Middle Eastern studies
All topics-
The Congress "Horizons of Islamic Theology"
A disintegration of Islam?
Academics from all over the world met to debate Islam at the congress "Horizons of Islamic Theology" in Frankfurt in early September. But the event was overshadowed by the acts of terror being perpetrated in the name of the faith by Islamic State and other extremist organisations. By Claudia Mende
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Global history
Playing with the relativity of perspectives
A new six-volume work entitled "A History of the World" is the high point of a historiographical boom in the discipline known as "global history". The project attempts to overcome the eurocentrism of traditional writings of history. By Andreas Pflitsch
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"The Physician" by Noah Gordon
The long road from international bestseller to film
The novel "The Physician" was one of the biggest international successes of the last few decades. So it's all the more surprising that it wasn't made into a film years ago. A big-screen version has now finally been released – with a German production team. By Regina Roland
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Interview with Angelika Neuwirth
"The claim that Islam lacks an Enlightenment is an age-old cliche"
In this interview with Anna Alvi and Alia Hübsch, Prof. Angelika Neuwirth says that the claim that Islam lacks an Enlightenment is an age old cliché, and that it is pride in the Enlightenment that continues to lead people to believe that Western Culture is superior to Islam
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Essay by Adania Shibli
Recalling Edward Said's Thought Today
The influential theorist and public intellectual Edward W. Said produced a body of work that, right up to the present, resonates worldwide in a variety of fields. Ten years after his death, Adania Shibli takes a look at his legacy, and what it means to us today
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Exchange between Christian, Jewish and Muslim Scholars
Exploring a Shared Heritage
Prof. Sabine Schmidtke, head of the Research Unit for the Study of Intellectual History in the Islamicate World at the Freie Universität Berlin, has a passion in life: working with ancient manuscripts. In the course of her work, she discovers common threads in the thinking of Christian, Jewish and Muslim scholars. Arnfrid Schenk takes a closer look at her work and its significance outside the academic world
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Jurji Zaidan's Arabic Historical Novels
Educating and Entertaining the Public
By writing historical novels, Jurji Zaidan wanted to provide the common Arabic people with an accurate sense of their own history in an accessible, entertaining way. His novels were unavailable in English for nearly a century. But now, in the last two years, six English translations have appeared. Marcia Lynx Qualey
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10th Anniversary of the Death of Annemarie Schimmel
Searching for the Inner Life of Islam
As one of the most eminent western scholars of Islam, Annemarie Schimmel is still held in high esteem in the Islamic world. But despite being a kind of a mystic herself, the German got entangled in the fraught relations between East and West. Ten years after her death, Stefan Wild takes stock of her life and work
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Europe's ''Judeo-Christian Heritage''
The Fiction That It Always Was
Contemporary debate over Europe's identity increasingly refers to the continent's Christian or Judeo-Christian heritage. But a closer look at the history books belies this theory and teaches us that for centuries, Islam and Judaism have played an integral role in shaping European history and that both religions have been regarded with deep hostility down through the centuries. By Stefan Schreiner
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The Islamic "Culture of Ambiguity"
Plurality as a Matter of Course
How does a wine goblet find its way into an Islamic art collection? In "The Culture of Ambiguity", Thomas Bauer describes the wide boundaries of Muslim culture and asserts that in the West cultural goods are often considered to be "Islamic" when they're actually not
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Koranic Research
The Reader Maketh the Book
According to Angelika Neuwirth, in view of the fact that the European and Islamic traditions have different understandings of the Koran, it is the job of Arabists to translate between the cultures
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The Legend of Lawrence of Arabia
The Recalcitrant Hero
With the benefit of hindsight, there is something superhuman about his character. However, more than almost anyone else, Lawrence embodies the transformation from hero to anti-hero that shaped literature in the twentieth century. By Stefan Weidner