Betreuung durch Prof. Dr. Florian Zemmin
Emad Alali
emad.alali[at]fu-berlin.de
Die politische Legitimität im arabischen politischen Denken der Gegenwart
Abstract:
Die jüngsten Umbrüche des sogenannten Arabischen Frühlings 2010/11 haben die politische Ordnung in den arabischen Staaten erschüttert und die tiefe Krise der arabischen Gesellschaftsordnungen offengelegt. Der Autoritarismus, politische Missstände und die jüngsten Umwälzungen deuten auf eine Krise hin, die verschiedene Dimensionen der politischen und gesellschaftlichen Sphäre betrifft. Die vorliegende Untersuchung geht davon aus, dass es sich bei der Krise in den arabischen Staaten um eine Legitimitätskrise handelt, die über die Herrschaft und den Staat hinausgeht und die gesamte Gesellschaftsordnung betrifft. Ziel ist eine fundierte Untersuchung des Begriffs der politischen Legitimität im arabischen Kontext als Zugang zum Verständnis der jüngsten Umwälzungen und ihrer politischen und sozialen Zusammenhänge. Dafür werden arabische Vorstellungen, Verständnisse, Wahrnehmungen und Konzeptionen von politischer Legitimität in den arabischen Staaten untersucht. Untersuchungsgegenstand sind zeitgenössische politiktheoretische, soziologische und philosophische Texte aus dem arabischen Raum, die eine ergiebige Grundlage für die Erforschung politischer Legitimität und ihrer Kontextbezüge bilden können.
Okbar Elamoud
okba.amoud[at]gmail.com
(Armed) Struggle in Arabic Contemporary Literature: A Conceptual Analysis of Jihad, Thawra, and Related Terms
Funded by: Einstein Foundation (Einstein Stiftung Berlin)
Abstract:
Literature shapes, and is shaped by, evolving concepts like jihad, thawra (revolution), and resistance. Rejecting these terms as static, the study treats them as dynamic linguistic tools forged within asymmetric struggles against global hegemony. Theatrically grounded at the intersection of Quentin Skinner’s conceptual history and Michel Foucault’s discourse analysis, the project analyzes concepts as instruments of power that dictate political legitimacy. Methodologically, it examines a diverse textual corpus spanning from 1950's to 2010's, including Islamist literature (e.g., Sayyid Qutb, Abdullah Azzam), Arab Left writings, and protest movement statements. The analysis reveals that these terms did not evolve in a vacuum but in a constant dialectic with Global andregional discourse, which often seeks to monopolize definitions of violence. For instance, jihad underwent radical global reclassifications post-Cold War, while revolution shifted from a twentieth-century symbol of national liberation to a term associated with instability. Ultimately, the study demonstrates that these conceptual shifts are not merely academic; they actively restructure Arab social identities, reshape political norms, and redraw the boundaries between society, the state, and the existing hegemones.
Omar Halabi
omarhalabi15[at]zedat.fu-berlin.de
Al-Shām and Sūriyya: A Conceptual History of Geographical Naming in Syrian Political Discourse
Funded by: DAAD (Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst)
Abstract:
My research examines the conceptual history of the Arabic geographical term al-Shām and its relationship to the modern term Sūriyya. Taking the renewed prominence of al-Shām in Syrian political discourse since 2011 as its point of departure, the project investigates how this name has been mobilized by different actors across competing political and religious registers. Rather than treating al-Shām as a neutral place-name, I analyze it as a historically layered designation shaped by sacred, commercial, administrative, and apocalyptic meanings. The project asks how geographical names accumulate conceptual weight over time and how they become available for political use during moments of crisis, rupture, and reordering.
Maximilian Kalkreuth
m.kalkreuth[at]fu-berlin.de
Generating Hybridity: Social Perspectives on Beirut’s Neighbourhood Generators
Funded by: Elsa-Neumann-Stipendium des Landes Berlin
Abstract:
Since the end of the civil war in the early 1990s, households in Lebanon unable to generate their own electricity have had to navigate a hybrid electricity system comprising an insufficient state run grid and numerous private neighbourhood grids. Those neighbourhood grids are powered by local diesel generators and often intertwined with sectarianized clientelist networks. The hybrid system results in electricity supply schedules within neighbourhoods which set shared material conditions for everyday routines and, in turn, social relations and neighbourhood social space.
While public debates and much of the academic literature approach electricity in Lebanon primarily as a political and economic crisis reflecting state failure and sectarian hegemony, its social dimension remains widely understudied.
Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in Beirut and following the trail from infrastructure to temporality to social space, this dissertation examines how residents experience energy hybridity in everyday life, how access to electricity can shape neighbourhood social space and how these spaces are linked to perceptions of state and sect through infrastructure.
Christin Sander
christin.sander[at]fu-berlin.de
Localizing the Global Arab Left: Communist Perspectives on Oppositional Unrests in Syria, 1976–1982
Abstract:
Despite the oppression of Hafiz al-Assad, a diverse, yet fragmented Left persisted in Syria. Syrian historiography tends to neglect or distort the domestic oppositional unrests in Syria in the 1970s and early 1980s, − either through a narrative of ‘stability’ or through framing them as a sectarianized uprising. My PhD project initially researches the history of the Communist Labor League and later Party (Rabitat al-ʿAmal al-Shuyuʿi, founded in Aleppo in August 1976) and subsequently explores its perspectives on the oppositional unrests in Syria 1976-1982. The League/Party’s publications offer a contemporaneous and hitherto overlooked perspective, further enriched by recent recollections from former members reflecting on their past. By questioning power as the only determinant, this research contributes to a deeper understanding of opposition under authoritarian rule as well as of the Arab Left after the Naksa. Contributing to a historiography of a violently repressed Syrian Left, which was part of a similarly defeated global Left, I situate my research in a ‘national [al-watan]’ social and intellectual history of the Arab New Left.
