The international workshop discusses recent historiography on humanitarianism, concepts and issues. It is organised by LabEx Ecrire une histoire nouvelle de l’Europe (EHNE), the Laboratoire Temps, Mondes, Sociétés (TEMOS), the Leibniz Institute of European History (IEG), and the international network “Engaging Europe in the Arab World” (Leiden University, NWO).
Programme: Affiche_Atelier_Humanitaire 2018-06-09
European History Yearbook 2018: Forum Essay by Manfred Sing
Against All Odds: How to Re-Inscribe Islam into European History
The central place that Muslims and Islam are accorded in the European media and public debates today contrasts with their near-complete absence in parts of European historiography until recently, Manfred Sing argues in his recent essay on Islam and European History.
Participants of the first congress of European Muslims, Geneva 1935. Picture: Van Beetem’s Family Archive (The Netherlands) – ERC Starting Grant “Muslims in Interwar Europe”, University of Leuven – n° 336608.
While right-wing demagogues campaign against refugees, Muslims and the supposed Islamization of Europe, their argument that Islam does not belong to Europe is, at least partially, supported by the rather patchy awareness of a continuous and multi-facetted Islamic history in European societies and, horrible dictu, even in some history departments. Recent research challenges this neglect, tries to overcome the “Othering” of Islam, and demands a new conceptualization of European history that leaves behind the Europe/Islam binary. As the construction of a European identity and a European space is based on “Othering” – a definition of what is not European -, the conscious and visible integration of Muslims into European history poses a systematic challenge to narratives of Europeanization. The article draws attention to the difficulties that spring from this challenge and discusses new approaches in scholarship that try to overcome them.
Manfred Sing’s essay is published open access in
Out Now – Open Access
ed. by Simone Derix and Margareth Lanzinger with contributions by:
The open access volume analyzes houses as an economic resource as well as a means of social, political and cultural agency. From the early modern period to the 20th century, the multifaceted capital of houses linked individuals, families and societies in specific ways. The essays collected here probe the material texture of past societies concerning the inheritance, value, sale or maintenance of houses as well as the symbolic meanings that houses conveyed.
