Ways
At the centre of this collection of articles honouring Gudrun Krämer is a variety of approaches to the academic exploration of Muslim social and cultural settings. The volume brings together international colleagues and colleagues closer to home and presents multiple ways of studying the Islamic tradition and Muslim beliefs and practices in the year 2018.
As an internationally renowned scholar, Gudrun Krämer has crossed paths with a wide range of people in many contexts. Simply assembling those who work closely with her in the academic landscape of Berlinânot to mention scholars from around the world with whom she has cultivated long-term and ongoing academic relationshipsâwould have been impossible for this edited volume. With the limitation of a single volume, what we aimed for in organising this collection was to highlight the breadth of disciplines reflected in Gudrun Krämerâs own work: Islamic studies, history, anthropology, political science, political theory, and religious studies. In addition, the articles of this volume address the notion of Islam in different geographiesâincluding the contemporary and historical dimensions of various cultures and languagesâat the same time capturing the epistemological and political underpinnings of this enterprise.
These introductory words are written from a German, and even what one might call a Berlinese perspective. Besides introducing the book in your hands, we will touch on some of the stages of Gudrun Krämerâs academic career, considered against the larger framework of political and academic developments in Germany and beyond.
Knowing
Islam has been a subject of intense study since its earliest days, with the resulting knowledge assembled and conveyed first and foremost by Muslims themselves, but also by non-Muslims, especially by Christians, and later by secularised Christians, self-proclaimed liberals, positivists, atheists, Marxists, and many others, most of them elites from the northern shores of the Mediterranean. The purposes were various, among them the fight against heresy (Rodinson 1980), the self-assured assertion of oneâs own beliefs and practices
In Germany the academic discipline of Islamic studies (Islamwissenschaft) was born in the early twentieth century and is closely connected to the name Carl Heinrich Becker (Jung 2011, Schäbler 2008), carrying the heritage of nineteenth-century historicism and defining the Orient and Islam (or the Islamic Orient) as cultural or civilisational entities. Islamic studies probably strengthened the Eurocentrism of German humanities, rather than helping âto develop a potential of resistance against itâ (Johansen 1990, 87). Under National Socialism and during World War II, many scholars of Islam had to leave the country because of their Jewish background or their stance against the regime and its totalitarianism and racismâor for both reasons. Others collaborated with the Nazis and adopted their ideology of cultural and ethnic supremacy (Ellinger 2006; Höpp et al. 2004). After World War II, research and publications about Islam and Islam-related topics increased in Germany in different ways on either side of the Cold Warâas a form of area studies in the East (Hafez 1995) and as an expression of a preference for remote historical times, with little focus on contemporary themes, in the West.
However, research on modernity and on contemporary questions of social and political change slowly found their way into West German Islamic studies. Gudrun Krämerâs research has been pioneering in this respect and it has reached an international audience: her work on the political thinking of the Egyptian Muslim Brothers and related independent thinkers and activists was among the first of its kind in Germany. From 1982 to 1994, in parallel with her research and in contrast to most of her colleagues at that time, she worked at the Stiftung Wissenschaft und Politik in Ebenhausen, an institution that was founded in 1962 in order âto make up for the deficiencies in German Oriental studies practiced at universitiesâ (Johansen 1990, 95; see also Asseburg in this volume).
In the framework of this dedicated turn towards the present, concepts, methods, and perspectives borrowed from other disciplines entered into the
However, this has only rarely translated into politics or informed the ways in which politicians would deal with the increasing Muslim population in Germany. On the contrary, there is a widespread tendency among the German public to listen to alarmist voices. We have witnessed a process of inquiring into Muslim thought and practice, examining the subject matter with every tool available, from the microscope to statistical analysis, since at least 9/11, if not since the fall of the Wall in 1989, thereby oscillating between acknowledging the other as other and turning those others into oneâs own voice (cf. Amir-Moazami in this volume). In public memory, much of the earlier academic cultural essentialism-cum-Eurocentrism seems to prevail (cf. Mas in this volume). German politicians have had different opinions about whether Islam is part of German history and the present (carefully not addressing Muslims directly). On 3 October 2010 Christian Wulff (Christian-Democratic Union, CDU) was the first President of Germany to publicly acknowledge that Islam is now part of Germany (âDer Islam gehört inzwischen auch zu Deutschlandâ; Hildebrandt 2015). This welcoming gesture, far from being universally shared, has triggered a wide-ranging debate. While the German Chancellor Angela Merkel agrees, fellow politician Horst Seehofer (Christian Social Union, CSU), former Minister President of Bavaria, expressed precisely the opposite view (âDer Islam gehört nicht zu Deutschlandâ) in an official statement on 16 March 2018, shortly after he was appointed Minister of the Interior in the newly formed German government (cf. Tasemir 2018).
