News

[simonwolfgangfuchs]

New Conversation on “In a Pure Muslim Land”

I recently had the pleasure to speak with Asad Dandia (Columbia University) about my book for the New Books in Middle Eastern Studies podcast.

You can listen to it here:

https://newbooksnetwork.com/simon-wolfgang-fuchs-in-a-pure-muslim-land-shiism-between-pakistan-and-the-middle-east-unc-press-2019/

(26 November 2019)

[simonwolfgangfuchs]

Author-Meets-Critics Session on “In a Pure Muslim Land”

I am very grateful to the South Asian Muslim Studies Association (SAMSA) for having included an author-meets-critics session in their upcoming yearly symposium held in conjunction with the Annual Conference on South Asian Studies in Madison, WI, USA (https://southasiaconference.wisc.edu/).

This year’s symposium, entitled “South Asian Islam and the Question of ‘Minorities’: Religion, Pluralism, Violence, and Peace”, will take place on Thursday, October 17.

The session on In a Pure Muslim Land: Shiʿism between Pakistan and the Middle East (https://www.uncpress.org/book/9781469649795/in-a-pure-muslim-land/) is scheduled from 3.45pm until 5.15pm and will be moderated by SherAli Tareen (Franklin and Marshall College). I will be discussing the book with Megan Eaton Robb (University of Pennsylvania) and Syed Rizwan Zamir (Davidson College). 

In case you would like to participate and need some excerpts of the book, please get in touch with [email protected].

[simonwolfgangfuchs]

I will be speaking in Erfurt on my new book “In a Pure Muslim Land”. Please join us in case you are around.

https://www.uncpress.org/book/9781469649795/in-a-pure-muslim-land/

[simonwolfgangfuchs]

Today is the day: "In a Pure Muslim Land. Shiʿism between Pakistan and the Middle East" is out with UNC Press. For details and endorsements, see here: https://www.uncpress.org/…/978146964…/in-a-pure-muslim-land/ (22 April 2019)

[simonwolfgangfuchs]

Fellowship News

Spring is in full, blooming swing in Freiburg. Quite an appropriate time then to share two exciting announcements:

1) I have been awarded a fellowship at the Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies (FRIAS) for the academic year 2019-2020. This means that I have no teaching obligations but can focus full-time on my next book-project -- a global history of the Iranian Revolution, under contract with Princeton University Press.

2) I have also been elected a junior fellow of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities and Germany's national academy, the Academy of Sciences Leopoldina. Being a member of the "Junge Akademie" over the next five years means lots of stimulating, interdisciplinary exchange with brilliant colleagues who all care about how to make our research findings relevant to public discourse.

(11 April 2019)

[simonwolfgangfuchs]

Article on my current research

The public relations office of the University of Freiburg was so kind to feature my current research on the global implications of the Iranian Revolution of 1979:

http://www.pr.uni-freiburg.de/pm-en/online-magazine/research-and-discover/a-model-for-the-arab-world?set_language=en

(12 December 2018)

[simonwolfgangfuchs]

Forthcoming Book “In a Pure Muslim Land: Shi’ism between Pakistan and the Middle East” Check out the UNC Press website: https://www.uncpress.org/book/9781469649795/in-a-pure-muslim-land/?fbclid=IwAR3WV1rm1a2ExdIPfQZxx96JJVAJUHi2cZ5m4sbN_43888dUjesPhSVjqXg

[simonwolfgangfuchs]

Review of Behnam T. Said’s latest book on al-Qaeda

On 10 September 2018, the Süddeutsche Zeitung published my review of Behnam T. Said. Geschichte Al-Qaidas. Bin Laden, der 11. September und die tausend Fronten des Terrors heute. C.H. Beck, München 2018.

You can read it here: https://www.sueddeutsche.de/politik/geschichte-al-qaidas-buchrezension-1.4121668

(20 September 2018)

[simonwolfgangfuchs]

Research Award by the Annemarie-Schimmel-Foundation

In September 2017, I received the Resarch Award of the Annemarie-Schimmel-Foundation. The awardees are selected by Islamic Studies committee of the German Oriental Society (Deutsche Morgenländische Gesellschaft). The award was presented to me and my co-winner Boris Liebrenz during the Deutsche Orientalistentag in Jena, Germany.

Photos and a short article are now online (in German):

http://www.dmg-web.de/iswi/preis.html

(14 March 2018)

[simonwolfgangfuchs]

New Book Chapter: The Long Shadow of the State: The Iranian Revolution, Saudi Influence, and the Shifting Arguments of Anti-Shi‘i Sectarianism in Pakistan.

This chapter has just been published in Laurence Louër & Christophe Jaffrelot (Eds.), Pan-Islamic Connections: Transnational Networks between South Asia and the Gulf . London: Hurst, 217-232 and 290-300.

You can find out more about the volume here:

http://www.hurstpublishers.com/book/pan-islamic-connections/

(13 December 2017)

[simonwolfgangfuchs]

Major Funding Award by the Gerda-Henkel-Foundation

The Special Programme of the Gerda-Henkel-Stiftung “Islam, the Modern Nation State and Transnational Movements” will fund my new research project on the global intellectual history of the Iranian Revolution.

