1In the work of Edward Said, Orientalism describes an intellectual tradition of defining and constructing the Orient, of stressing the eternal difference between “East and West” and of preparing the way for domination and hegemony over states and societies of the Middle East and other parts of Africa and Asia. It must be stated that, from the era of the German Empire and beyond, both the German public and literary and scholarly circles widely shared those sentiments of cultural distance and attraction, of exotic fascination with and, at the same time, unquestioned superiority towards Islam and the Muslim world.

2At the same time, both in Germany and in many other European countries, there emerged a tradition of academic research on Muslim societies, their history and culture which – although developing alongside imperial expansion and certainly not free of political agenda – established a framework of research methods and interpretation that set it apart from the immediate play of political and economic forces, indeed sometimes put it in opposition to them. Aims and ideas rooted in Enlightenment and Romanticism, along with a critical attitude towards one’s own culture and society, often come into play here. This is an aspect of Orientalism that was frequently stressed by Edward Said’s critics, with particular respect to German scholarship, which he had largely omitted from his controversial book. The individual biographies of Islamic and Oriental scholars between the two World Wars give a very chequered picture of personalities from diverse political camps. A good number of them were finally forced into exile, if not killed under Nazi rule, while others belonged to different strands of German conservatism or were themselves close to the Nazi regime.

3In its first phase, post-war reconstruction of the academic field in Islamic and Oriental studies fell back upon the strong heritage of German historicism and philological scholarship. It was only from the late 1960s onward that the weight of Middle Eastern political conflicts again made itself felt in this field, a development which could be noticed both in Western and Eastern Germany, under widely differing conditions. The opening of academic Oriental studies and the development of interdisciplinary programs and institutions for area studies in this field became significant in the 1970s and has continued to be ever since. Disciplines like geography, political science, law and economics have played an increasing role in this field, challenging the rather closed domain of research, which had until then been left largely to regional specialists and to generalists of Islamic and Oriental studies.

4The growth of public interest in the contemporary Middle East could easily have led to a marginalisation of “detached” philological and cultural scholarship. The Islamic revolution in Iran and the general resurgence of Islamic political movements all over the Muslim world changed this trend, as it created a demand for specialists in the fields of Islamic religious and cultural traditions and for specific expertise on Muslim societies in different parts of the world. No wonder, then, that cooperation among the different disciplines engaged in research on the Middle East and the Muslim world has increased rather than decreased over the last two decades, a development which has once more gained momentum since 11th September 2001. It has led to the establishment and growth of a new professional society, the German Middle East Studies Association for Contemporary Research and Documentation (Deutsche Arbeitsgemeinschaft Vorderer Orient, DAVO). Founded in 1993, DAVO is roughly comparable to those French, British and American counterparts with which it has entered into close cooperation (AFEMAM, BRISMES, MESA).1 In remarkable contrast to the strong polarization prevailing in the US between the American Oriental Society and the MESA (with Edward Said sometimes seen as the main symbol of this antagonism), tensions between DAVO and the age-old German Oriental Society (DMG), though quite strong in the beginning, did never reach a breaking point. In the course of time, cooperation and cross-membership became normal and quite frequent, with panels on cultural and classical “Islamic” topics figuring regularly at the DAVO conference programs.

5The World Congress for Middle Eastern Studies (WOCMES) convened in Mainz on September 8-13, 2002, jointly held by the Middle East Studies associations of 18 European countries. In a ceremony that took place on the anniversary of the attack on the Twin Towers, it honoured Edward Said with the WOCMES Award for his contribution to Middle Eastern Studies. In his speech on this occasion, Said paid an extraordinary tribute to the interpretive tradition of German philological scholarship, which, as he made clear, had strongly influenced his own work and which he regarded as an important source of both understanding and criticism in a globalizing world.2 At this moment, one is left with the impression that waves of the famous “cultural turn” – even its philological trickles – have fully swept the vast field of contemporary Middle East studies…

6In his densely argued overview of the state of the art in Islamic Studies in Germany in the 1980s, Baber Johansen posited the well-founded expectation that economics, political science, and sociology would soon become that country’s new scholarly authorities on the Near East.3 Thus far his prognosis would seem to have come true only in part. It is, rather, a large bundle of disciplines and institutions (academic and non-academic) that together continue to hold a rather diffuse authority within the field. Oriental and Islamic studies have certainly continued to provide some of the strong sticks in that bundle. This is apparent from some of the public controversies and media polemics into which some prominent colleagues became involved during the 1990s.

