Thyssen Lecture: Gudrun Krämer (FU Berlin)

The imperial and colonial contexts in which modern science and scholarship came of age haunt us to this day. Be it the origin of museum collections, the Eurocentrism of history textbooks and academic curricula, or the lack of minority ethnic university staff—the shadows of an imperial past loom large upon us today.

The German Historical Institute London is proud to collaborate with the Fritz Thyssen Foundation on a new lecture series on Science, Knowledge, and the Legacy of Empire consisting of eight lectures over fours years. Join us for the fourth lecture of the series given by Gudrum Krämer, Professor Emerita at FU Berlin, on 21 October 2024 at the GHI London. She will talk about "Local Modernity: Agency, Entanglement, and the Making of the Modern Middle East".

Current critical scholarship tends to cast the colonial West as the prime actor in shaping the non-Western world, ‘producing’ types of knowledge specific to itself and alien to others, ‘inventing’ not just tradition(s) but entire religions, and imposing boundaries premised on colonial knowledge and interest. The insight gained from this scholarship is deeply important. But it also carries the risk of overrating the power of imperial world-making. In large parts of the non-Western world, the formation of modern subjectivity and statehood drew on concepts, practices, and institutions that predated the colonial era and informed what was understood as articulations of local, or rather alternative, modernity.

A look at the Middle East reveals that these processes of creation and contestation were driven by a complex interplay of political, socio-cultural, and religious factors which did not revolve exclusively around the colonial Other. The project of Islamic modernity, based on the education of the modern Muslim subject and the establishment of an Islamic state and society, as propagated by Hasan al-Banna and the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood in the 1930s and 1940s, exemplifies these processes. The project was specifically Islamic in form and outcome, yet the combination of ideas, mechanisms, and institutions understood as either part of the ‘authentic’ tradition or European in origin is characteristic of attempts to create an alternative, non-colonial modernity in general. For this reason, these endeavours invite comparison well beyond the Middle East and Islam at large.

Gudrun Krämer is Professor Emerita of Islamic Studies at Freie Universität Berlin, where she taught from 1996 to 2019 and directed the Berlin Graduate School Muslim Cultures and Societies from 2007 to 2018. In the Winter Semester of 2024-5 she will be a Visiting Professor of Islamic Studies at the University of Vienna. Having originally studied history, political science, English language and literature, and Islamic studies at the universities of Heidelberg, Bonn, and Sussex, she obtained both her PhD and her Habilitation from Hamburg University. Her research focuses on the history of the Near East and North Africa since 1800, Islam, modernity, and secularity, Islamism, and non-Muslims under Islamic rule. A former visiting scholar in Beijing, Beirut, Bologna, Cairo, Delhi, Erfurt, Jakarta, Paris, and most recently Salzburg, she is also a member of the Berlin Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and associated member of the Tunisian Academy of the Arts and Humanities and executive editor of the Encyclopaedia of Islam Three. Until recently she was a member of the German National Research Council. In 2006, she was awarded an honorary doctorate from Tashkent Islamic University, Uzbekistan, and in 2010, she received the Gerda Henkel Prize for her achievements in the historical humanities.

Host or Publisher German Historical Institute London