Carl Heinrich Becker Lecture of the Fritz Thyssen Foundation 2008
The text of Aziz Al-Azmeh and the introduction by Wolf Lepenies are available here.
Carl Heinrich Becker Lecture
Wed 05 Mar 2008 | 19:00–21:00
Wed 05 Mar 2008 | 19:00–21:00
Rome, New Rome and Baghdad: Pathways of Late Antiquity
Aziz Al-Azmeh (Central European University in Budapest)
Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, Wallotstr. 19, 14193 Berlin
Aziz Al-Azmeh is a University Professor at the School of History and Interdisciplinary Historical Studies at the Central European University in Budapest.
He earned his doctorate at Oxford University and taught at the American University in Beirut and the Universities of Exeter, Columbia, Yale, and California. He is the author of numerous books and essays on Arab and Muslim historiography and intellectual history, including Arabs and Barbarians: Medieval Arabic Ethnology and Ethnography (1991 in Arabic), Secularism (1992 in Arabic), Ibn Khaldun (1982, 2004), Arabic Thought and Islamic Societies (1986), Muslim Kingship: Power and the Sacred in Muslim, Christian and Pagan Polities (1996), Postmodern Obscurantism and the Muslim Question (2004 in French), and The Times of History: Universal Topics in Islamic Historiography (2007).
His influential book Islams and Modernities (1993) was one of the intellectual starting points for the Berlin “Working Group Modernity and Islam”, of which Aziz Al-Azmeh was one of the founding members. He was a Fellow of the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin in 1994/95 and from 1996 to 1998.
Reports of the German press
Tim B. Müller: "Religiöser Sprengstoff", in: Süddeutsche Zeitung, 13.03.2008.
Uwe Walter: "Mohammeds Nachfolger sprachen Latein", in: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 10.03.2008.