Mysticisme et sécularisme en Inde. Iqbal, Gandhi, Nehru et leurs sources
Conférences de Razak Khan et Faisal Devji
Le séminaire Transfers culturel consiste à interroger les vecteurs du déplacement de contenus intellectuels dans l’espace et dans le temps, ainsi que les re-sémantisations engendrées par ces transferts. Chaque année, de nombreux spécialistes français et étrangers présentent leurs travaux et projets. Lieu d'échange et atelier de recherche, ce séminaire est fondamentalement pluridisciplinaire, et aborde au fil des séances une large variété de sujets touchant plus particulièrement à l’histoire culturelle et à l’histoire des sciences humaines.
Razak Khan (Erlangen) : Demystifying Mysticism: Iqbal, Scholem and German Orientalism
When Sheikh Muhammad Iqbal (1877-1938) decided to write his doctoral research on Metaphysics in Persia, he moved from Oxford to Germany and submitted the thesis under the chair of Semitic languages Prof. Fritz Hommel at Munich University in 1909. Around the same time Gershom Scholem (1897-1982) a young German Jewish boy was reassessing his relationship with German nation and culture but made a similar choice few years later when he submitted his dissertation on Jewish mysticism and kabbalistic text also under the supervision of Fritz Hommel.
Iqbal and Sholem probably never met but their life, intellectual work and trajectories of the knowledge they produced share a deep affinity as both turned to reassess the mystical dimension of their religion. The knowledge they produced was deeply connected with the project of imagining a new Minority identity and vision of a new homeland in Pakistan and Israel.
How might one think of these genealogies and trajectories of an entangled intellectual history? What is the role of German language and Orientalism in shaping these histories in Muslim and Jewish scholars who started their intellectual journey in Germany?
How can an entangled intellectual history help us rethink these histories beyond nationalist framework of histories and archives? This paper argues that legacy of German thought survives not just within Germany or in German archives and language but outside of its linguistic and national boundaries.
Faisal Devji (Oxford) : India and the Idea of Secularism
The critics of secularism, whether they are themselves religious or not, have focused on its European origins and allegedly Christian specificity as one of their chief lines of argument.
India's history and character as a secular state allows us to look at the way in which secularism has been debated and defined in quite different ways outside Europe. This lecture will explore such discussions not simply in constitutional terms but also as part of a new kind of secular culture outside the law, focusing in particular on the foundational ideas of the theorist of nonviolence, Mahatma Gandhi, the philosopher Mohammad Iqbal and the politician Jawaharlal Nehru.
Conférence dans le cadre du séminaire Transferts culturel
Mis à jour le 9/9/2019