How To Be a Modern Muslim: Global Social Imaginaries and the Construction of Islamic Identities
Dietrich Jung
Wednesday, September 24, 2014, 7:00 pm
Simon Fraser University
Joseph and Rosalie Segal Rooms 1420-1430
515 West Hastings Street, Vancouver
Combining contemporary social theory with Islamic studies, this lecture looks at the various ways in which Muslims have dealt with the construction of social orders and forms of subjectivity in the modern age. Taking examples from the broad stream of Islamic reform movements, it shows the ways in which globally relevant social imaginaries together with Islamic traditions have served as frames of reference for individual and collective ways to construct modern Islamic identities. In pointing to both similarities and differences between Islamic and non-Islamic forms of social order and modern selfhoods, the presentation claims that also modern Muslim identities have been constructed with respect to a set of more global paradigms. In this way, the lecture challenges exclusivist assumptions about both Western modernity and modern Islamic ways of life.
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