erzählt von Herrschaft und Widerstand, von Sultanen, Gelehrten, Handwerkern und Sklaven. Ein großes Grundlagenwerk, unverzichtbar für das Verständnis der aktuellen Konflikte in Nordafrika und Vorderasien, deren Auswirkungen auch Europa schon verändert haben und weiter verändern werden.
