Islamic Discourse Contested: Middle Eastern and European Perspectives

Director: Gudrun Krämer (Institut für Islamwissenschaft, Freie Universität Berlin)

Islamic Discourse Contested is associated with the Berlin Graduate School Muslim Cultures and Societies at Freie Universität Berlin.

Under the impact of several epistemological turns, including the linguistic and the pragmatic, scholars in the humanities and the social sciences have become absorbed with action, motion, and interaction: agency has become a key word, processes and trajectories are the subject of serious enquiry, social spaces are explored, and so are boundaries, ever shifting and constantly negotiated. Everything is in flux, people are mobile, ideas are constructed and developments contingent, nothing is uniform, no move stays uncontested.

The fascination with change, and exchange, and transformation, interactive, interwoven and entangled, full of contradictions and for this reason never unilinear, has strongly affected the study of Islam, which used to be thought of as the abode of culturalist essentialism. But not any longer: situated between the local and the global, spanning what for lack of a better term are still called the Islamic and the Western worlds, Islam, or rather the study of Islam, offers exceptional opportunities to test the concept of multiple modernities (Eisenstadt et al.), so attractive conceptually and of such obvious practical relevance. Islamic thought and discourse will serve to illustrate this point.

Please find the complete description of the research field here.