Research Foci

  • Processes of Christianization and Islamization
  • Historical Sociolinguistics of Latin and Arabic entanglement, Latin-Arabic translation
  • Transmediterranean, Christian-Muslim relations, Interreligious communication
  • History of Christian-Muslim othering, Orientalism and Occidentalism

Member of Mediterranean Platform

Editor (with Theresa Jäckh and Eric Böhme) of Transmediterranean History. Commented Anthology of Primary Sources

Research Projects

al-Gharb: Conceptions of the West in the Islamicate Sphere

A concept of “the West” is widely diffused in Europe and North America and manifests itself in various publications, many of which tend to draw boundaries to other cultural spheres, the Islamic sphere in particular, e.g. with reference to “Western values”, “Western conceptions of democracy”, etc. Simultaneously, a concept of “the West” is also cherished from an external perspective, not least in Occidentalist discourses maintained by radical Islamic groups among others.

The project aims at systematically engaging with images of the West produced in the Arabic-Islamic sphere. The point is not only to highlight their diversity and thus to nuance public and academic debates on the topic, but to enquire into the origins of culturalist perceptions of the West. Research tends to look for these origins in the late 19th century, when Islamic(ate) societies were confronted with the colonial projects of European powers and thus forced to engage with the characteristics of the societies represented by these powers. Although there are some indications that a concept of “Western culture” already circulated earlier, no study has systematically analysed so far, when and why this new form of conceptualizing European and North American societies replaced earlier alternatives.

Against this backdrop, the project investigates, when, why and via which channels a conception of the West became part of discourses in Islamic(ate) societies. A terminological analysis, specifically of Arabic texts produced between the 16th and the 20th century, examines, in which contexts the Arabic terms “al-ġarb” (“the West”), “al-ġarbiyyūn” (“Occidentals”) and “ġarbī” (“Western”) appear as cultural collective terms, thus complementing or even replacing older conceptions of Europe (e.g. “Land of the Franks” – “bilād al-Ifranǧ”) and America (e.g. “Western India” – “al-Hind al-ġarbī”). The search for a kind of terminological “turning point” is linked to the question, in which milieus and for which purpose these cultural collective terms are used. Of interest is also how such terms relate to alternative, e.g. national, categorizations in terms of quantity and quality, and if their appearance rather results from concrete experiences with Western societies or from the translation and reception of European writings and inherent concepts of culture, processes that can be traced both in the Maghreb and the Mashreq of the 19th century.

The project is partly funded by the Gerda Henkel Foundation (https://www.gerda-henkel-stiftung.de/projekte?page=90f)

The Rise of an Islamic Commonwealth (600-1350)

This research project represents a contribution to volume 2 of the multi-volume “History of the World” edited by Jürgen Osterhammel und Akira Iriye. Taking on a macro-historical perspective, it deals with the emergence, differentiation and interaction of Islamicate societies, i.e. societies that have been formed by variants of the Islamic creed in one way or another.

In the period under investigation between around 600 and 1350, the following should be considered: (1) the first half of the seventh century witnessed the formulation and basic social implementation of fundamental Islamic ideas. (2) During the Arabic-Islamic expansion of the seventh and eighth centuries, these fundamental ideas as well as their early social manifestations became part of an imperial framework and also began to spread beyond this imperial sphere. (3) From the middle of the eighth century onwards, the imperial framework broke down into a number of Muslim-led polities, which ceased to form a single political entity, increasingly developed regional characteristics, but stayed connected thanks to certain shared standards. (4) This “fragmented aggregate” is not well represented by the terms Islamdom or “Islamic sphere / culture / civilization / world”. For this reason, the project experiments with an anachronistic term already adapted to the multipolar spheres of Christianity and Islam in the first millenium CE by Garth Fowden: the Commonwealth.

The emergence of an Islamic Commonwealth will be traced in five steps: Part I focuses on the ideological and political preconditions of Muslim expansion. Part II explains how the Arabic-Islamic expansion of the seventh and eighth centuries merged different societies under the suzerainty of norms legitimized by Islam. The imperial framework created by the expansion served as a springboard for the Muslim advance into new areas and radiated into different parts of Eurafrasia for centuries. Against this backdrop, Part III explains how certain “proto-global” standards emerged in large parts of this huge region, but also illustrates the limits of standardization. The parallel coexistence and interaction of Muslims and non-Muslims in very different power constellations proves in particular that the sphere influenced by Islam remained and continues to remain culturally heterogeneous. Moulded in a particular, early Islamic context, the basic ideas of Islam were continuously adapted to new contexts under very different conditions and thus integrated rather differently into the various affected regions and societies. These adaptive adjustments promoted their dissemination, but also produced an increasing number of variations: every process of mutual adaptation between a particular manifestation of Islam and its environment resulted in transculturation and a new cultural synthesis. In the course of the centuries, these different, but largely compatible manifestations of Islam increased in number and diversified, thus forming an Islamic Commonwealth understood here as a space characterized by a high degree of transregional mobility, communication, and interaction. Part IV illustrates these characteristics by pointing to proto-global networks as well as commercial and intellectual flows influenced by Islam in one way or another. It ends with a panoramic view on the Islamic Commonwealth around 1350. Finally, Part V discusses, to which extent the history of this Commonwealth still plays a role today.