7The first such clash occurred during the first Gulf War in 1991, when a specialist in Islamic History from Tübingen published a long newspaper article in which he accused some senior journalists of misrepresenting and distorting Islam and Muslim society by ignoring the social and political reasons for the Middle East conflict.4 This was followed by a very heated TV discussion during which the academic’s opponents accused him of naïveté and lack of political realism. This affair led to strong protests among the younger generation of students and graduates of the oriental disciplines. After some time it was revealed that one of the journalists who had expressed his contempt for Orientalist scholars had himself plagiarized a translation of the biography of the Prophet, made by another scholar of Islamic Studies in Hamburg. For this the translator successfully took him to court.5 Both within the disciplines and in the public this affair led to a change of attitude towards the representation of Islam and Muslim society in the media.

8In the course of the 1990s, the demand for publications about Islam and the Middle East increased greatly in Germany, and several Orientalists had considerable success in publishing for a more general readership. One of the major publishing houses even established a special series for such books. Germany thus attained a situation that had long been common in France and Britain. This could be seen in the crisis following September 11 and before and during the Gulf War in 2003, when the media regularly asked Orientalists for interviews or other contributions.

9Another major public controversy – which revealed how much Islamic scholarship had become a matter of public interest – arose around the German Publishers’ Association decision to award the Peace Award to Annemarie Schimmel in 1995. Her much-disputed interview, in which she criticized Salman Rushdie for having hurt the feelings of many believing Muslims, met with strong reactions among all those who had supported Rushdie and the writer’s freedom of expression against the Iranian regime. One colleague went so far as to publicly accuse Schimmel of defending Khumayni’s fatwa and of supporting Islamic fundamentalism. This was strongly denied by herself and by her supporters, but the effect of the accusation was to see her gradually change her position from an explicitly apolitical one to a clearly expressed stand against the persecution of intellectuals.

10In the course of a heated exchange of articles in the leading German newspapers, which involved several leading German intellectuals, journalists and politicians, the basic point of contention centred around whether the appropriate position to take vis-à-vis Iranian and other forms of Islamic fundamentalism was dialogue or protest. Notwithstanding the misunderstanding and lack of political insight, it can at least be said that in the end the task of Islamic scholarship in creating a ground for mutual understanding and critical exchange with the Muslim world had achieved public recognition.6 Still, Orientalists – who plead for a more nuanced understanding of the plights and positions of Muslims – remain vulnerable to accusations of political romanticism, even blindness, with respect to political Islam and militant Islamic movements. This charge is raised quite frequently in public debate whenever Islamic issues heat up in political and communal life.

11Another result of the clash between Islamic and Oriental studies and the media was the establishment of a new Journal of Information on the Near and Middle East, called INAMO.7 Founded by a group of junior regional specialists and journalists in 1995, INAMO’s declared aim is to provide more adequate coverage of the current political, socioeconomic and cultural developments and crises in the Middle East and to serve as a bridge between journalism and academic specialists. This project was at first funded by foundations close to the Green Party, later by the Development Service of the German Protestant Churches. INAMO combines the presentation and analysis of current political developments with a wide range of cultural and social issues (regular contributions on modern Arabic literature, for instance), thereby highlighting the success of this special mix of political and cultural interests and approaches that has come to the fore in Middle Eastern Studies during the 1990s.

12Only a selective, and quite personal, overview of the present state of research and institutions in German Oriental and Islamic studies can be presented here.8 This discussion shall focus on some of the major lines of academic discourse that have taken shape in research projects and more permanent institutions.

13As in other academic disciplines, research projects in Oriental and Islamic studies are funded by a number of general research funds, the most important being the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (German Research Fund, DFG)9 and the Volkswagenstiftung.10 These have regularly funded projects, programs and conferences related to this field. Within the organisational framework of the DFG, Semitic, new Iranian, Turkish and Islamic Studies are grouped together within the Subject Area of Ancient and Oriental Cultures (Oriental Studies). Under this category a wide range of historical, philological, linguistic, cultural and political projects have received funding over the last years, with a certain bias towards linguistic, philological topics within the mainstream of the involved disciplines. This is different for the Collaborative Research Centres (Sonderforschungsbereiche, SFBs), Research Training Groups (Graduiertenkolleg) and Research Units (Forschergruppen) where participation depends on the interdisciplinary research focus of the whole program.

14There are at present ten such programs – among a wide range of others – running with Orientalist participation. About half of them concern themselves with earlier historical periods. The other half have a clear regional focus including the Middle East or other Muslim regions and communities. Cooperation amongst historians and anthropologists would appear to be most strongly represented here. Within the research program of the Volkswagen Foundation (Volkswagen-Stiftung), Islamic  Studies projects are also mainly represented within programs with a clear regional focus, as for example in the current program related to Central Asia and the Caucasus, and in their program for Junior Research Groups, as mentioned below.

