Trajectories of Islam between Europe and South Asia

In the neighbourhood of Mitte in Berlin, a small, unassuming plaque commemorates the site of a house belonging to Muhammad Asad (1900-1992). The plaque describes Asad as a journalist, diplomat, and scholar, honoring him as "Der Wegbereiter für einen Dialog zwischen den Kulturen" (the pioneer of a dialogue between cultures). Asad, who was born Leopold Weiss into a Jewish family in present-day Ukraine and converted to Islam in his mid-twenties, spent significant time in Germany, the Middle East, and Saudi Arabia, before ending up in British India, where he would stay past the partition of 1947, and eventually join Pakistan's Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Towards the end of his life, Asad moved to Spain with his wife Pola Hamida, an American of Polish Catholic descent, and dedicated himself to translating the Qurʾan into English, thereby coming full circle in his traversing of cultures, religions, and languages.

Halfway across the world, in Lahore, Pakistan, an Annemarie Schimmel Haus pays homage to the legacy of Annemarie Schimmel (1922-2003). Schimmel, who was born in Erfurt and died in Bonn, was a pioneering scholar of Islam in South Asia and professor at Harvard University, where she was only the fourth woman to be granted tenure in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. Her scholarly endeavours ranged from history to poetry, and she can be credited, almost single-handedly, with putting South Asia on the map as a productive site of intellectual inquiry about Islam and Muslims. Fluent in German, English, Urdu, Arabic, Persian, and Punjabi, among other languages, Schimmel's towering presence continues to be felt in contemporary scholarship on Islam from the US to Indonesia, from Europe to South Africa.

Our workshop, "Trajectories of Islam between Europe and South Asia," argues that figures such as Asad and Schimmel are not outliers. Rather, they are metonymic of active, ongoing, and well-entrenched dialogues between Europe and South Asia, dialogues in which Islam, conceptualized and interpreted in varying ways, has been a central presence. Our workshop excavates the routes and connections through which people, ideas, and practices of and about Islam and Muslims have traversed back and forth between South Asia and Europe from the eighteenth century to the present day. We posit that such movements are never mono-directional: instead, the data we examine evinces a continuous oscillation and sustained mutual exchange between distinct geographies, languages, and realms of experiences. Our workshop emphasizes the fluidity that marks Islamic and Muslim endeavours between South Asia and Europe, the ease with which South Asian Islam and Muslims have claimed belonging in Europe without having to leave behind South Asia, and the seamlessness with which many European ideas about Islam and Muslims have been embedded in internal Muslim discourse about, and practice of, Islam, often leading to important paradigm shifts and new directions in globalized debates about religion in the modern age.

This workshop was made possible by the generous support of Fritz Thyssen Stiftung, and with assistance from the Centre for Modern Indian Studies, Georg-August-Universität Göttingen.

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