Being trained in Islamic Studies at the Freie Universität Berlin from the mid-1990s on, with Gudrun Krämer as one of the young professors at that time (she became professor there in 1996), meant to become sensitive to these issues. Students became aware of and careful about their impact as researchers of Islam in a newly unified Germany that was still looking to determine its political course, both internally (how to deal with the inhabitants of the former GDR, on the one hand, and its Muslims on the other) and externally (the question of whether Germanyâs size and economic power obliged it to play a bigger role in global politics again: the bombardment of Yugoslavia by the German air force during the Kosovo war in 1999 to support the Albanian Muslim population was a case in point). For students and graduates, amidst an evolving awareness of these configurations, the moral fulcrum was embodied in the consciousâor at
Gudrun Krämer was a role model when it came to the question of choosing research topics. All of her own topics seemed to be challenging, politically speakingâcertainly her work on the history of the Jews in modern Egypt (her PhD dissertation, published in 1989) fit into this category, as did her book on contemporary Muslim thinking on democracy, human rights, and Islam (her habilitation, published in 1999); her history of Palestine until 1948 (2002; English translation, 2008, now in its third edition; also translated into Spanish, 2006); and her book on Ḥasan al-BannÄ, the founder of the Egyptian Muslim Brothers (2010). (The full list of her publications is included in this volume). She has described herself as a specialist in Islamic studies and a historian. A recent example of her devotion to historical detail, combined with the ability to provide a masterful overview of time and space, is the massive Der Vordere Orient und Nordafrika ab 1500 (2016). Providing the reading public with ready access to material evidence has been, in her experience, the only way to win over others, by challenging their convictions and possibly erroneous assumptions. This straightforwardness was key to her being awarded the prestigious Gerda Henkel Prize in 2010. When she received the award, her work was praised as enlightening, nuanced, very clear in her language, and a pleasure to read.
In 2018, she was accorded the honour of being appointed to the Wissenschaftsrat, the German Council of Science and Humanities, which advises the German government on matters of higher education and research, further recognition of the significance of her contributions to this vitally important field of study.
Muslim
For many students it was the Gulf War of 1990 to 1991 that led them to Islamic studies and prompted them to learn Arabic, Persian, Turkish, and other Eastern languages. They were not perhaps concerned with Islam at first but wanted to understand their own geopolitical circumstances and the world around them. However, there were other students, too, in the cohort at Freie Universität in Berlin, German students with Turkish, Palestinian, Tunisian, and Armenian backgrounds. They had a variegated notion of the tradition of Islam and Muslim practices and beliefs, and linked that notion to many other categories, such as music, poetry, architecture, colonial struggle, class struggle, commitment, oppression, home, invasion, and exile. Soon most of the students discovered
In the end, they would comprehend the need to look for the relationships between their own histories and the histories of Islam, whether in terms of political, economic, cultural, ethical, or legal dimensions. They would come to understand that Islam might be a notion, a religion, a tradition, and a lived practice all at once, reported and mediated to them in many different ways (cf. Krawietz in this volume). They would learn, especially from Gudrun Krämer, that a discursive tradition (cf. Asad 1986), one that focusses on and interprets a set of fixed texts in different ways at different timesâand thus opening, rather than closing, various possible histories and futuresâis not unique to Islam. Indeed, Islam is no exception here to any other discursive tradition one might study, such as Catholicism, for example (MacIntyre 1990). One can maintain, though, that the tradition of Islam is exceptional in the way it has been situated in the geopolitical field (cf. Asad 1993, 2003; Salvatore 2007, as well as Filali-Ansary, al-Khatib, Kresse, and Tayob in this volume).
Accordingly, it has become all the more important to dive into the details of this tradition. Gudrun Krämer has mastered the contemporary complexity of Islam-related questions with encyclopaedic knowledge. In recognition of her expertise, in 2001 she was invited to join the editorial board of the Encyclopaedia of Islam, THREE (EI3), a crucial and vast knowledge venture that had been planned even before the Second Edition of the encyclopaedia, which had begun publication in 1960, was finished, in 2004. As of this writing, she continues in her position as an editor of EI3, an exacting and demanding responsibility for all those involved that represents a significant and ongoing contribution to the field.
