The "Thyssen Lectures" are a continuation of a tradition that the Fritz Thyssen Foundation initiated in 1979, first at various institutions throughout Germany, and then at several universities in Czechia, Israel, the Russian Federation, Turkey, and most recently in Greece. The series in the United Kingdom and Ireland will be held over a period of four years. Spearheaded by Prof. Christina von Hodenberg, director of the German Historical Institute London, it will be dedicated to the overarching theme of "Science, Knowledge, and the Legacy of Empire".
LOCAL MODERNITY: AGENCY, ENTANGLEMENT, AND THE MAKING OF THE MODERN MIDDLE EAST
Islamic Studies has long formed part of Oriental Studies, which since Edward Said's devastating critique of Orientalism, has been widely perceived as colonial knowledge at its worst. Rather than deconstructing Orientalism yet again, I suggest moving from a postcolonial perspective with its heavy emphasis on colonial knowledge to a decolonial perspective, one that first, focuses on the interplay of local and "foreign" agents and their respective repertories and agendas; second, systematically considers local knowledge antedating the colonial era of which postcolonial theory tends to be oblivious; and third, thinks in the categories of encounters and entanglements rather than of hierachical binary relationships pitting the European colonizer v. the non-European colonized. The multifocal approach is particularly suited to understanding the quest for Ottoman modernity in the nineteenth century and Islamic modernity in the twentieth. A case study taken from interwar Egypt - the "Islamic" project to form Muslim man - serves to illustrate the dynamics at play.
