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THE RECEPTION OF THE RELIGIOUS OTHER IN INTERCULTURAL EXCHANGE (16TH-18TH CENTURIES)
10-11 MARCH 2011
Ruhr-Universität Bochum (Mensa, Level 01, Room 02)
The historical theme at the core of this Symposium is the perception, stereotyping and understanding of the religious Other in both Western and Eastern cultures from the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries. Both sessions will focus mainly on heterodox authors, critical converts, antidogmatists, and free-thinkers.
It is commonly held that the concept of Otherness, which is instrumental for the quest and the development of
national and cultural self-definition, is intrinsically related to a concept of an enemy – an enemy that must be destroyed, captivated, or assimilated. In a recent enlightening book, co-edited with Andre Gingrich (2004), Gerd Baumann convincingly adopts a “weak” concept of identity: there is no exclusive demarcation between sameness and alterity, identity and difference. For this reason, besides three grammars of identity/alterity (orientalization; segmentation; encompassment) in which identities and alterities are conceived as “mutually constitutive or potentially dialogical”, Baumann also conceptualises an anti-grammar of violence: the attempt to annihilate the Other implies an annihilation of the Self: “the altrocidal murder entails the egocidal suicide”.According to Baumann, the first of the three grammars, orientalization, constitutes Self and Other by negative mirror imaging: “what is good in us is lacking in them”, but it also adds a subordinate reversal: “what is lacking in us is (still) present in them”. It thus entails a possibility of desire for the Other and even, sometimes, a potential for self-critical relativism (“albeit under the auspices of a self-invented Other”).
The first session of the Symposium will take into account the themes and the circulation of an impressive body of
(tendentially) philoislamic, philosemitic and sinophile literature produced in Enlightenment Europe. “Radical” representations of the religious and cultural Other, of the distant Other, prompted a re-examination, or a reinterpretation, of one’s own convictions, as well as a legitimation of the nearby Other. Through the unnumbered travel accounts and memoirs as well as the recurring literary fiction of diaries and correspondences, purportedly written by Eastern travellers in Europe, religious toleration in non-Christian civilisations was first highlighted in order to expose the iniquity of European political and ecclesiastical power structures.
The second session will broaden the investigation: early modern and also gendered representations of the religious Other in Judaism, Islam and “Oriental religions” will be considered. As Gauri Viswanathan has convincingly shown, “assimilation may be accompanied by critique of the very culture with which religious affiliation is sought. Equally, dissent may aim at reforming and rejuvenating the culture from which the convert has detached herself” (Outside the Fold, 1999).
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Symposium Schedule:
Thursday, 10 March 2011
09.00 h Welcome Address
Volkhard Krech (KHK Bochum, Director)
09.15 h Symposium Introduction
Giovanni Tarantino (UWA Perth / KHK Fellow)
ENLIGHTENMENT VIEWS OF JUDAISM, ISLAM AND EAST ASIAN RELIGIONS
09.45 h The Moral Language of Islam: Hume or Lessing?
Laurent Jaffro (Université Paris I, Panthéon-Sorbonne)
10.30 h What is Left of Religion after Christianity is Unveiled – D’Holbach’s Perspectives
Knut-Martin Stünkel (Ruhr-Universität Bochum)
11.15 h Coffee Break
11.45 h “Radical” Attitudes Towards Religions of Siam in 18th Century French Thought
Rolando Minuti (Università degli Studi di Firenze)
12.30 h Individual Curiosity or Scientific Measuring? The Religious Other in 18th Century Accounts of
Travels to the East
Ulrike Vordermark (Ruhr-Universität Bochum)
13.15 h Lunch
15.00 h Superstition as a Category of Otherness in the Early Modern Period
Yaacov Deutsch (Hebrew University of Jerusalem)
15.45 h Demystification and Re-Mystification of Mosaic Judaism in Early Modern Republicanism, from Cunaeus to Spinoza and Toland
Diego Lucci (American University in Bulgaria)
16.30 h Coffee Break
17.00 h European and Domestic Understanding of the Religious Discourse and Experience in Tokugawa Japan
David Mervart (Universität Heidelberg)
17.45 h Concluding Remarks
Ann Thomson
Friday, 11 March 2011
EARLY MODERN REPRESENTATIONS OF THE RELIGIOUS OTHER IN JUDAISM, ISLAM AND “ORIENTAL RELIGIONS”
09.30 h The Christian “Other” in the Writings of 17th Century Jews
Talya Fishman (University of Pennsylvania)
10.15 h Mutable Religious Identities in Post-Reformation England: Judaizing Christians, Crypto-Jews and Jewish Apostates
Ariel Hessayon (Goldsmiths, University of London)
11.00 h Coffee Break
11.30 h From Accommodation to Companionship: Jesuit Interactions with Women Converts from Zen in the Japan Mission (1549–1614)
Haruko Nawata Ward (Columbia Theological Seminary)
12.15 h Individualism and Anti-Dogmatism in the Thought of Li Zhi (1527–1602)
Wolfgang Ommerborn (Ruhr-Universität Bochum)
13.00 h Lunch
15.00 h Seyhulislam Ebussuud Efendi, Ya ‘qub-i Hakim and the Question of the Islamic Scepticism in
the 16th Century Ottoman Empire
Nenad Filipovic (Princeton University)
15.45 h ‘Abd al-Ghanī al-Nābulusī’s (d. 1731) Interpretation of Ibn ‘Arabī’s (d. 1240) Inclusivist
Soteriology
Lejla Demiri (EUME Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin)
16.30 h Coffee Break
17.00 h Shah Hussain and Madho Lal Hussain: Heterodox Passions Crossing Religious and
Cultural Divides in 16th Century Mughal India
Amanullah De Sondy (University of Miami)
17.45 h Cultural Images of Europe in the Reverse Mirror of Mirza Abu Talib (1752–1806)
Aslam Syed (Islamabad, former KHK Fellow)
18.30 h Concluding Remarks
Aziz Al-Azmeh (CEU, Budapest)
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