Cultures and Societies
The Berlin Graduate School Muslim Cultures and Societies (BGSMCS) at Freie Universität Berlin, of which Gudrun Krämer was one of the founding members and its long-standing director, was founded in 2007. The success of the firstâand hitherto onlyââGraduate School Muslim Cultures and Societiesâ during
The two notions of culture and society (set in the plural) are programmatic for this volume too: They are broad enough to encourage thinking about and discussion of the Islamic tradition and Muslim practices, while avoiding the trap of essentialism and Eurocentrism. Moreover, these terms are not necessarily confined to given geopolitical entities such as empires or nations and their borders. The advantage is that subjects such as the internal and foreign policies of individual states, the global political economy connected to the region, terrorism, and war might be discussed, but not necessarily or exclusively. In this volume, we propose an inquiry into Muslim cultures and societies utilising variegated methodological and self-reflexive tools that extend well beyond the necessity of merely cultivating the languagesâan approach very different from that of Heinrich Leberecht Fleischer, who taught Oriental studies in Leipzig from 1835 to 1888, and who, in Baber Johansenâs words, âtransformed the Orient into grammar and lexicographyâ (Johansen 1990, 77).
The Volume
The volume is introduced with an essay, directly following this preface, by Dale Eickelman, who describes the state of international Islamic studies today and highlights Gudrun Krämerâs role in it. He shows how Krämer has âcontributed to building new academic spaces and made such spaces an integral part of her scholarly presence,â thus shaping and reshaping Islamic studies in the last thirty years in many different contexts.
Following from the design of the Berlin Graduate School Muslim Cultures and Societies, the ways of studying Islam, the Islamic tradition, and Muslim beliefs and practices presented here are characterised by a wide geographical scope, a broad timeline, an historically informed focus on contemporary phenomena, and transdisciplinary perspectives. We have divided the twenty-two contributions into the following eight categories:
1) In the first category, Islamic Studies Inside Out, Alexander Knysh and Reinhard Schulze teach us anew and in gratifying detail the degree to which the description and analysis of Muslim societies and cultures in the nineteenth
2) The articles that comprise the second category, Empires, Corporations, and Nations, contributions by Ahmed Abushouk, Johann Büssow and Astrid Meier, Elke Hartmann, and M. Sait Ãzervarlı, are closely related to the first category in historical terms. These articles deal with the late Ottoman Empire and present reflections on and analysis of a time of change and transitional orders in the final phase of the empire. Abushouk discusses Muḥammad RashÄ«d Riá¸Äâs active support of the old order in the form of the Ottoman caliphate, through the lens of his journal al-ManÄr. Büssow and Meier reflect on an alternative understanding of the social and political order within the Ottoman Empire, which they call âOttoman corporatism,â with the intention of complicating the stiff and sometimes misleading state-society distinction. Hartmann, in her paper, demonstrates the usefulness of incorporating visual sources, in the form of photographic family portraits, into a social history of the Ottoman Empire. In his article, Ãzervarlı portrays the evolving differentiation of the discipline of philosophy (hikmet, felsefe-i cedide) in the late Ottoman reforms within the two educational systems that developed in parallel and sometimes overlapped: the classical learning institution, or madrasa, and the newly built European institutions.
3) In his contribution, which is placed in the third section, Islam, Ethics, and Languages, Mutaz al-Khatib is similarly concerned with the history of philosophy, especially with moral philosophy and ethical thinking (al-tafkÄ«r al-akhlÄqÄ«), as he calls it. He narrates the evolution of this sub-field of philosophy, which reflected the influence of Europeanâand especially Frenchâthought, covering the same period of time as Ãzervalıâs contribution, but in this case for Egypt. In the last part of his article he draws attention to the new field of Islamic ethics that evolved in the last decades of the twentieth century. In this same category, Abdou Filali-Ansary discusses the relationship between morals and religious practice in different Muslim settings. He is especially interested in the dimension of the secular in connection with public morals and public religiosity. Abdulkader Tayob, in turn, analyses a highly publicised conversion to the notion of jihÄd in the South African context, which occurred after the invasion of Iraq by the United States and its allies in 2003 and the subsequent formation of the Islamic state in Iraq and Syria (ISIS). The three articles of this section reflect the increasing interconnectedness of various regions and
4) The closely related question of media representation is discussed in section four, Media Perspectives and Material Approaches to the study of Muslim cultures and societies. Following a constructivist line of thinking, one can argue that there is no knowledge without mediation. Thus, in this category the different media practices involved in any form of inquiry and their relation to material conditions are highlighted. Alina Kokoschka investigates the Arabic script, Islamic calligraphy, and the question of legibility. She asks about the deeper sense of a writing that is difficult to read. This question leads her to the importance of materiality and, further, to the âart of the line,â a calligraphy that reaches beyond words and invites reading between the lines.
