1. Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient
  2. Research
  3. Religion and Intellectual Culture

Religion and Intellectual Culture

This research unit examines the interplay between religion, intellectual culture, and everyday life across diverse societies, with a particular focus on the „Muslim world“, and from different disciplinary angles. We study „religion(s)“ both as discursive traditions and as dynamic sets of unifying (but often contested) norms and practices in different kinds of lifeworlds. Our understanding of „intellectual culture“ encompasses a set of historically grown and regionally specific narratives and knowledge-oriented practices that often reflect a specific sense of how to live a meaningful life. These may also be linked to religious traditions as well as (trans)regional social and intellectual histories.

The relations (and tensions) between religious and intellectual world-making are of particular interest and concern for us. As researchers, we embrace diverse methods and biographical, historical, ethnographic, material, textual, comparative and contextualizing approaches. We work with a strong sensitivity for the relevance of different languages and (trans)local conceptual fields and processes of conceptualization. Attention to these aspects feeds into the possibility of overcoming Europhone and Eurocentric scholarship, on the way to a more adequate (regionally underpinned) analytical language that may help to address some of the currently pressing decolonial concerns.

Of particular interest are also the ways in which technological innovations, in recent times especially digitization processes, social media exchanges, and artificial intelligence (AI), as they shape and in turn re-shape human experience on different levels, while they have initially been shaped by it. Some researchers use digital humanities methods and resources, such as text mining, network analysis, and digital archives, to explore these transformations, and push the boundaries of traditional research in the study of religion and intellectual culture.

While our primary focus is on Muslim societies (including Muslim secular positions), our research extends to comparative studies with other religious traditions, including Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism, and other endogenous religions. This comparative approach enriches our understanding of how different religions remain of longstanding importance in many regions. Our research challenges assumptions about Muslim societies as particularly "law-abiding" (sharia/law) or “religious” communities. Instead, a perspective on lifeworlds questions this and encourages the study of individual processes of negotiation that determine how religious commitment and conviction, but also knowledge and education, feed into and play out in the practice and navigation of everyday life, in relation to specific (trans)regional aspects of religious orientation and intellectual culture more broadly. Such a perspective, pursued in some of our projects, strengthens a view of the complex dimensions of human meaning-making practices, including attention to a wider and even universal intent and appeal that social actors may attach to them.

Research in our unit explores, in different ways, how religiosity, knowledge, and intellectual practice provide orientation in everyday life. The various ways in which these are mobilized and translated (e.g. into individual and collective life plans and sense-making) are examined in times of continuous decolonization – inter alia with a view to areas of tension with the (secular) state. The dynamics of learning cultures and religious upbringing and education in different social contexts are also of particular interest. Although primarily focused on Muslim contexts, some projects pay attention to secular ways of meaning-making, and to interactions between Muslims and their non-Muslim neighbors. In doing so, they also build on previous ZMO-based research on the comparison between Muslim, Christian, and regionally specific endogenous religious traditions. Some projects examine philosophical and artistic forms of engagement with the world and their respective socio-political contexts. Hereby, one prominent aspect is to study the translocality of these traditions, and the contributions as well as reworkings of local actors.

How are such forms shared, passed on, mediated and appropriated beyond their context of origin? Which historically evolved forms of engagement with the living world or the global political environment have been used? In what way are creative and critical traditions of knowledge continued or transformed, and with what motivations? What dynamics have emerged in these contexts? But also: how do academic and non-academic (organic or integral) intellectual traditions and schools of knowledge in our regions of study influence and enrich each other?  These are some of the questions that will be explored here.

The Ghadames Heritage Project

Digitization and Heritage Protection: Ghadames as a Laboratory of Community-Based and Collaborative Strategies

This project, based at Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient in Berlin and supported by the Patrimonies Funding Initiative of the Gerda Henkel Stiftung, is developed with the University of Tripoli and the Ecole nationale d’architecture et d’urbanisme of Tunis, in cooperation with the Ghadames Association for Heritage and Conservation (Jam’iyya Ghadames lil-Turâth wal-Mahfuzât). It aims to digitize a large amount of high-value historical archives and manuscripts that have been partially saved from the rubbles of buildings in Ghadames (Libya) that were destroyed during World War II.

Islam West Africa Collection

Alongside his research project, Dr. Frédérick Madore works on the Islam West Africa Collection. It is  a collaborative, open-access digital database that currently contains over 5,000 archival documents, newspaper articles, Islamic publications of various kinds, audio and video recordings, photographs, and references on Islam and Muslims in Burkina Faso, Benin, Niger, Nigeria, Togo and Côte d‘Ivoire. This project, funded by the Berlin Senate Department for Science, Health and Care, is a continuation of the award-winning Islam Burkina Faso Collection created in 2021 in collaboration with the University of Florida (USA).

Projects of Affiliated and Associated Researchers

PD Dr. Dietrich Reetz

World-Making from the 'Margins': Muslim Global Actors from South Asia

Dr. Daniele Cantini

Scholarly Ways: Mobility, Knowledge Production and Research Capacity Building Between Europe and the Middle East

Mamadou Diallo

Religion in Senegalese Laïcité: Enunciations of the Secular in the Colonial and Developmental State (1840-1980)

Dr. Benedikt Pontzen

Rethinking ‘African Traditional Religion’: Living with Spirits in Asante, Ghana

Dr. Jürgen Schaflechner & Dr. Max Kramer

The Populism of the Precarious: Marginalization, Mobilization, and Mediatization of South Asia’s Religious Minorities

Muhammedali Puthoor

One party for various Muslims: AIMIM and its Muslim constituents in Hyderabad

Dr. Denys Brylov

Sufi Fundamentalists: Al-Ahbash transnational Sufi network in Western Europe

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