This seminar engages with various theoretical and empirical accounts in approaching the ‘Sociology of Islam’. The upheaval of the literature that took Islam into the focus of sociological research goes back to the 1980s and reaches most heated discussions in the light of political historical events of this century. On the one hand there is a growing range of studies that deal with the themes related to Islam, its political forces, and its new geographies, on the other, finding a way to bring these fragments to one another without taking the risk of forming another line of identity politics seems a hard task for sociology today. How can we find an intermediary way to approach these topics and put it under one umbrella of sociology of Islam? We take two paths in a dialogical mode to come into grips with this problem. We suggest studying the German line of thought following Max Weber’s seminal works under the rubric of differentiation. Then we ask how these approaches can communicate, come into discussion or critique the more recent discursive tradition that wishes to read Islam as tradition and to analyze it through Muslim practices and affects (Foucault and Asad). Taking empirical research from both camps we give flesh to the themes such as public sphere and Muslims’ affect, individualization and secularization, body and sovereignty.

Kurs im HIS-LSF