Abstract

Sociology produced in Arabic has been studied very little in general, and research on Arabic sociologies of religion in particular is almost inexistent. In this talk and based on recently started research, I will provide glimpses into historical and contemporary dimensions of Arabic sociologies of religion. I use these glimpses to argue that we should care about Arabic sociologies of religion more – and this for several reasons and from various perspectives. I will especially highlight the relevance of Arabic sociologies of religion within and for Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies and for post-colonial debates criticizing sociology as Eurocentric; and I shall also address their relevance for public knowledge in Europe about societal processes and intellectual production in Arabic countries and their relevance within Arabic societies.

 

Bio

Florian Zemmin is currently Senior Research Fellow at the Humanities Center for Advanced Study “Multiple Secularities: Beyond the West, beyond modernities” at the University of Leipzig, Germany. Previously he served as Assistant and then Interim Professor for Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Bern, Switzerland. He holds a B.A. in Cultural Studies with a Focus on Religion from the University of Bayreuth (2007) and an M.A. in Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies from the University of Bern (2010), where he in 2016 also completed his PhD-thesis on “Modernity in Islamic Tradition. The Concept of ‘Society’ in the Journal al-Manar (Cairo, 1898–1940)” (De Gruyter 2018). Recent articles include: “The Janus Face of Kātib Çelebi: Reflecting on the Ottoman Saddle Period.” Turcica 50 (2019) and “Validating Secularity in Islam: The Illustrative Case of the Sociological Muslim Intellectual Rafiq al-Azm (1865–1925).” Historical Social Research 44 (2019).


Find us on Google Maps