Kai Kresse, Abdoulaye Sounaye

Thinking the Re-Thinking of the World

Decolonial Challenges to the Humanities and Social Sciences from Africa, Asia and the Middle East

As far too many intellectual histories and theoretical contributions from the ‘global South’ remain under-explored, this volume works towards redressing such imbalance. Experienced authors, from the regions concerned, along different disciplinary lines, and with a focus on different historical timeframes, sketch out their perspectives of envisaged transformations. This includes specific case studies and reflexive accounts from African, South Asian, and Middle Eastern contexts. Taking a critical stance on the ongoing dominance of Eurocentrism in academia, the authors present their contributions in relation to current decolonial challenges.

Hereby, they consider intellectual, practical and structural aspects and dimensions, to mark and build their respective positions. From their particular vantage points of (trans)disciplinary and transregional engagement, they sketch out potential pathways for addressing the unfinished business of conceptual decolonization. The specific individual positionalities of the contributors, which are shaped by location and regional perspective as much as in disciplinary, biographical, linguistic, religious, and other terms, are hereby kept in view. Drawing on their significant experiences and insights gained in both the global north and global south, the contributors offer original and innovative models of engagement and theorizing frames that seek to restore and critically engage with intellectual practices from particular regions and transregional contexts in Africa, South Asia, and the Middle East.

Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient
Geisteswissenschaftliche Zentren Berlin e.V.
ZMO-Studien 43
2022
230 Seiten
De Gruyter
ISBN 9783110738094

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CONTENTS

Abdoulaye Sounaye, André Chappatte

Islam and Muslim Life in West Africa

Practices, Trajectories and Influences

The book offers an examination of issues, institutions and actors that have become central to Muslim life in the region. Focusing on leadership, authority, law, gender, media, aesthetics, radicalization and cooperation, it offers insights into processes that reshape power structures and the experience of being Muslim. It makes room for perspectives from the region in an academic world shaped by scholarship mostly from Europe and America. parcel of such social conflicts and transformations, its role being neither one of resistance against power nor of guidance towards norms, but rather one of open-ended complicity.

Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient
Geisteswissenschaftliche Zentren Berlin e.V.
ZMO-Studien 42
2022
236 Seiten
De Gruyter
ISBN 9783110738124

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CONTENTS

Samuli Schielke und Mukhtar Saad Shehata

Shared Margins

An Ethnography with Writers in Alexandria after the Revolution

Shared Margins tells of writers, writing, and literary milieus in Alexandria, Egypt’s second city. It de-centres cosmopolitan avant-gardes and secular-revolutionary aesthetics that have been intensively documented and studied since 2011. Instead, it offers a fieldwork-based account of various milieus and styles, and their common grounds and lines of division.

Structured in two parts, Shared Margins gives an account of literature as a social practice embedded in milieus that at once enable and limit literary imagination, and of a life-worldly experience of plurality in absence of pluralism that marks literary engagements with the intimate and social realities of Alexandria after 2011.

Literary writing, this book argues, has marginality as an at once enabling and limiting condition. It provides shared spaces of imaginary excess that may go beyond the taken-for-granted of a societal milieu, and yet are never unlimited. Literary imagination is part and parcel of such social conflicts and transformations, its role being neither one of resistance against power nor of guidance towards norms, but rather one of open-ended complicity.

Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient
Geisteswissenschaftliche Zentren Berlin e.V.
ZMO-Studien 41
2021
272p
De Gruyter
ISBN 9783110726770

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CONTENTS

Jeanine Elif Dağyeli, Claudia Ghrawi, Ulrike Freitag

Claiming and Making Muslim Worlds

Religion and Society in the Context of the Global

To what extent can Islam be localized in an increasingly interconnected world? The contributions to this volume investigate different facets of Muslim lives in the context of increasingly dense transregional connections, highlighting how the circulation of ideas about ‘Muslimness’ contributed to the shaping of specific ideas about what constitutes Islam and its role in society and politics. Infrastructural changes have prompted the intensification of scholarly and trade networks, prompted the circulation of new literary genres or shaped stereotypical images of Muslims. This, in turn, had consequences in widely differing fields such as self-representation and governance of Muslims. The contributions in this volume explore this issue in geographical contexts ranging from South Asia to Europe and the US. Coming from the disciplines of history, anthropology, religious studies, literary studies and political science, the authors collectively demonstrate the need to combine a translocal perspective with very specific local and historical constellations. The book complicates conventional academic divisions and invites to think in historically specific translocal contexts.

Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient
Geisteswissenschaftliche Zentren Berlin e.V.
ZMO-Studien 40
2021
299 Seiten
De Gruyter
ISBN 978-3-11-0726534

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CONTENTS

Suaad Alghafal

A Bridgehead to Africa

German Interest in the Ottoman Province of Tripoli (Libya) 1884–1918

This monograph analyses the role of the province of Tripoli, Libya, in the context of German foreign politics with a focus on the period between 1884 and 1918. Suaad Alghafal examines the German military, political and economic strategy, and sheds lights on the international events that provided the setting for the German policy towards Libya, particularly the European ‘Scramble for Africa’.

Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient
Geisteswissenschaftliche Zentren Berlin e.V.
ZMO-Studien 39
2021
242 Seiten
De Gruyter
ISBN 978-3-11-0684964

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CONTENTS

Alexander Benatar

Kalter Krieg auf dem indischen Subkontinent
Die deutsch-deutsche Diplomatie im Bangladeschkrieg 1971

In den Jahren 1971/72 waren in Mitteleuropa und Südasien zwei gegenläufige Bewegungen zu beobachten. Während die deutsch-deutsche Entspannungspolitik den Ost-West-Konflikt zu überwinden suchte, entspann sich zwischen den beiden Nachfolgestaaten Britisch-Indiens ein Krieg, der zur Teilung Pakistans und Gründung Bangladeschs führen sollte. Indien unterstützte die bengalische Unabhängigkeitsbewegung gegen die pakistanische Zentralregierung.

Entscheidend sind hierbei die unterschiedlichen Block-Allianzen der jeweils agierenden Nationalstaaten: Waren Bundesrepublik und DDR ihre Loyalitäten im Kalten Krieg recht klar, so blieben sie im bündnisfreien Indien bewusst weitaus unklarer. Dennoch war mit Abschluss des Indisch-Sowjetischen Freundschaftsvertrages im August 1971 eine (vor allem sicherheitspolitische) Annäherung der indischen Regierung an die UdSSR zu beobachten, derweil Pakistan schon früher zu einem wichtigen strategischen Partner der USA auf dem Subkontinent avanciert war.

Ausgehend von der Hypothese, dass für Bundesrepublik und DDR Anfang der 1970er Jahre die Auseinandersetzung miteinander ihre Loyalitäten im Kalten Krieg überwog, untersucht die vorliegende Arbeit die Haltung der beiden deutschen Staaten im Bangladeschkrieg.

Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient
Geisteswissenschaftliche Zentren Berlin e.V.
ZMO-Studien 38
2020
257 Seiten
De Gruyter
ISBN 978-3-11-068085-0
lieferbar; 79,95 Euro

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CONTENTS

Stephanie Zehnle

A Geography of Jihad
Sokoto Jihadism and the Islamic Frontier in West Africa

This book addresses the Jihad movement that created the largest African state of the 19th century: the Sokoto Caliphate, existing for 99 years from 1804 until its military defeat by European colonial troops in 1903. The author carves out the entanglements of jihadist ideology and warfare with geographical concepts at Africa’s periphery of the Islamic world: geographical knowledge about the boundary between the “Land of Islam” and the “Land of War”; the pre-colonial construction of “the Muslim” and “the unbeliever”; and the transfer of ideas between political elites and mobile actors (traders, pilgrims, slaves, soldiers), whose reports helped shape new definitions of the African frontier of Islam. Research for this book is based on the study of a very wide range of Arabic and West African (Hausa, Fulfulde) manuscripts. Their policies reveal the persistent reciprocity of jihadist warfare and territorial statehood, of Africa and the Middle East.

Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient
Geisteswissenschaftliche Zentren Berlin e.V.
ZMO-Studien 37
2020
718 Seiten
De Gruyter
ISBN 978-3-11-067536-8
lieferbar; 59 Euro

CONTENTS

Review
Paul Naylor, Islamic Africa 11, 2, 271-273