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SoSe 21: The Historicity of Democracy in the Arab and Muslim Worlds

Nora Lafi

Information for students

Die Lehrveranstaltung findet online statt. Dr. Lafi wird zur gegebenen Zeit Informationen zu den einzelnen Sitzungen verschicken.

Comments

Democracy, or the lack thereof in the Arab, Islamic, and Post-Ottoman worlds is currently the object of numerous scholarly, as well as political controversies. It is also the object of culturalist reifications. The aim of this seminar is to explore this crucial issue by examining the forms of political organization and deliberation that were inherent to societies of the region and to study their regimes of historicity, i.e. their constant reinterpretation during various historical phases. The intent is also to discuss their impact on various forms of modernity, including late-Ottoman, colonial and national. It is also to propose a critical examination of the heritage of local early forms of deliberation between accommodation, negation and ambiguous resurgences. These forms of early democratic collective deliberation include various councils and assemblies, deliberative institutions inside the world of guilds and confessional communities. The seminar will analyse such dimensions on the basis of archival documents and of the bibliography). This angle of interpretation will allow students to reflect on discussions about the relationship of societies of the region and democracy under an innovative perspective. Reflections will also focus on the new definitions of citizenship and nationality that emerged in the region and on their multiple ambiguities. This effort is aimed at proposing alternative narratives of the evolution of the relationship between democracy and the Arab/Islamic/Post-Ottoman worlds, avoiding both neo-traditionalist visions, Islamist visions that tend to present religion as a unique source of social regulation and post-colonial trends that insist on the ontological externality of the democracy to the region. close