Muhammad Qasim Zaman deals with practices around the translation of the QurʾÄn and ḥadÄ«th in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century South Asia. He points out that, although the ṢūfÄ« scholar ShÄh WalÄ« AllÄh (d. 1176/1762) was not the first to render the QurʾÄn into Persian on the Indian subcontinent, his translation had considerable influence on generations of translators and exegetes. Zaman argues that this impact was backed by claims to religious authority that in themselves owed much to the technology of print.
Bettina Gräf, in her article, is also concerned with the interrelation of media technology, social relations, and the promulgation of knowledge, albeit in a different setting. She investigates visions of social change in connection with materiality in forms as different as pocketbooks and Facebook, and explores questions of ownership and censorship in Egypt. She argues that individual and/or group expression in publicâand therefore individual and/or group agencyâis bound to economic constraints, on the one hand, and to constant interventions by the modern state on the other. Unlike in the South Asian case Zaman examines and the time and space he is concerned with, promises of social change connected to new media technologies thus glimmer for only brief moments in time and are very much bound to the experiences of one generation and their media biographies.
Kai Kresse pushes the discussion in yet another direction while looking at internal debates among coastal Muslims in postcolonial Kenya. He investigates discursive agency and intellectual practices on Swahili Islamic Radio in Mombasa in the years 2005 and 2006, emphasising the ways in which the radio programmeâs listeners and makers address and negotiate internal conflict. Kresseâs analysis highlights, on the one hand, the specific ethical dimensions
5) The fifth category of inquiry, titled The Politics of Body and Gender, is closely related to the fourth. Just like reflections on the material conditions of communication, the topic of body and gender permeates time and space. These relatively new perspectives form an important part of critical studies about Muslim cultures and societies.
Birgit Krawietz investigates the cultural multiplicity of Turkish oil wrestling, drawing on the late Shahab Ahmedâs postulation of a âBalkans-to-Bengalâ complex. In contrast to the homogenising and for many decades utterly nation-bound narrative of republican Turkey imposed on the sport, her contribution points to a much broader scope of influences. Discussing concepts such as Muscular Islam and Islamic martial arts, she draws attention to neo-traditional, modified wrestling practices related to the oil wrestling hub of Edirne and the newly introduced Ethnosports Cultural Festival in Istanbul.
Katajun Amirpur and Bettina Dennerlein provide new insights into the politics of gender in Muslim contexts: Amirpurâs article deals with the solidarity many Iranian men demonstrated with Iranian women in a Facebook campaign initiated in December 2009 called Men in Hijabs. These interventionsâwhich were originally meant as support for an Iranian man, MajÄ«d TavakkolÄ«, who had given a speech against oppression on National Student Dayâbecame an impetus for rethinking notions of gender, masculinity, femininity, public and private, and their epistemological underpinnings. Similarly, Dennerlein sheds light on the intellectual dynamics of current debates on gender in the Arab World. Her starting point is a text by the Egyptian political scientist and Islamic thinker Hiba Raʾūf Ê¿Izzat, published in 2005, in which she critiques transnational womenâs rights activism. In the tradition of modern Islamic thought, Ê¿Izzat inserts herself into differently aligned debates and addresses diverse national and international publics, while questioning the âideological dominance of the secular-religious binary.â
6) Our sixth category, titled Dominant Minorities and Dominant Majorities, with contributions by Hamit Bozarslan and Dorothea Schulz, is not intended to highlight the often-problematic terminology of minorities and majorities in nation-state settings, but rather to draw attention to the different possible hierarchies involved in sectarian tensions and to reconsider the assumptions that underlie much of the research on the Middle East in the social sciences since the 1990s and 2000s. Bozarslan deals with the different handling of ethnic and confessionally bound groups in empires and nations and compares the âcivility of the empires with the citizenship of the states,â using the late Ottoman Empire as an example. His article simultaneously speaks very much to the
7) Issues of sectarianism and nationalism played an important role in the latest Arab revolutions in 2011 and 2012 too. These issues were not the reason for the revolutionsâwhich in the first place called for economic, social, and political change, wrapped in the slogans for bread (Ê¿aish), dignity (karÄma), and social justice (Ê¿adÄla ijtimÄÊ¿iyya)âbut rather were used in countering the revolutions. The major crackdown on the Egyptian Muslim Brothers after the coup dâétat in Egypt in August 2013 and the ensuing discrimination and prosecution directed against them is one case in point. In their articles categorised under the heading Arab Revolutions and Their Impact on Research about the Middle East, Muriel Asseburg and Cilja Harders show the impact of the revolutions in terms of political science approaches to authoritarianism and political mobilisation. While Asseburg focusses on elite perspectives and elite change in four countriesâEgypt, Libya, Tunisia, and YemenâHarders is interested in what Asef Bayat has called âthe politics from belowâ and its long-term influences among those who represented the generation of Egyptian youth in 2011.
