2016 : Reviving previous times and expanding horizons: Islam and Modernity in global historical perspective (Istanbul, Turquie)

Appel pour la session d’études doctorales de l'Institut d’études de l’Islam et des Sociétés du Monde Musulman (IISMM/EHESS, Paris)  — Limite de candidature : 10 janvier 2016

Istanbul, 14-18 March 2016

En partenariat avec le Netherlands Interuniversity School for Islamic Studies (NISIS),

• Koç University's Research Center for Anatolian Civilization (RCAC),
• l’Institut français d’études anatoliennes d’Istanbul (IFEA)
• Netherlands Institute in Turkey (NIT)
• Center for Near and Middle Eastern Studies (CNMS), Marburg University
• Orient-Institut Istanbul (Max Weber Foundation)

Responsables scientifiques :

Mercedes Volait

• Directeur de recherche au CNRS
• Directeur d’InVisu, INHA, Paris
• Institut d’études de l’Islam et des Sociétés du Monde musulman
• Mercedes.volait@inha.fr

Petra de Bruijn

• Lecturer in Turkish studies,
• Middle Eastern Studies Leiden University
• InterUniversity School for Islamic Studies
• Director ad interim Netherlands Interuniversity School for Islamic Studies
• nisis@hum.leidenuniv.nl

Levent Yilmaz

• Professeur, Department of History
• Directeur d’AKMED (Suna & İnan Kıraç Research Institute on Mediterranean Civilizations)
• Koç University
• lyilmaz@ku.edu.tr

Dates

arrivée le 13 mars 2016, départ le 18  mars 2016

Lieu

Istanbul , Turquie

Thème

Islam et modernité dans la perspective de l’histoire globale

Disciplines

Histoire – Histoire de l’art – Archéologie – Anthropologie – Sociologie –Philosophie – Islamologie

Déroulement de la session

Des exposés magistraux seront prolongés par des séances de discussion et des ateliers de travail autour des recherches doctorales des étudiants qui participent à la session. Les débats et les interventions se dérouleront en anglais. La participation exige une bonne compréhension de l’anglais, ainsi qu’une véritable capacité à s’exprimer dans cette langue.

Participants

Une douzaine d’étudiants inscrits dans les formations doctorales en France seront sélectionnés par l’IISMM.

Procédure de sélection des doctorants

Sélection par un jury sur la base d’une lettre de motivation adressée par les candidats (1 à 2 pages maximum), d’un CV, d’un résumé de la thèse (2 pages maximum) et d'une lettre de recommandation du  directeur de thèse. Les candidats retenus s’engagent à assister à la totalité de la session. Leurs frais de mission étant pris en charge, ils s’engagent également à respecter les dates de départ et de retour qu’implique la session.

Date limite de réception des candidatures

10 janvier 2016  par poste (IISMM, 96 bd Raspail, 75006 Paris) ou par mail (direction.iismm@ehess.fr)

Argumentaire

Reviving previous times and expanding horizons: Islam and Modernity in global historical perspective

Whether modernity is equated with Renaissance, Reformation, Enlightenment, or Industrial Revolution in the West,or withIslamic reformism, Tanzimat, or Nahda in the East, it can be safely assumed - considering the vast, often polemical, literature the notion has nurtured - that a basic dimension lays in new engagements with time and space.

Modern representations of time have been characterized both by a break with the immediate past, and a curiosity about earlier ages. The surge of interest in classical times is a well-known feature of European Renaissance that gave birth to myriad new intellectual activities, from collecting manuscripts and antiquities to circulating widely printed texts and engravings; new cleric figures, legitimized by their erudition, emerged in the process and paved somehow the way to the formation of the modern state. Shifting representations of ancient times in the Muslim world have generated less scholarship but are no less revealing. The Sublime Porte’s awakening to the political value of antiquities since the mid-eighteenth century is a good example of increased and novel uses of the material past.The modern reception of classical texts such as Ibn Khaldun’s Muqaddimah offers another perspective. The new forms of historical writing that resulted in turn gave birth to a new class of literati that transformed in the long run established social stratifications and professional identities.

Contested memories of things past may represent another crucial dimension of modernity, and this is nowhere more visible than in the enduring grief caused by the recurrent eruptions of violence that have characterized our modern times and the fragmented narratives they have legated. Outbursts followed in some instances dynamics of religious redefinition, that eventually fueled sectarianism and ascribed ethnicity to persuasion – a process that can be viewed indeed as inherent to modernity, whenever and wherever it takes place.

The incorporation of the world into the systems of knowledge is an equally salient feature of modernity that took varied forms and meanings depending from where it is viewed. Europe turned to distant civilizations to debate domestic issues as early as the seventeenth-century, at a time when an already exhausted Ottoman imperial system was being conscious of the limits of its model and forced to come to terms with European military and economic supremacy. By the nineteenth century, emulating European governance and culture had become standard currency throughout the Eastern Mediterranean, producing along the way many an idiosyncrasy.

Pleas have been made to think the integration of nations into the international state system in global terms, rather than in a Eurocentric way. French culture did dominate the social life and cosmopolitanism of many port cities around the Mediterranean in the imperial age, but Western Europe was soon to cease being the only location of authority at world scale. Japan emerged after its 1905 military victory over Russia as a privileged counterpoint to modernization without the imperialism and race ideology associated to the West. The interest in non-Western modernity is well reflected in the increasing number of Middle Eastern writings on the East that followed. These flows and counter-flows invite to challenge diffusionist notions of modernization (i.e. its gradual dissemination from Europe to the rest of the world), and to acknowledge the social dynamics that existed in many societies before, and beyond, their encounter with the West. They suggest not neglecting the long history of entanglements and transnational conditions that went into the co-production of modernity anywhere.

The Spring school invites to rethink the temporality and spatiality of modernity over a long time span and within enlarged geographies. It aims at pluralizing the notion of modernization, by trespassing usual national and civilizational bounda