15One of the major changes in Islamic and Oriental Studies in general has been the widening of the regional perspectives since the late eighties. Research on Islam in regional context, especially in the last two centuries, has greatly expanded, with projects and area studies programs ranging from Africa to Central Asia, South and Southeast Asia and China. This kind of regional research – which was established at different universities and which largely profited from the new political situation in the successor states of the former Soviet Union – has greatly increased the interdisciplinary outlook of many of the younger generation of Islamic Studies scholars. It has also led to the development of broader comparative perspectives, which were in turn applied to some of the core areas of the Middle East, like the Arabian Peninsula and North Africa. It has greatly enriched our understanding of Sufism, Islamic reform movements and new states of the 18th and 19th centuries, and of the trans-regional networks of religious and commercial relations that have come to link the different parts of the Muslim world since that period.

16This kind of research has found an institutional base in the new Centre for Modern Oriental Studies (ZMO).11 Up and running in Berlin since 1996, the ZMO is one of the Humanities Research Centres funded by the DFG. It is dedicated to historical, social and cultural research on the Middle East, South Asia and Africa. As a centre of interdisciplinary research involving mainly historians, anthropologists and scholars of Islamic studies it focuses for the most part on Muslim societies and their interaction with the non-Muslim world.

17The trend towards approaches focussing on trans-regional relations, networks and “entanglements” within and beyond the Islamic realm can also be seen at work in German Oriental research in the areas of culture, literature, religion, and even economic history. Perhaps the most telling example of this is the Working Group “Modernity and Islam”, which was also established in Berlin in 1996 and which organises teaching and research programs on the basis of five-year cycles.12 Its declared aim is to over-come the gap that all too often exists between the major academic disciplines and the different traditions of Area Studies in Germany. The focus of the first cycle was the interaction of Muslim societies with those processes of modernization that also shaped European society since the early modern period. This approach now includes one project on Middle Eastern Literatures and their cultural mobility (closely related to the literary theory of New Historicism), another on the development of comparative Islamic and Jewish Hermeneutics, and a larger project on Merchant cities in the Ottoman Empire as focal points of socio-cultural and trans-cultural development.

18A similar focus on relations, though with a different methodological approach, can be seen in the Research Group on Islamic scholarly networks since the 18th century, funded by the Volkswagen Foundation and operating in Bochum since 1997. Perhaps it can be said that all these programs have responded in one way or other to the experience of globalization, which was largely discussed during the 1990s. They can all be seen as trying to overcome both cultural essentialism and the limitations of the nationalist paradigm prevailing in many parts of the Muslim world up until now. This would seem to suggest there are prospects for a new social and cultural history of Muslim societies.

19A strong tradition of research on urbanism in different parts of the Muslim world has linked Islamic Studies and Geography since the 1970s. This has been continuing not only in the mentioned research project of the Working Group Modernity and Islam, but in such other projects as in the large Aleppo Project and in others in which the German Orient-Institut in Beirut has been involved. Here, too, urban culture seems to become a much broader focus of socio-cultural encounter and overlap than was the case in the earlier stage of urbanist research.

20All these lines of academic discourse have created a growing general interest in Muslim society and culture in the Early Modern period. This interest found its expression in some major internal debates within Islamic studies, on the use of historical categories of European historiography for the Middle East and other parts of the Muslim world. The notion of “Enlightenment” was one long-debated point of contention,13 as were some others that were put forward with more success. The general task of developing an adequate comparative terminology will remain with us for quite some time. A more general objection to this whole comparative and cross-cultural approach comes from those scholars who insist on the historical uniqueness and alterity of Islamic culture and warn against loosing sight of this uniqueness by embracing the framework of sociological theory or by forcing European labels on Islamic history.14 The rift between those who pursue a comparative and interdisciplinary approach and those who insist on uniqueness and alterity of Islam and the Orient still remains within the field of Islamic Studies in Germany. Although many new perspectives have been opened in the meantime, the major task of bridging the conceptual gap between our understanding of the medieval and the modern Muslim world also appears largely unfinished.