8) The last section of this volume, Muslims Inside Out, addresses the grounds on which Muslims are accepted into or excluded from European nation-states. Schirin Amir-Moazamiâs chapter investigates the ways in which Europeâs politics of recognising Muslims are recurrently promoted as a means of opposing ongoing measures of securitisation that target Muslims. However, as she demonstrates, the paradigms of recognition, which are inscribed in a liberal-secular matrix of Western European democracies, are also riddled with contradictions and exclusionary mechanisms. This becomes especially obvious in the way in which Muslims are simultanously inserted into a secular nation-state framework and at the same time marked as âreligiousâ through ever-changing conditions of acceptance. The critique of the paradigm of recognition offered by Amir-Moazami is extended by Ruth Masâs consideration of the structural and legal mechanisms at play in deciding the inside and outside status of Muslims in Germany and Europe. Set in the context of the ongoing refugee crisis, Mas traces the genealogy of equivalencies established between the animal and the
These eight categories clearly relate to certain academic disciplines, but they also show the cross-disciplinary approaches applied in mastering the complexities of the issues. However, the volume does not seek simply to address âcomplexity.â The most interesting observation we can draw from the various contributions is the relatedness of academic knowledge production within space and time. Obviously, it is not unimportant to reflect about who is speaking and from where and from what point of view. What we can see today with regard to Islamic studies is a change in consciousness and in balance. At least since the 1980s, with discussions of the postmodern condition (Lyotard 1979, Jameson 1984) and postcoloniality (Shohat 1992, Mbembe 2001), heterogenous voices from many places around the world are present within the academy. This volume in honour of Gudrun Krämer and her work thus displays a certain stage of critical inquiry, politics, and self-reflection on the matter of hierarchies and power relations within academic writing related to the Islamic tradition. We very much hope, in line with ideas expressed in Achille Mbembeâs Critique de la raison nègre (2013), that the academic (and any other) clocks will not in the future be turned back.
Acknowledgements
First and foremost, we would like to express our deepest gratitude to Gudrun Krämer for generously sharing with us her enormous range of ways of knowing Muslim cultures and societies. We further wish to express our gratitude to Dale Eickelman for hosting this volume in his fine series âSocial, Economic and Political Studies of the Middle East and Asia,â published in Leiden by Brill, and to Maurits van den Boogert and the entire production team at Brill. When we approached Brill with the project of this Festschrift they wholeheartedly picked it up and offered generous help and support. Our special thanks go to Abdurraouf Oueslati, project manager of EI3, who administered communications with the authors and oversaw the production process, and to Linda George for expert English copy editing. It was a real pleasure to work with your professional, collaborative, and encouraging minds throughout the production of this volume. We will certainly miss your presence in our inboxes. We are also grateful to Marie-Pascale Pieretti for the French copy editing, and to Amir Dastmalchian for assistance with the Persian. We would further like to thank Ulrike Freitag and Konrad Hirschler, who provided valuable feedback and who supported us throughout the entire process with advice and assistance in various matters. Furthermore, we are grateful to Verena Klemm and Dorothée Sack, who were of great help at the beginning of the project.
Several others had to bear with an additional workload and diligently devoted themselves to the book project, including the student assistants Juli Singer (Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München), David Battefeld (Freie Universität Berlin), and Farid al-Ghawaby (Freie Universität Berlin). Christina Stark (BGSMCS) was so kind to help in preparing the index. We are also grateful to the secretaries of the Institute of Islamic Studies at Freie Universität Berlin, Angela Ballaschk and Sonja Eising, as well as the secretary of the BGSMCS, Jutta Schmidbauer, for their extensive support. In addition we relied on the services of the PhD Office at the Department for History and Cultural Studies (Freie Universität Berlin), and we thank Michaela Köppen and Irina Golubko for their assistance in checking data for us there.
We extend our thanks to those listed in the Tabula Gratulatoria, and offer special gratitude to the contributors to this volume. We very much appreciate your positive response to the enterprise.
Bettina Gräf, Birgit Krawietz, and Schirin Amir-Moazami,
Berlin, June 2018