After our summer hiatus, we are delighted to resume the OIB/COSIMENA Seminar series.
Our next lecture, the third in the series, will be held on Monday, 23rd September 2024 and as usual it will start promptly at 6.00 p.m. at the DAAD Regional Office Cairo, 11 El-Saleh Ayoub St. off 26th July, Zamalek.
The lecture is titled “What went wrong with Islamic Historiography? On the Need for a Global Perspective.” The lecture will be held by Prof. Dr Florian Zemmin (Freie Universität Berlin)

Concept Note:

“Why are Muslims backwards?” and “What caused the decline of Islam?”. These questions stem from the high age of imperialism. Typically, the paradigm of modernization as Westernization was coupled with that of an Islamic decline. Both paradigms have by now been refuted, the first mainly by social theorists, and the second by historians of the Islamic Middle East. However, no alternative model or narrative to these obsolete paradigms has yet been established. This contributes to the lasting purchase of notions of Islamic decline and Western progress in non-specialized academic fields and amongst the public. This lecture will revisit the main trends and options in the writing of modernity in the Middle East and discuss especially their underlying premises. Against internalist perspectives and culturalist explanations, it will argue for the need for connected histories, departing from the synchronic emergence of modernity in the colonial encounter.

Bio:

Prof. Dr Florian Zemmin
Univ.-Prof. Dr., Freie Universität Berlin is a Professor of Islamic and Middle East Studies (Islamwissenschaft) at Freie Universität Berlin and Director of the Berlin Graduate School Muslim Cultures and Societies. Previously he was a Senior Researcher at the Humanities Center for Advanced Study “Multiple Secularities: Beyond the West, beyond modernities” at the University of Leipzig.

His main field of research is religion and society in the modern and contemporary Arab and Islamic world. In that field, more specific topics include Islamic reformism, theories of secularity, and Arabic sociologies of religion. Next to the sociology of religion and sociology of knowledge, he mainly works with approaches to conceptual sociology of religion and sociology of knowledge, he mainly works with approaches to conceptual history.

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