Vivienne Schommer
vivienne.schommer[at]fu-berlin.de
Writing Women into History: Social Collectives in and around Early Syrian Women’s Periodical
Funded by: Gerda Henkel Stiftung
Abstract:
This dissertation traces the social history of women’s periodicals published between Beirut and Homs from 1909 to 1939. In examining the social and political functions of these periodicals, it reads their history as a collective one, because they were formative to a moment of increased collectiveness that brought together upper- and, increasingly, middle-class Syrian women, before mass mobilisation for the women’s movement. It traces how these periodicals conceptualised notions of collectiveness, and how these understandings were mirrored in social collectives in- and outside of the material space of the periodical. Using network analysis and conceptual history and drawing on a large corpus of periodials, and archival material, this research shows that Syrian women’s periodicals put multiple and fluid social collectives up for discussion, while simultaneously positioning themselves as part of them. These span from local intellectual circles to global women’s movements. It thus contributes to growing bodies of work that place Arab women as social theorists, and that tell a story of Nahdawi social theory beyond a nationalist frame.
Hanna Magdalena Schrodt
Hanna.schrodt[at]web.de
Religion as a factor in development cooperation in Arab countries
Funded by: Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung
Abstract:
Religion is an essential factor in the construction of individual and collective identity and normativity and must therefore be considered in socio-political theory and practice. This has been discussed in English-speaking discourse for around 20 years, whereas the role of religion in development cooperation in the Arabic-speaking discourse is a research gap. Arab knowledge production is marginalized by various factors and hardly participates in the global discourse, although Arab countries are the scene of a large number of development projects. Yemen is of particular note here. In this thesis, the analysis of Arab academic knowledge production is coupled with an insight into development practice in order to find out how religion is negotiated as a factor. This serves both to gain conceptual knowledge and to improve religious literacy in development cooperation
Razi Shaikh
razi.shaikh[at]fu-berlin.de
[Title is following]
Funded by: Gerda Henkel Stiftung
Abstract:
My thesis examines the role of Urdu literary culture in shaping and reflecting the nascent national imaginary in late nineteenth-century India. I argue that the ghazal-based Urdu poetry tradition was a key factor for this emerging political imagination. As a first step, I “excavate” a ghazal-based notion of vat̤an prior to the onset of colonial modernity. Referring to hometown or homeland, vat̤an in its ghazal usage was a spatially opaque, but affectively charged term to denote timeless notions of home and belonging. This precolonial notion would furnish the conceptual and affective scaffolding for the transition actors to articulate the emerging political shifts. A second and parallel step investigates the genealogy of this emerging national imaginary. Poetry would supply the affectively charged tropes and images to anchor this imaginary; it would also serve as an effective archive of mass literature, transmitting this new imagination across a wide section of society. The two steps help map a conceptual history of vat̤an: the transformation of a hitherto deterriotorialized and relational concept into a spatially concrete, nation
Daniel Sonnenfeld
Daniel.sonnenfeld[at]mail.huji.ac.il
Muslim Traditionalism and Reformism: An Epistemological Analysis of Modern Islam's Great Debate.
Funded by: President's Scholarship for Doctoral Students, Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Abstract:
My research examines the epistemological dimension of modern Islamic thought, focusing on the debate between Traditionalist and reformist currents in the Sunni Arab and Anglophone worlds. Drawing on the writings of prominent scholars from the late nineteenth century to the present, I argue that what is often framed as a legal or theological dispute over religious authority and interpretation is, at its root, a disagreement about the foundations of knowledge. Reading these positions against both pre-modern Islamic and Western epistemology, the project traces the development of Muslim Traditionalism in the modern era and proposes a new classification of Islamic thinkers and movements according to their epistemological commitments.
Fatemeh Roudsari
fatemeh.roudsari[at]fu-berlin.de
Post-Islamist ʿUlamāʾ in Iran: Unveiling Authority, Contesting Islamism
Funded by: Individual
Abstract
This project investigates the structural and ideological fragmentation within the Qom seminary, focusing on an emergent internal critique of Islamist discourse that signals a substantive, rather than merely tactical, rupture. By applying Asef Bayat’s framework of post-Islamism, the study hypothesises that the post-2022 socio-political conjuncture acted as a catalyst, rendering latent clerical dissent explicit and aligning it with a broader, rights-based societal sensibility. Crucially, the research examines whether this represents an ideological shift away from state-sponsored ‘politicised fiqh’ towards a jurisprudential discourse grounded in pluralism and individual liberty. Through a comparative analysis of traditionalist-orthodox and reformist currents, the project investigates how senior ʿulamāʾ are fundamentally renegotiating the jurisprudential boundaries of legitimate political authority, state coercion, and the public role of religion. Combining discourse analysis of fatwas and digital debates with semi-structured interviews, this study provides an empirically grounded account of the internal revaluation of religious authority in contemporary Iran.
