MY PUBLISHING ACTIVITY SINCE TURNING 70 IN 2010

This is a career autobiography

2019

This book breaks away from this clash between Islam and the West, by arguing that European Islam is possible. It analyses the contribution that European Islam has made to the formation of an innovative Islamic theology that is deeply ethicist and modern, and it clarifies how this constructed European Islamic theology is able to contribute to the various debates that are related to secular-liberal democracies of Western Europe. Part One introduces four major projects that defend the idea of European Islam from different disciplines and perspectives: politics, political theology, jurisprudence, and philosophy. Part Two uses the frameworks from three major philosophers and scholars, to approach the idea of European Islam in the context of secular-liberal societies: British scholar George Hourani, Moroccan philosopher Taha Abderrahmane, and the American philosopher John Rawls. The book shows that the ongoing efforts of European Muslim thinkers to revisit the concept of citizenship and political community can be seen as a new kind of political theology, in opposition to radical forms of Islamic thinking in some Muslim-majority countries. Opening a new path for examining Islamic thought ‘in and of’ Europe, this book will appeal to students and scholars of Islamic Studies, Islam in the West and Political Theology.

Islamic civilization rose from its humble origins in 7th-century Arabia to become a world civilization, the first premodern global culture. But how was this astonishing transformation accomplished? This introductory course examines the advent of Islam and the development of the civilization that bears its name from the career of the Prophet Muhammad to the modern period. We first approach Islam in relation to the late antique Near Eastern context from which it emerged, becoming heir, with Christianity, to the twin legacies of prophetic monotheism and philosophical rationalism. We then turn to the process whereby Muhammad's apocalyptic message to the tribes of Arabia was sublimated into a high imperial project by the Umayyad, Abbasid and Fatimid caliphates-that is, Islam's transformation from religion to civilization. We then trace the emergence of Islam as a world civilization during the 10th-16th centuries. The attenuation of the caliphate and decentralizing proliferation of sultanates from the 10th century onward set the stage for a new florescence of Islamic civilization, which offered increasingly flexible and open-source models of high culture, government and spirituality. This process gained a new intensity with the Mongol conquest of Asia and their termination of the caliphate in 1258, an event creative in its destructiveness: Islam saw its greatest expansion in the post-Mongol period, with 1300-1900 being the golden age of conversion to Islam, particularly in Africa, China and South and Southeast Asia. Most notably, the breakdown of the established model of Islamic society led to the emergence of sufi sainthood as a hegemonic concept in political theory, philosophy and social practice until the 17th century. Over the course of the 15th century, all of these strands were integrated in the east into a

Collectanea Christiana Orientalia

Spurred by a recent American work offering an overview of the intellectual life and literary output of the Christians in the Land of Islam during the middle ages, we propose to revisit the question from a broader basis and a differently structured perspective.

Y. Frenkel, “The Coming of the Barbarians: Can ClimatLiang Emlyn Yang, Hans-Rudolf Bork, Xiuqi Fang, Steffen Mischke (eds.), Socio-Environmental Dynamics along the Historical Silk Road (, 2019

Socio- Environmental Dynamics along the Historical Silk Road

An engagment with Richard Bulliet's Cotton, Climate and Camels.

Intriguing dreams, improbable myths, fanciful genealogies, and suspect etymologies. These were all key elements of the historical texts composed by scholars and bureaucrats on the peripheries of Islamic empires between the tenth and fifteenth centuries. But how are historians to interpret such narratives? And what can these more literary histories tell us about the people who wrote them and the times in which they lived? In this book, Mimi Hanaoka offers an innovative, interdisciplinary method of approaching these sorts of local histories from the Persianate world. By paying attention to the purpose and intention behind a text's creation, her book highlights the preoccupation with authority to rule and legitimacy within disparate regional, provincial, ethnic, sectarian, ideological and professional communities. By reading these texts in such a way, Hanaoka transforms the literary patterns of these fantastic histories into rich sources of information about identity, rhetoric, authority, legitimacy, and centre-periphery relations.

Dear Readers: Those of you affected by the heritage of Orientalism may be embarrassed by a discussion of camels, or else inclined to a scoffing and/or bemused response to it, because it has long been suggested that associating people from the Middle East with camels is a not-so-subtle form of racism. Some others may have family or cultural roots in the region and may indeed feel annoyed or demeaned by any mention of camels. I ask all of you to set aside these prejudgments for a few minutes as you peruse the pages that follow.