Latin & Arabic: Entangled Histories

Social Histories of Linguistic Entanglement

For centuries, Latin and Arabic have played a preponderant role as languages of administration, intellectual endeavours and religion in the wider Euromediterranean sphere. In these functions, they are commonly regarded as cultural markers of European Christendom and the (Mediterranean) Islamic world.

Both linguistic systems came into contact in the ancient Roman Near East where entanglement was still limited to a restricted repertoire of forms. The Arabic-Islamic expansion into the western Mediterranean, dominated linguistically by Latin and its Romance derivates, significantly increased the number of Latin-Arabic forms of entanglement. From the early modern period onwards, however, the interaction of Latin and Arabic progressively receded into the sphere of academic endeavours while Romance-Arabic entanglement produced various phenomena, including a Mediterranean pidgin known as lingua franca. Since the European vernaculars increasingly supplanted Latin functionally, Latin ceased to fulfill certain functions of a world language, still largely retained by Arabic. For this reason, phenomena of Latin-Arabic entanglement only continue to exist in highly specialized academic milieus.

Phenomena of Latin-Arabic entanglement exist in different forms. These range from analysis (comments on the other language), regulation (statements on linguistic policy) via transformation and appropriation (oral / written translations, bilingual word-lists, glossaries, loans, calques) to graphic, literary or systemic forms of hybridity. Reconstructing the respective set of extralingual (e.g. social, political, economic etc.) conditions that prepared the ground for the emergence of specific forms of entanglement, provides insights into highly complex social and cultural constellations that cannot be explained in terms of religious or culturalist dichotomies, e.g. between “Christians” and “Muslims” or “Islam” and “the West.”

See Daniel G. König (ed.), Latin and Arabic. Entangled Histories (Heidelberg: HeiUP, 2019), Open access, DOI: https://doi.org/10.17885/heiup.448 .

Those interested in this field of research might also take a look at the homepages of the Centre for the History of Arabic Studies in Europe, hosted by the Warburg Institute in London; the Digital Averroes Research Environment, hosted by the Thomas-Institute in Cologne; the Forschungsstelle Philosophie- und Wissenschaftsgeschichte der griechisch-arabisch-lateinischen Tradition, hosted by the Department of Philosophy of Würzburg University, and the project Ptolemaeus Arabus et Latinus, hosted by the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities.

 

Transmediterranean History: Commented Anthology of Primary Sources

Transmediterranean History is a trilingual journal (German, English, Arabic) that provides access to commented excerpts of primary sources in their original language and in translation. They cover transmediterranean themes in the period between 600 and 1650. Open access, DOI: https://ojs.ub.uni-konstanz.de/transmed/index.php/tmh/index .

Daniel G. König, Theresa Jäckh, Eric Böhme (Eds.), Open access, DOI: https://ojs.ub.uni-konstanz.de/transmed/index.php/tmh/index .

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RELCOM: Interreligious Communication in and between the Latin-Christian and the Arabic-Islamic Sphere: Macro-theories and Micro-settings

Financed by the UK-German Funding Initiative in the Humanities (AHRC/DFG), the project is based on the intensive collaboration of two research units situated at the universities of Durham (Theresa Jäckh) and Konstanz (Daniel G. König) respectively, each consisting of one PI and a post-doctoral researcher. The project analyses processes of interreligious communication in and between the medieval Latin-Christian and the Arabic-Islamic sphere.

In the past thirty years, research has refined our understanding of Jewish-Christian-Muslim relations in the wider Mediterranean by analysing political, economic, social, and cultural fields of interaction, by highlighting phenomena of mutual perception, transgression, and hybridity, and—last but not least—by proposing systemic models of interreligious interaction ranging from “dhimmitude” to “convivencia” and “conveniencia”. Adding to this, scholars have formulated a large number of unconnected hypotheses to describe various settings and patterns of Jewish-Christian-Muslim communication. In view of the huge variety of interreligious communicative processes documented in the extant primary sources, these models and hypotheses have yet to be critically evaluated in terms of their complementary character, inherent contradictions, and plausibility.

Our project engages with the varieties of interreligious communication from a macro-historical and from several micro-historical perspectives. On the macro-historical level, it collects, juxtaposes, and systematizes scholarly hypotheses on interreligious communication. On the micro-historical level, selected corpora of primary sources serve to examine the validity of this theoretical framework. These include the historiographical documentation of communicative settings, in which Christians and Muslims feature as interlocutors, Christian-Muslim correspondence as well as legal sources concerning Jews who negotiated their concerns and grievances in legal venues subjected to Muslim or Christian dominance. Although these and comparable corpora do not cover all facets of interreligious communication between the medieval Latin-Christian and the Arabic-Islamic sphere, they can serve to critically examine existing models and hypotheses dealing with Jewish-Christian-Muslim communication.

Transforming Infrastructure - Cultural Perspectives