Date: April 3-5, 2019

Venue: Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient, Kirchweg 33, 14129 Berlin, Germany

Funded by the German Ministry for Research and Education, and since 2017 with the Leibniz-Association, the conference concludes our 12-year research program “Muslim Worlds – Worlds of Islam?”

In its main BMBF-funded research program, the Centre currently comprises four interdisciplinary project groups, with twenty-two researchers working on different historical and cultural aspects of the “Islamicate World” since the 18th century. Building on ZMO’s preceding programs, Abgrenzung und Aneignung in der Globalisierung (1996-2000) and Translokalität (2000-2007) – the first phase (2008-2013) of the current program, Muslim Worlds – World of Islam?, tracked the global condition of Muslim life worlds in a more differentiated manner.

Through empirically based and conceptually engaged projects, it explores specific themes within the wider field of tension between Muslim worlds, understood as the life worlds of Muslims or members of other communities in Islamicate contexts, and the world of Islam, constructed by a religious tradition with unifying claims but diverse interpretations and practices.

Our current research agenda includes capturing the flows and dynamics of transregional interaction and connectivity that have characterized Muslim worlds in recent historical periods and under diverse conditions – while also including the ruptures, conflicts and crises that these processes entail.

The second phase (2014-2019) of ZMO’s research program, Muslim Worlds – World of Islam?, starts from here. By way of four interlaced research fields, we will explore themes and issues that have emerged as relevant and particularly promising in the discussions of the previous research phase. The four fields investigate:

– Progress: Ideas, Agents, Symbols;
– The Politics of Resources;
– Trajectories of Lives and Knowledge, and
– Cities as Laboratories of Change.

Conference Program

• Thematic Section: Religious Worlds
Religion and Ideas of World Order: Claims, Engagements and Transformations
Governing the Sahel-Sahara: Bad Islam and Good Muslims

• Thematic Section: Values in Circulation
Making Muslim Spaces in the Indian Ocean
Challenging the North/South Divide: Multicentric Flows in Muslim Worlds
The Moral Economies of Resource Valuation and Extraction

• Thematic Section: Unmaking and Remaking Muslim Worlds
Overcoming Division: Religious and Non-Religious Norms in Global Transitional Justice Processes
Muslim Liminality in Migrant Spaces: Berlin During the Era of the World Wars

• Thematic Section: Rethinking Muslim Worlds
Intellectual Cultures, Philosophy, and Critical Thinkers: Challenges, Pathways and Reservoirs for Decolonization

More information on: Centre for Modern Oriental Studies (ZMO)