Prof. Dr. Dietrich Jung

How is one “authentically” modern? My project explores the multiplicity of answers that Muslims have provided to this question. These answers relate to ideas of citizenship, educational and moral cultivation, economic entrepreneurship, political institutions, scientific knowledge, bodily performances, and forms of consumerist and creative self-made identities. Throughout the twentieth century we can observe the rise, spread and fragmentation of a meanwhile relatively hegemonic idea according to which the attachment to Islamic traditions bestows projects of Muslim modernities with cultural authenticity. Drawing on different strands of social theory, I interpret this specifically Islamic discourse of modernity as an inherent part of global modernity, in conceptual terms understood as the emergence of world society. The guiding research question of my project is, then, in which ways do the rise of Islamic modernities and the emergence of world society intersect?

I take my point of departure in the latest discussion about “multiple modernities that has reached the discipline of Islamic studies too. Current research on Islam puts its focus on the formation of pietistic Muslim identities, emphasizing the continuing importance of religion in the construction of forms of Muslim modernities. With this focus on Islam/religion, these studies deliver a welcome critique of the often secularist and Eurocentric bias in the academic study of modern Islam. At the same time, however, they are limited in scope due to their focus on both strictly religious observant Muslims and the present. Moreover, pitting cases of pietistic Muslims against the alleged secular nature of Western modernity, they implicitly confirm the idea of a fundamental alterity between “Islam and the West.” In my project I seek to overcome these limitations of the current state of the art in three ways: theoretically, historically and in my choice of cases. Employing non-normative theories of world society, I investigate a number of societal “boundary negotiations” between non-religious arenas and religion through which new semantics of Islamic modernities have emerged since the nineteenth century.