Reinhard Schulze

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Reinhard Schulze (born January 29, 1953 in Berlin ) is a German and Swiss scholar of Islam .

Life

From 1974 to 1981 Schulze studied Oriental and Islamic Studies, Romance Studies and Linguistics at the University of Bonn . He received his doctorate there in 1981 with a dissertation on the rebellion of the Egyptian Fallahin . His teachers in Bonn were Werner Schmucker and Stefan Wild . His habilitation took place with the help of a DFG grant in 1987 with studies on the history of the Islamic World League . The topic was suggested to him by Werner Ende . From 1987 to 1992 he was Professor of Oriental Philology at the Ruhr University in Bochum , and from 1992 to 1995 he was Professor of Islamic Studies and Arabic Studies at the University of Bamberg . From 1995 until his retirement in 2018 he was a full professor for Islamic Studies and Modern Oriental Philology at the University of Bern .

In the presence of economic prosperity resp. In the absence of this, he sees a decisive factor for whether young people in Europe join IS or not. The font, which appeared in 2018 on his retirement, focuses on the topic that was close to his heart throughout his life: the relationship between Islam and modernity. Since 2018 he has been director of the university's advisory forum on Islam and the Middle East .

He is the twin brother of linguistics toddlers Wolfgang Schulze .

Positions and reactions

Islamic enlightenment

Schulze calls for a "cultural theoretical redefinition" of German Islamic studies. Today culture is "the concept of order par excellence". He advocates the thesis of an “Islamic Enlightenment ”, which he first mentioned in 1990 in his article “The Islamic 18th Century. An attempt at a historiographical criticism ” and defended it again in his article“ What is the Islamic Enlightenment? ”From 1996.

At the beginning of his last-mentioned essay, Reinhard Schulze refers to the thesis, which is well established in the public consciousness, that Islam knows no enlightenment. Due to this negative demarcation of Islam from modernity, the Enlightenment appears in the context of current discussions “like a collective term for a cultural identity that marks the highest point of development in the context of an evolutionary understanding of culture”, but in which Islam has no part. Schulze wants to counter this thesis, not by asserting the opposite, that Islam is well aware of an Enlightenment, but by using structural analogies between the Islamic and the European 18th century to show that at the time of the Christian 18th century in the There were autochthonous historiographical traditions in the Islamic world, which would have made an enlightenment possible in the Islamic world. But Napoleon's Egyptian campaign in 1798 and the subsequent colonization of the Islamic world marked a “break” in these autochthonous traditions, which were no longer able to develop any force in the Islamic world. In the global discourse on modernity, Muslim intellectuals have since then attributed: "The factual enlightenment of the 'oriental discussion participants' is interpreted in good old colonial manner as a 'loan from the West' to the Islamic world." As it happened in Europe, Schulze defines the following four requirements:

  1. a correlation between monistic mysticism and rationality,
  2. the change from a two-dimensional, theocentric to a one-dimensional, anthropocentric worldview,
  3. the will to want to be new, original and at the same time original,
  4. the emancipation of the bourgeoisie and the emergence of the social dichotomy of citoyen and bourgeois .

He sees these prerequisites for Europe in pietism , mysticism and rationalistic empiricism and believes that he has also found them structurally analogous in the Islamic tradition, which he describes in his essay.

criticism

Schulze's writings sparked a discussion in Islamic studies about the interpretation of the Islamic history of the 18th century. His thesis that there was an Enlightenment in the Islamic world of the 18th and 19th centuries that resembled the western one was heavily criticized, not only by Bernd Radtke (Utrecht), a student of Fritz Meier , but also in an essay by both of them Islamic scholar Gottfried Hagen (Ann Arbor, Michigan) and Tilman Seidensticker (Jena). Radtke criticizes Schulze's understanding of neo- Sufism , in which it sees an autochthonous Islamic tradition that is necessary for an enlightenment process. From Ahmad ibn Idris ' writings it emerges for Schulze that the neo-Sufists affirmed iǧtihād , which for him is evidence of the use of one's own reason. Radtke points out that the source refers to common sense as “fahm” and not as raʾy . The latter denotes the rational ability of man, and it is precisely this that should not be used on the path of knowledge. Because it comes from the lower nature of man, which ultimately relies on itself, and for Ahmad ibn Idris that is “idolatry” (širk). Tilman Nagel said that this thesis is "about the - z. Partly philologically untenable, even grossly wrong - interpretation of a few sentences or lines of verse taken out of context by Arabic authors of the 18th century in accordance with “this very thesis. While Schulze on the one hand advocates entering the European epoch designation "Enlightenment" in the history of the Islamic world, on the other hand he criticizes the transfer of the Christian term " fundamentalism " to the Islamic movements of the modern age.

