Suchergebnisse

This study scrutinizes a case of adaptive globalisation at the interface of colonized India and post-war colonial Europe. It examines Muslim missionaries who, after World War I, made missionary efforts in Germany. Originating from British India, the missionaries' determination was firmly rooted in the Indian colonial past. They saw their mission as a further step in the process of adaptive globalisation, that is, the drive to adapt to and to reverse Western domination.The paper retraces missionary competition in Weimar Berlin, revealing an amalgam of pan-Islamic ideas, political strategies, and reformist religious imagery. These attempts at winning Western converts were a knife that cut both ways: Missionaries approached German 'moderns' in their own symbolic language, while the latter steered between the different mission offers and adapted Islam to their own needs.Making use of fresh sources, the contribution offers three perspectives: (1) the Sunnī mission with its revolutionary tinge; (2) the Ahmadiyya mission, and (3) the interface.

History education inevitably is a thing of the present. During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries it has always answered to problems that were urgent at the time of discussion. This has mostly taken the form of explaining and thus smoothing over painful ruptures in the past. Although nowadays we generally acknowledge this contemporary character of history education, the professional ideal of doing proper, authentic history remains—a desire that is understandable, but compatible neither with epistemological standards nor with public expectations. While teaching instrumental history is not an option, history education cannot live on criticism and deconstruction alone, we need a reflexive presentism that self-consciously confronts the present day—"difficult" rather than "easy" histories.

In this article, I explore the dominant narratives about Islam in German history textbooks from the eighteenth century until the present day. I thereby deconstruct a longue durée script with a rather curious pattern. Until the 1980s, textbook narratives about Islam were rooted exclusively in people's historical imagination. Only when the children of Turkish workers entered the classroom did textbook authors try to accommodate knowledge based on real encounters. By addressing the di erent stages of this longue durée script, I enquire into the functions of narratives as they underpinned a German and European "we."

From relativism to evaluation. Recent trends in the historiography of science and the humanitiesHistorians of science have taken leave of finalism. No longer do they write teleological histories of scientific progress. Instead of a grand narrative on the triumph of science they now tend to write small stories on local knowledge. This is the result of several decades of criticism of Whig history. Starting with neo-marxist critique in the interwar years, enhanced in the social history of the 1970s, science was seen as an economic commodity and as a social product. Cultural history and anthropology added the view that scientists and scholars are mere mortals, muddling through messy life. This critique was topped off with postmodern criticism of knowledge as power, which translates into the accusation that historiography is only legitimating cultural and political oppression.To counter these allegations, many historians have insulated themselves into a kind of retro-historicism that shies away from any teleology, coherence, meaning and evaluation. It depicts the production of knowledge as a practical, local activity that is strictly limited to its cultural context. No claims to truth, validity, let alone progress or even development were allowed.This situation of rampant relativism could not last. Total abstinence of any evaluation of knowledge claims, quality of research or success of theories has proven unsatisfactory. The need has arisen to study broader issues of traveling knowledge and longer lines of scientific development. There is a shift of interest into traditions of knowledge that spring the bonds of locality and context. Why do some scientific theories and research practices succeed in surpassing paradigms and bridging epistemic ruptures? In this respect disciplines are in the process of being rehabilitated. Instead of oppressive structures they become the vehicles of sustained knowledge growth. Especially the role of education and academic training is focused on. Facing up to the charges of conceptual anachronism, historians of knowledge now opt for a cautiously evaluative history. The alternative would be an intellectually barren historicism.

This article discusses the relationship between Europe and ancient Greece as narrated (or ignored) in a range of European history textbooks. It unravels the threads the narrative has followed since the eighteenth century, investigating the choices made in construing the narrative taught today. Which meanings were inherent in the terms "east" and "west" before they acquired the ideological coloring associating "east" with "barbarians" and "west" with the civilized world and "Europe"? The article opens up a new perspective on a complex past that was lost from view when perceptions of the ancient Greeks as guarantors of European values became entwined with the invention of the nation state.