Editorships

Manual: Christianity and Islam in Germany

Edited by Mathias Rohe, Mouhanad Khorchide, Havva Engin et al. (10/11/2014)

55 renowned Christian and Muslim authors – all living in Germany – enter in the “Handbuch Christentum und Islam in Deutschland” [“Handbook of Christianity and Islam in Germany”] in the dialog, ask what challenges there are, and discuss how to tackle them. The two-volume work provides a ground-breaking and practical interim report on the integration debate, opens the perception of each point of view, and gives concrete guidance on religious, political and social questions concerning living together. It will be published by Verlag Herder, Editor is the Eugen-Biser-Foundation, with a foreword by Federal President retd. Christian Wulff.

Islam and Muslims in Germany

Publication edited by Ala Al-Hamarneh and Jörn Thielmann (June 2014)

In the European discourse of post 9/11 reality, concepts such as “Multiculturalism”, “Integration” and “European Islam” are becoming more and more topical. The empirically-based contributions in this volume aim to reflect the variety of current Muslim social practices and life-worlds in Germany. The volume goes beyond the fragmented methods of minority case studies and the monolithic view of Muslims as portrayed by mass media to present fresh theoretical approaches and in-depth analyses of a rich mosaic of communities, cultures and social practices. Issues of politics, religion, society, economics, media, art, literature, law and gender are addressed. The result is a vibrant state-of-the-art publication of studies of real-life communities and individuals.

Special Issue of The Muslim World: Muslim Women and the Challenge of Authority

Publication edited by Riem Spielhaus and Juliane Hammer (July 2013) 

Muslim women, for better or for worse, as will become apparent below, have garnered particular attention as being situated at the intersection of questions and claims to religious authority in the modern period. Several of the articles presented in this special issue challenge the exclusive location of women’s claims to religious authority in and as a product of modernity and present the reader with alternative perspectives that claim women as agents of authoritative discourses in the more distant Muslim past. They analyze how Muslim women challenge religious and other authorities on the one hand and how Muslim women are, become, or claim to be authorities themselves on the other. The challenges of and the challenges to authorities further-more appear in the context of spatial — or, in the case of online-communities technical — arrangements, and literary texts as well as in organizations and movements. Most of all they appeal to different dimensions of knowledge and practice. The articles also simultaneously read women’s authority, male authority over women, and other authoritative relationalities as negotiated, debated, and as politicized in contemporary scholarship. In other words, it is no coincidence that Muslim women and their ability to exercise freedom of religious and other life choices would have become so central to Euro-American academic narratives of Muslims in past and present. Religious authority, in the genealogy of the study of Muslim women, fits a paradigm that focuses on women as understudied and marginalized by men and by their religion, but it also offers the possibility of more nuanced and self-reflective representations and interpretations.