Auf Einladung der American University of Cairo (AUC) (siehe hier das Berufungsschreiben vom 24.02.2016) und mit Drittmitteln der Dodge Foundation USA nahm Professor Tibi den Ruf für den Monat März 2016 an, als Kurzzeit-C.B. Dodge distinguished professor zu wirken. Prof. Tibi hielt in Kairo vier große Vorlesungen in arabischer und englischer Sprache über:
- Islamic Migrant Communities in Europe
- Shari’a and Fiqh
- Islam and Modernity
- The Shari’a State and the Shari’atization of Islam
Neben diesen vier Vorlesungen führte Prof. Tibi Interviews und forschte über die gegenwärtige Krisensituation im Nahen Osten. Auch nahm Prof. Tibi an Besprechungen mit Fakultätsmitgliedern der School of Humanities and Social Sciences teil.
Abstracts zu den zwei zentralen Vorlesungen in englischer und arabischer Sprache an der AUC (März 2016)
Islam’s Exposure to Modernity (to be held in Arabic)
One of the great challenges to which the Islamic umma-communitiy has been exposed to in the past few centuries has been cultural and techno-scientific modernity. There exists a great amount of publications on this topic that convey different messages: accommodative , defensive-cultural, modern as well as postmodern. These responses are to be reviewed in passing while focusing on the approach of M. al-Jabri that traces the roots of rational thought to the intellectual tradition of the turath/ cultural heritage of Islamic falsafa-approach of Averroes. This Islamic tradition is compatible with modernity. “The Averroist spirit is adaptable to our era” as al-Jabri states. I follow al-Jabri’s thought of “universality and historicity of knowledge” and share his view that a promising future “can only be Averroist”. In the context of this adoption I add my research published in my book “Islam’s Predicament with modernity” (2009) to dismiss two approaches: 1) the Islamic illusion of semi-modernity that advocates the adoption of modern technology and science while rejecting cultural modernity and 2) Western view of multiple modernities based in cultural relativism.
The Shari’a-State and the Islamist Shari’atization of Islam
The Qur’an includes only one phrase on shari’a namely al-Jathiyah 45/18 with the meaning of morality. There is also a tradition of historical shari’a subdivided in three realms Ibadat, Mu’amalat, Hudud. In these both souces shari’a does not relate to politics. Hovewer Hassan al-Banna and his Muslim-brothers induce in the context of a politicization of the shari’a, a new meaning: As Fazlur Rahman states, shari’a is ethics not law in the Qur’an. What has been taking place is a “shar’iatization of Islam to support in Islamist terms the concept of a shari’a-sate”. I have analyzed this process in my book of 2013 “The shari’a state”. I argue that this concept is an Islamist addition to Islam that lacks firm foundations and is therefore to be dismissed in Islamic terms. Current Islamist movements that engage in this thinking of a shari’atization of Islam do harm to Islam and are subject to criticism.