21Among the highly important academic works pursued during the 1990s with respect to Koran, Hadith and Islamic Law, I shall only touch upon those related to the Koran. It may be observed that it is mainly the growing Muslim presence in Europe and in Germany that has led to an increased public and academic interest in this field. Koranic research has, of course, quite a strong and well-established tradition in Islamic Studies in Germany, especially in the field of philological and literary analysis and interpretation. This has been given a further push by a highly seminal work on the aesthetics of the Koran. This dimension has often been lost in academic scholarship and it is, of course, of obvious significance for the integration of Muslims into the cultural life of non-Muslim societies. Other work on the Koran has focussed on the history of its reception in Christian Europe and its most famous literary translation into German, that of Friederich Rückert.15 The translation of the Koran into German has been a key activity since the 1980s – among Muslims as well as non-Muslims – with several new translations and a systematic commentary16 appearing in recent years.

22Another critical, and quite controversial, book on the Koran is that of C. Luxenberg.17 This is the pseudonym of an author who presents a reinterpretation of many of the difficult passages of the Book on the basis of Syriac and claims that the whole Koranic text was strongly influenced in its early stages by an Aramaic-speaking religious community. This thesis met with an enthusiastic reception among all those long awaiting a secular philological criticism of the Koran. Others were more careful and rather sceptical in their judgement. Public interest for the book, though, has been increasing. Several interviews with the author appeared in German newspapers, and an English translation will soon appear. A first symposium on the book and on the theses of its author was held in Berlin in February 2004.18 The book has since begun to draw Aramaic and early Arabic specialists into public discussion, scholars who have remained for the most part fairly detached from public life.

23Another new challenge for Islamic Studies in Germany is the growth of Muslim communities in Germany itself, with a large number of Muslim students, often from quite modest family backgrounds, now joining Oriental departments as students. Research on Islam in Europe and Germany has thus been growing over the last ten years. A new aspect of this is the development of Islamic primary and secondary education, introduced by some governments of the German Federal States and including some programs of academic teacher training in this field. This project has already been undertaken in several parts of Germany, especially in the Federal State of Nordrhein-Westfalen. Islamic Theology is about to be established – albeit under a different label – as an academic subject. Muslim teacher-training has also been developing along with the school experiments in this field, with departments of Oriental and Islamic Studies becoming more and more involved in advisory and teacher-training activities. This creates new tasks and challenges; it will presumably also lead to changes in the academic discourse on Islam. A critical analysis and discussion of Middle Eastern patterns of religious and general education, pursued among Muslims (including Muslim converts) as well as non-Muslims, has already begun and will certainly become more important for educational policies in Germany.

24Closely related to this discussion are all those questions and disputes concerning the practice of Shari‘a norms in the ethical and legal context of non-Muslim countries. Research on Islamic Law in recent years has come to draw a distinction between the systemic and the symbolic functions of the Shari‘a in Muslim states and societies. Due to the lack of a recognized Islamic legal and institutional framework in most parts of Europe and the ethical rather than legal expression of religion, which largely prevails in European societies, the ethical and symbolic aspects of the Shari‘a have gained in importance among their Muslim minorities.

25The development of Europe’s Muslim communities will likely have increasing significance in Middle Eastern countries, as can already be seen in the relations between Germany and Turkey, especially with respect to the Alevites and Sunni Muslim religious associations.

26This leads me to my last point, which is the growing interaction and interdependence between German and Middle Eastern societies. At a scale unprecedented in German history this interaction has now reached the grass-roots level of individuals and families. These closer relations have their consequences with respect to Turkey, but also to several Arab states and communities. Over the last decades, new forms of transnational communities have emerged, which have created relatively stable patterns of life and business between two or more countries. This is not a characteristic peculiar to militant movements, but rather a fact of everyday life for large groups of people from the Middle East living in Europe and elsewhere.

27There are now several research institutes in Germany, with some quite well-established journals, hosting scholars in Political Science and Islamic Studies who specialize in analysis and documentation of political and economic developments in the Middle East. But the research on Middle Eastern diasporas and networks in Europe and Germany has been developing along different lines. In a way it is still very much in its beginnings. Perhaps the interest in mutual relations and “entanglements” below the state level – described here as typical in German Islamic and Oriental studies at present – also has something to do with this new socio-cultural situation in Germany itself.

28It remains to be seen whether and how the diverse and flourishing landscape of Islamic and Oriental studies in Germany, highlighted here with some of its current trends and challenges, will survive the onslaught of heavy financial cuts felt in German academic and extra-academic institutions over the last years. I hope I have been able to show that, contrary to earlier expectations, these studies have held their own in a remarkable cooperation with other disciplines and institutions. With the growing interest in cultural issues, they have been able to maintain their position within the field, a development that has also had its impact on the coverage of Islam and the Middle East in the German media.