Also Schulze history of the Islamic world in the 20th century was by Tilman Nagel panned . She is "an oppressive example" of "that at the point secured knowledge obtained from the relevant sources ideological set pieces of the simplest cut are chosen as the basis for far-reaching interpretations". Nagel accused Schulze of a lack of knowledge of the sources. Schulze interprets "in the politically correct manner currently required " so-called Islamic fundamentalism as the poisonous fruit of the colonial grip of European powers on the Islamic world (...), which disrupted the European analogous development of 'human self-liberation' that was taking place there compelled the Islamic intellectuals to build up 'Islam in its idealized original form (...) as a counterweight to European identity' ”. Nagel thinks this interpretation is wrong.

However, Christopher de Bellaigue comes to similar conclusions as Schulze , who regards Muhammad Ali Pascha and Sultan Mahmud II , whose mother was a French (the sister of Joséphine de Beauharnais ), as the most important representatives and patrons of the Islamic Enlightenment of the early 19th century.

Fonts (selection)

  • The rebellion of the Egyptian Fallahin 1919. On the conflict between the agrarian-oriental society and the colonial state in Egypt 1820–1919. Baalbek, Berlin 1981 (dissertation, University of Bonn, 1981).
  • Islamic Internationalism in the 20th Century. Research on the history of the Islamic World League . Brill, Leiden 1990, ISBN 90-04-08286-7 (habilitation thesis, University of Bonn, 1987).
  • The Islamic eighteenth century. Attempt at a historiographical critique. In: The world of Islam . 30: 140-159 (1990).
  • What is the Islamic Enlightenment? In: The world of Islam. 36: 276-325 (1996).
  • History of the Islamic World in the 20th Century. Beck, Munich 1994; extended versions 2002 and 2016:
  • Religious pluralism and European Islam , in: Robertson-von Trotha, Caroline Y. (Ed.): Europa in der Welt - die Welt in Europa (= interdisciplinary cultural studies / Interdisciplinary Studies on Culture and Society, Vol. 1), Baden-Baden 2006, ISBN 978-3-8329-1934-4

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ In an interview with Yves Wegelin (* 1978), co-editor-in-chief of WOZ (WochenZeitung), WOZ No. 43/2014, WOZ from October 23, 2014: Religion should not be marginalized or pushed underground , http: //static.woz.ch/1443/der-westen-und-der-is/man-darf-die-religion-nicht-an-den-rand-oder-in-den-untergrund-draengen
  2. ↑ Florian Zemmin and a .: Islam in modernity - modernity in Islam. Festschrift for Reinhard Schulze's 65th birthday . Brill, Leiden 2018, ISBN 9789004364042
  3. ↑ http://www.fino.unibe.ch/index_ger.html
  4. ↑ Rolf Cantzen: "Islam has murdered the Orient ..." New cultural studies on Orientalism (= research and society. June 21, 2007). Deutschlandradio Kultur, 2007 ( manuscript ).
  5. ↑ Reinhard Schulze: The Islamic eighteenth century. Attempt at a historiographical critique. In: The world of Islam . 30: 140-159 (1990).
  6. ↑ a b Reinhard Schulze: What is the Islamic Enlightenment? In: The world of Islam. 36: 276-325 (1996).
  7. ↑ Reinhard Schulze: What is the Islamic Enlightenment? In: The world of Islam. Vol. 36 (1996), p. 280.
  8. ↑ Reinhard Schulze: What is the Islamic Enlightenment? In: The world of Islam. Vol. 36 (1996), p. 286.
  9. ↑ a b Gottfried Hagen, Tilman Seidensticker: REINHARD SCHULZES hypothesis of an Islamic enlightenment. Critique of a Historiographical Critique. In: Journal of the German Oriental Society. Wiesbaden. 148: 83-110 (1998).
  10. ^ A b c Tilman Nagel: Autochthonous roots of Islamic modernism. In: Journal of the German Oriental Society . Vol. 146 (1996), pp. 92-111, here p. 94, footnote 4 ( digitized version ).
  11. ↑ Reinhard Schulze: Islamic culture and social movement. In: Periphery . Vol. 18/19 (1984/85), pp. 60-84, here 60.
  12. ↑ Christopher de Bellaigue: The Islamic Enlightenment. The Modern Struggle Between Faith and Reason. London 2017.
personal data
SURNAME Schulze, Reinhard
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German scholar of Islam
DATE OF BIRTH January 29, 1953
PLACE OF BIRTH Berlin