Orientalists, Islamists and the Global Public Sphere - A Genealogy of the Modern Essentialist Image of Islam - Dietrich Jung

Orientalists, Islamists and the Global Public Sphere - A Genealogy of the Modern Essentialist Image of Islam - Dietrich Jung

References

Orientalists, Islamists and the Global Public Sphere - A Genealogy of the Modern Essentialist Image of Islam - Dietrich Jung

Dietrich Jung [+-]
University of Southern Denmark
Dietrich Jung is a Professor and Head of Department at the Center for Contemporary Middle East Studies, University of Southern Denmark. He holds a MA in Political Science and Islamic Studies, as well as a Ph.D. in Political Science from University of Hamburg, Germany and has large field experience in the Muslim world. He has published numerous scholarly articles on causes of war, peace and conflict studies, political Islam, modern Turkey and on conflicts in the Middle East. His most recent book (edited with Catharina Raudvere) is Religion, Politics, and Turkey’s EU Accession (Palgrave Macmillan, 2008).

Description

Honourable Mention, The British-Kuwait Friendship Society Book Prize 2012 In light of the ongoing public debate that focuses on differences between Islam and the West, this book suggests a change of perspective. It departs from the observation that both western Orientalists and Islamist activists have defined Islam similarly as an all-encompassing religious, political and social system. In shifting from differences to similarities, it leaves behind the increasingly circular debate about the “true” nature of Islam in which the Muslim religion has been represented either as intrinsically hostile to or as principally compatible with modern culture. Instead, it associates the evolution of a particularly essentialist image of Islam with a complex process of cross-cutting (self)-interpretations of Muslim and Western societies within an emerging global public sphere. Putting its focus on the life and work of a number of paradigmatic individuals, the book investigates the intellectual encounters and discursive interdependencies among western and Muslim intellectuals. In a historical genealogy it deconstructs the essentialist image of Islam in uncovering its conceptual foundations in the modern transformation of European and Muslim societies from the nineteenth century onwards. Thereby, the changing infrastructure of the global public sphere has facilitated the gradual popularization, trivialization, and dissemination of a previously elitist discourse on Islam and modernity. In this way, the idea of Islam as an all-encompassing system has been turned into accepted knowledge in the Western and Muslim worlds alike.

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Citation

Jung, Dietrich . References. Orientalists, Islamists and the Global Public Sphere - A Genealogy of the Modern Essentialist Image of Islam. Equinox eBooks Publishing, United Kingdom. p. 275 - 306 Dec 2011. ISBN 9781845539009. https://www.equinoxpub.com/home/view-chapter/?id=19736. Date accessed: 29 Mar 2024 doi: 10.1558/equinox.19736. Dec 2011

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