Source: news.hum.uu.nl

On 1 December, Dr Gerdien Jonker will give the second lecture in the series that are organised as a part of the research project ‘Muslims in interwar Europe’, for coordinated by Dr Amr Ryad. She will speak about Ahmadiyya who traveled to Europe in the interwar period, looking for intellectual cross-pollination.

Photo: gerdien-jonker.com Photograph by Ekko von Schwichow

The lecture-cum-seminar offers fresh knowledge and insights on those Ahmadiyya who in the interwar period went to Europe with the aim to strike up a conversation with European intellectuals. They also strived to ameliorate the European image of Islam and discuss religious progress together. The results of those joint efforts could then be fed back into the Islamic tradition, and, through these measures, help Islamic progress on its way.

Their endeavor to weld together the best of European thought with the cream of Muslim peace traditions offers some of the best examples of adaptive globalisation. The seminar thus adds to the recent discussion on the cultural imprint of Muslims on interwar Europe. Especially Berlin offered a stage on which it proved perfectly possible for Indians and Germans, Muslims and Jews, Arabs and Europeans, to meet and think about cultural issues.

Gerdien Jonker is a scholar in the history and ethnography of religion. She studied History of Religion, Cuneiform and Hebrew in Amsterdam and Paris, and obtained her PhD at Groningen University on the topic of collective memory in ancient Mesopotamia. Ever since she conducted both empirical and historical research on Muslims in Europe and European perceptions of Islam. She is affiliated to the Erlanger Centre for Islam and Law in Europe (EZIRE) at the University of Erlangen-Nuernberg.

Registration

Entrance is free, but registration is necessary. Please send an email to Mr. Tolga Teker.