You can release their press release from 16 November 2017 here (in German)

https://www.gerda-henkel-stiftung.de/gewalt-in-der-geschichte-kulturerhalt-in-nepal-und-der-iran-vor-und-nach-der-revolution?page_id=97062

[simonwolfgangfuchs]

French-German Workshop on Contemporary Shi’ism

I am excited to be part of this day-long workshop on modern Shi’ism in Paris on Wednesday, November 8, 2017:

https://www.ephe.fr/actualites/journee-d-etudes-franco-allemandes-sur-le-chiisme-contemporain

[simonwolfgangfuchs]

New Position at the Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg

As of 1 October 2017, I have started a new position as a lecturer in Islamic and Middle East Studies at the University of Freiburg in Germany.

https://www.orient.uni-freiburg.de/islamwissenschaft/mitarbeiter/fuchs

[simonwolfgangfuchs]

Three New Reviews Published

Recently, three books reviews by me have been published:

1) Review of Elvire Corboz, Guardians of Shi'ism. Sacred Authority and Transnational Family Networks (Edinburgh University Press, 2015), Review of Middle East Studies (2017)

https://doi.org/10.1017/rms.2017.61

2) Review of Michael Farquhar, Circuits of Faith: Migration, Education, and the Wahhabi Mission (Stanford University Press, 2016), in BSOAS 80,2 (2017): 382-384

https://doi.org/10.1017/S0041977X17000593

3) Review of Seema Alavi, Muslim Cosmopolitanism in the Age of Empire, in Die Welt des Islams 57 (2017): 223-226

https://doi.org/10.1163/15700607-00572p04

(03 October 2017)

[simonwolfgangfuchs]

Dethrone Islamic Law

My take on Shahab Ahmed’s “What is Islam” (in German):

https://zenith.me/de/channel/magazine/culture/sto%C3%9Ft-das-islamische-recht-vom-thron

(17 March 2017)

[simonwolfgangfuchs]

CFP: Certainty and Ambiguity in Modern Islam

Panel Proposal for the 33rd Deutscher Orientalistentag “Asia, Africa and Europe,” to be held from 18 – 22 September 2017 in Jena, Germany (http://www.dot2017.de/en/)

The themes of certainty and ambiguity provide compelling portals into the internal logics of modern Muslim thought and practice. As works by Thomas Bauer, Shahab Ahmed, and others have shown, since the mid-19th century mainstream strands of Islam have privileged epistemological absolutism over contradiction and ambiguity. While pre-modern Muslim jurists and theologians also sought to ground their legal and doctrinal positions in certain knowledge, they productively engaged with speculative knowledge and even conjectural methods in thinking about norms and beliefs. The dominant trend in modern Islam, however, systematically demotes sources of speculative knowledge, such as local customs, as expressions of inauthentic deviations. Reformist discourses also marginalize the social relevance of mystical experience and the personal purchase of esoteric conceptions of the transcendent. Instead, what appears to be prized most is certainty (yaqīn). A conceptual sibling of this new focus on “plain reading” and univocality is the predominant importance many modern Muslims, especially Salafis, attribute to the proof-text in order to settle specific arguments. Our panel takes these arguments seriously and seeks to unearth the mechanisms behind the production, dissemination, regulation, and displacement of certainty in modern Islam in the 19th and 20th centuries. To what extent can we attribute the increasing skepticism regarding manifestations of ambiguity to the rise of modern science or the decisive socio-political impact of colonialism, imperialism, and globalization? What accounts for the resilience of theology, with its less accommodating stance on internal Islamic diversity, in the 20th century? What happens to certainty as it moves from procedural hermeneutics in kalām and fiqh to self-taught, informal ways of interpretation in modern times? What is the link between certainty and fundamentalism? We welcome interdisciplinary perspectives on Muslim moral and legal thought, theology, philosophy, history, literature, poetry, and Sufism that focus on both specific localities and actors such as traditionalist scholars, state bureaucracies, and religious autodidacts or explore broader trends. In particular, we invite papers that show how, despite all evidence amassed to the contrary, ambiguity as a positive value is kept alive, kindled, and justified in modern and contemporary Islam.

Please send paper titles, abstracts of 200 words, and a CV until March 15 to Simon Wolfgang Fuchs ([email protected]) and Ali Altaf Mian ([email protected]).

[simonwolfgangfuchs]

Afghanistan’s Islam: From the Conversion to the Taliban

Afghanistan's Islam: From Conversion to the Taliban, published by the University of California Press and edited by Nile Green has just been published. 

An open access digital edition of the book is available for free at:

http://www.luminosoa.org/site/books/detail/23/afghanistans-islam/​

Regular print copies of the book are also available for purchase.

The book provides the first overview of the history and development of Islam in Afghanistan. Written by leading international experts, chapters cover every era from the conversion of Afghanistan through the medieval period to the present day. Based on primary sources in Arabic, Persian, Pashto, Uzbek, and Urdu, its depth of coverage is unrivalled in providing a developmental picture of Afghanistan's Islam, including such issues as the rise of Sufism, women's religiosity, state religious policies, and transnational Islamism. Looking beyond the unifying rhetoric of theology, the book reveals the disparate and contested forms of Afghanistan's Islam.

In case you'd like to read more about the Jihad period of the 1980s, how Afghans conceptualized the international calling and the global significance of their military and political efforts, how the employed Shi'i imaginery in doing so, and what this all means for political Islamic thought, you might be interested in my "Glossy Global Leadership: Unpacking the Multilingual Religious Thought of the Jihad," pp. 189-206 and pp. 299-307. 

(04 January 2017)