Representations of Islam in Germanophone Literature: Cultural Perspectives from the Enlightenment to the Present

Dear Colleagues,

This Special Issue invites contributions with a focus on intercultural relationships by using the example of religion, an indispensable element in discourses of culture. As such an element, religion bears and constitutes meanings. According to Brent Nongbri’s Before Religion: A History of a Modern Concept (2013), we do not have any scientifically proven knowledge and scholarly consensus regarding the question as to what precisely constitutes a religion. Therefore, the question would be: How do such meanings arise that have shaped the idea of ​​religion and its cultural scope for thousands of years? In the cultural history of religion, we work with images, texts, rituals, music and many other media that transmit an idea of ​religion to humanity. We might be able to understand religion as a system of worldviews that enables us to define beliefs, morals, attitudes, behaviors, practices and, more generally, that relates humanity to transcendental, spiritual and supernatural elements.

This Special Issue is interested in the transmission of such a system through art, but mainly through literature, focuses its perspective on the representation of Islam in Germanophone literature and culture from the Enlightenment to the present and aims to shape the literary discourses on Islam in the context of following questions:

1. How does literature create the encounter between German-speaking and Islamic cultures and what ideas, images and meanings have shaped the literary discourses of Islam from the Enlightenment to the present day?
2. What kind of texts or text types prove to be outstanding in the construction of images of Islam in Germanophone literature? What meanings do they produce and how do those meanings affect the idea of the cultural otherness?
3. Before the Islamic invasion, the Persian Empire and the Ottoman Empire were self-contained cultural spaces. From an intercultural und interreligious perspective, how does the Germanophone literature describe the influence of Islam on Persian and Ottoman Cultures, and vice versa?
4. Since the Enlightenment, what influence exert various images of Islam on the intellectual and controversial debates on Islamic-embossed cultures?
5. Discourses on culture conventionally take place in the hermeneutic field of tension of the Own and Foreign. Cultural difference dominates. How are cultural differences constructed on the basis of Islam and what meanings do they produce? What role do similarities play in cultural encounter?
6. Travelogues, poetry and novels are genres that tell stories by producing certain images with particular meaning. How are those meanings culturally ingrained and how do they influence the cultural understanding of Islam since the Enlightenment?
7. Since the turn of the millennium to 2000s, a series of political occurrences have changed our societies. How does Germanophone literature contend with these social transformations and ?

Beyond those primary questions, other approaches are also welcome that enrich cultural discourses of Germanophone literature on Islam, especially in the present, constructively and beyond conventional debates. We also strongly invite contributions that deal with art, music, paintings and film.

Contributors are invited to use research in the field of theories of culture and literature, theories of discourse, narratology, and film studies to explore aspects of the dynamic relationship between culture and religion.

Prof. Dr. Hamid Tafazoli
Guest Editor

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• German literature and Islam
• intercultural and interreligious discourses on Islam
• imagology and narratology 
• religion as an aspect of cultural differences and similarities
• German, Persian and Turkish literature