Itzchak Weismann

Itzchak Weismann

Itzchak Weismann ( Hebrew יצחק ויסמן; * September 14, 1961 in Haifa ) is an Israeli orientalist . He is Professor of Islamic Studies at the University of Haifa and headed the Jewish-Arab Center there from 2010 to 2013. His specialties include Sufism , especially the Naqschbandīya order , modern Syria and Islam in India .

biography

Itzchak Weismann was born in Haifa, grew up there and graduated from the local university with honors. He wrote his master's thesis on Sa'id Hawwa (1935–1989), the ideologue of the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood under the rule of Hafiz al-Assad . His doctoral thesis examines the trends in religious reforms that emerged in Damascus at the end of the Ottoman era as a reaction to the modernization efforts of the central government in Constantinople . He completed his postdoctoral studies at Princeton University and Oxford University . From 2008–2009 he was visiting professor at Dickinson College in Pennsylvania .

Weismann has been a member of the teaching staff at the University of Haifa since 1989 and has been a professor there since 2010. As head of the Jewish-Arab Center, he launched encounters between Jewish and Arab students on the campus of Haifa University as well as the project “ Akko as a common space”, whereupon he was invited to interreligious and intercultural conferences in Vienna and Kosovo . He has published eight books, dozens of English and Hebrew articles in professional journals, and several articles in the Encyclopaedia of Islam . He is married and has three children.

Research work

In his research, Itzchak Weismann deals with the ideology and the practical work of the modern Islamic movements, in particular the Muslim Brotherhood and the Salafists . The focus of his research was initially on Syria and then expanded to the Indian subcontinent and other parts of Asia.

Modern Islam and Sufi tradition

With regard to the interaction between the modernization efforts of Islam and the Sufi tradition, Weismann turns against the prevailing opinion, which adopts the standpoint of radical Islamic organizations, especially the Salafists. According to these organizations, the Sufi orders are primarily responsible for the decline of Islam and the Islamic surrender to Europe. In a study on Damascus, Weismann shows that the fathers and grandfathers of the first Islamic reformers were Sufis, but at the same time were the first to support the modernization efforts of the Ottoman Empire. This also applies to other cities such as Aleppo , Hama , Baghdad and to religious-political movements such as the Muslim Brotherhood. In an article “Modernity from within”, Weismann assumes that the shift in focus from the Sufi orders to “fundamentalist” movements in the history of Islam reflects a reaction to the modernization processes, but also explains the violence exercised in the name of religion .

Naqschbandi Order

The Naqshbandiya is a late branch of Sufism. This Sufi order supported the modernization efforts of Sultan Abdülhamid II for the first time , who appointed most of the religious reformers in the cities of Syria and Iraq as well as some leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood in Syria at the end of the 19th century . Weismann's monograph on the development of the Naqschbandi order is the first comprehensive study on this topic. It explains the beginning of the order in the 14th century in the Central Asian cities of Bukhara and Tashkent on the Silk Road , the spread in the following centuries to India, China and the Ottoman Empire and concludes with explanations of new intellectual and organizational forms under the influence of modernity .

Muslim Brotherhood

Most of the studies on the subject focus on the history of the movement in Egypt. Weismann has dealt particularly with the life and teaching of Sa'id Hawwa, the leading ideologue of the movement under the Syrian dictator Hafiz al-Assad, as well as with the views of the movement on Islamic and Western civilization and on the realization of missionary activity in the sense from Daʿwa .

Islam in India

In this area, too, Weismann opposes traditional views. He assumes that many modern Islamic ideas attributed to thinkers and movements from the Middle East have their actual origin on the Indian subcontinent, which in addition to India includes today's Pakistan and Bangladesh . He explains this with the fact that the crisis of Islam in India as a result of the fall of the Mughal Empire in the 18th century and the subsequent British colonization occurred about a hundred years before the similar crisis that led to the fall of the Ottoman Empire. Indian Muslims were the first to propagate a return to the original religion of Islam, to adopt selected elements of Western culture and to restore Islam to its original greatness. In his research work, Weismann emphasizes India's contribution to the modernization of Islam, from the Naqschbandi order to the Salafiya and the Muslim Brotherhood to the radical movements based on the theories of the Egyptian Sayyid Qutb .

Salafism

For some years now, Weismann has been researching the development of conservative Salafism , which also includes the jihadists of al-Qaeda and IS . He tries to explain how the initially liberal-religious Salafist outlook, which at the end of the 19th century a balance between modern cultural achievements of the West and the intellectual return to the "ancestors" ( Arabic سلف "Salaf") could degenerate into the current terrorist violence.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Ashgate: Islamic Myths and Memories
2. ↑ Syria Comment, Joshua Landis May 11, 2007

Web links

• Profile of the University of Haifa (English)

Publications (selection)

• Itzchak Weismann: Taste of Modernity: Sufism, Salafiyya, and Arabism in Late Ottoman Damascus . Leiden, Brill 2001, 343 pp. ISBN 90-04-11908-6
• Itzchak Weismann: Sufi Brotherhoods in Syria and Israel. A Contemporary Overview . In: History of Religions , Vol. 43 (2004), pp. 303-318, ISSN  0018-2710
• Itzchak Weismann: The Naqshbandiyya: Orthodoxy and Activism in a Worldwide Sufi Tradition . London and New York, Routledge 2007, xv + 208 pp.
• Itzchak Weismann: 'Abd al-Rahman al-Kawakibi : Islamic Reform and Arab Revival . Oxford, Oneworld 2015.
• Itzchak Weismann: Sa'id Hawwa: the making of a radical Muslim thinker in modern Syria . London, Routledge 2007. ( Online )
• Itzchak Weismann: "The Salafiyya in the 19th century as a forerunner of modern Salafism", in: Thorsten Gerald Schneiders : Salafism in Germany: Origins and dangers of an Islamic fundamentalist movement . 2014 ( partial online view )
• Associate Editor: Ottoman Reform and Islamic Regeneration . London, IB Tauris 2005, 240 pp.
• Associate Editor: Islamic Myths and Memories: Mediators of Globalization . Farnham (Surrey), Ashgate 2014, 263 pp.