Historicism and Islamic Modernism: The search for authenticity in the past

How to be authentically modern? This was the pervasive question behind the ideological elaborations of numerous religious and nationalist movements toward the end of the nineteenth century. Many of them attempted to find the answer in an imaginary past. This lecture puts its focus on the construction of specifically Islamic forms of modernity by representatives of the Islamic reform movement. Interpreting their thought in the context of more global nineteenth century narratives and ideas, the lecture argues that this movement laid the foundations for the multiplicity of ways in which contemporary Muslims construct both individual and collective forms of identity. More precisely, in Islamic modernist thought we can discern the origins of the contemporary hegemonic idea that authentic forms of Muslim modernity, in one way or the other, should relate to the corpus of Islamic religious traditions. 

Details
Date: 14 January 2020, Tuesday
Time: 19:00 to 21:00
Venue: KL11 
            The University of Nottingham Teaching Centre (KLTC) 
            Level 2 Chulan Tower 
             No. 3 Jalan Conlay 
            50450 Kuala Lumpur 

About the speaker: 
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. from the Faculty of Philosophy and Social Sciences, University of Hamburg, Germany, and has large field experience in the Muslim world. His most recent books are Orientalists, Islamists and the Global Public Sphere: A Genealogy of the Modern Essentialist Image of Islam, Sheffield: Equinox (2011); The Politics of Modern Muslim Subjectivities: Islam, Youth and Social Activism in the Middle East, together with Marie Juul Petersen and Sara Lei Sparre, New York: Palgrave (2014); Muslim History and Social Theory: A Global Sociology of Modernity, New York: Palgrave (2017); Modern Subjectivities in World Society. Global Structures and Local Practices, edited with Stephan Stetter, New York: Palgrave (2018).