To honor the eminent historian of Islam Reinhard Schulze’s retirement from the Swiss University of Bern, twenty-eight scholars address Islam and modernity, a challenging topic that mirrors Schulze’s works on the history of the Muslim World League, the Islamic Enlightenment, and the Islamic world in the twentieth century.

One of Schulze’s key theses is that there were Middle Eastern modernities under Islam before the eighteenth century, commonly known as trends of an-Nahda, which were subdued or deflected by Europe’s colonialism. Islamic enlightenments then collided with the Western and Soviet versions. But the previous Islamic ways percolated in residual streams, swayed by forms of Jewish, Western, Eastern, and Christian fundamentalism, modernism, or revolutionism.

Creating this mosaic requires an inter-disciplinary approach. In her contribution, Gudrun Krämer describes the local modernity of Muslim Brotherhood founder Hasan al-Banna while Stephan Guth explores Islamic studies in the eras of neoliberalism, the Islamic State, and, U.S. president Donald Trump. Other essayists offer interesting insights as well: Albrecht Hofheinz on sub-Saharan Africa; Jürgen Paul on Carl Heinrich Becker and semi-feudal relations in the Orient or iqta (land grant); Ahmad Dallal on trends in eighteenth-century hadith studies; Armando Salvatore on civility and charisma in the genesis of political modernity within the Islamic world.

Notes by his colleagues on the academic personality of Schulze and his list of publications make this book a scholarly compendium. Notably, his most recent article of 2017 deals with a new and disputed trend: the establishment of Islamic centers of theological studies at secular universities, for instance, in Germany.[1]

This honor study does a double service to Schulze and the academic community and offers nourishing food for thought.

[1] “Anmerkungen zur Einrichtung islamischer theologischer Studien an säkularen Universitäten.”