Unsere Forschungsfellows

Dr. Ali Ghandour ist muslimischer Theologe und wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter am Institut für Islamische Theologie an der Westfälischen Wilhelms-Universität Münster.  Dort promovierte er von 2012 bis 2017 im Fach “Islamische Theologie” am Graduiertenkolleg Islamische Theologie. Zu seinen Forschungsschwerpunkten gehören die Praktische Theologie, das Sufitum sowie die Sexualität und Genderforschung.

Projektname: LGBTQQIA in der muslimischen Seelsorge

Kurzbeschreibung des Projekts:

Die LGBTQQIA-Community ist in der muslimischen Seelsorge ein besonderer Fall (die Abkürzung LGBTQQIA steht für lesbisch, schwul, bisexuell, trans, queer, questioning (hinterfragend), intergeschlechtlich und asexuell). Diese Menschen sind von einer vergleichsweisen hohen Suizidalität betroffen und erleben immer wieder Ausgrenzungserfahrungen in Familie und Gemeinde sowie intersektionale Diskriminierung aufgrund ihrer Religion oder Herkunft. Es gibt kaum akademische Auseinandersetzungen mit dem Themenfeld diverser sexueller Orientierung in der muslimischen Seelsorge im Speziellen und in der Praktischen Theologie im Allgemeinen. Das Forschungsprojekt von Ali Ghandour hat sich mit dem Thema LGBTQQIA in der muslimischen Seelsorge aus einer theoretisch-theologischen Perspektive auseinandergesetzt. 

Im Rahmen des explorativen Projekts hat Ghandour an einem theologischen Konzept gearbeitet, das sich mit der Arbeit mit Muslim_innen in der Seelsorge befasste. Dabei spielten die folgenden Fragen eine Rolle: Wie lässt sich eine LGBTQQIA-freundliche Einstellung innerhalb der Seelsorge theologisch begründen? Welche Ansätze können für die seelsorgerische Arbeit mit muslimischen LGBTQQIA-Menschen konzipiert werden? Was kann man aus den Erfahrungen dieser Menschen für die Erstellung dieser Konzepte lernen?

Basierend auf den qualitativen Forschungen zu muslimischen LGBTQQIA in den Sozialwissenschaften und in der Psychologie sowie auf den theologisch-historischen Überlegungen über Homosexualität und Queerness, hat er Lösungsvorschläge und Strategien ausgearbeitet und diese theoretisch-theologisch untermauert.

Dr Elisabeth Becker Topkara is a sociologist (PhD, Yale University 2018) and public scholar interested in how agency is expressed by racial, ethnic, and religious minorities. She is currently a Freigeist Fellow at the Max-Weber-Institute for Sociology, Heidelberg University. Her project, ‘Invisible Architects: Jews, Muslims, and the Making of Europe’, focuses on how Jews and Muslims have contributed to the formation of European societies. Elisabeth writes for both academic and non-academic publications (e.g., the Washington Post, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung).

Project name: Abrahamic Strangers: German Jewish and German Muslim Intellectuals in Conversation

Project description:
In this project, Dr Elisabeth Becker Topkara focused on what she terms the ‘Abrahamic stranger’, an insider-outsider positionality shared by Muslims and Jews in Europe. Dr Becker Topkara turned to a productive conversation between 19th and 20th-century German Jewish intellectuals and contemporary German Muslim intellectuals in order to explore the possibilities and limitations of their inclusion in the German academic milieu. Her research combined the deep reading and analysis of 19th and 20th-century German Jewish thought and interviews with contemporary Muslim intellectuals in Germany, enabling an analysis of the productive capacities, i.e. the critical agency, of the Abrahamic stranger engaged in the contemporary German intellectual milieu. The goal of this project was to combine a sociological framing of the "Abrahamic stranger" with a thorough investigation of the nature and potentials of Islamic theology and Islamic thought in Germany in order to gain new insights into the potentials of – and challenges to – pluralism in German society.

Mansooreh Khalilizand (PhD) is a research fellow at the Centre for Islamic Theology (CIT) at Münster University (WWU). She is currently working on the philosophy of Ṣadr al-Dīn Šīrāzī (Mullā Ṣadrā), focusing on his ontology, in addition to teaching philosophy in the Islamicate world and Kalām. Her principal argument centres on the idea that within the framework of Ṣadrā’s ontology, all existents turn into necessity. Seen in this light, Ṣadrā’s ontology represents a fundamental and radical break with Avicennian ontology. She also engages in actual debates on Islamic theology, such as the nature of the revelation and the question concerning Quran as the words of Allah.

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Project name: Ṣadr al-Dīn Šīrāzī's Theory of Allah as the Foundation of his Ontology

Project description:
In Ṣadrā’s thought, Allah appears to equate with the reality of existence in its highest instantiation. However, it encompasses three different existential degrees of existence, i.e. the essence of Oneness (al-dhāt al-aḥadīya), the stage of Oneness (al-martaba al-aḥadīya) and the stage of Uniqueness (al-martaba al-wāḥidīya). Despite the loose implementation of these concepts in the secondary literature on Ṣadrā’s thought, a precise reading of the relevant passages in his works reveals that they are philosophically founded and ontologically differentiated instances. In her short-term project, Dr. Mansooreh Khalilizand elucidates on the ontological locus of each of the aforementioned degrees of Allah, their ‘nature’ and the dynamic between them. The philosophical necessity that led Ṣadrā to this theory and his source of inspiration in the tradition of Islamic thought were issues that Dr. Khalilizand dealt with during her fellowship.
Her study sought to shed light on the ultimate ontological foundation of Ṣadrā’s thought and to demonstrate its radical otherness in comparison to Avicennian philosophy by meticulously disassembling the concept of Allah.This point represents a new approach to reading the history of the philosophy of Muslims, in contrast to the mainstream narrative that construes this history as a harmonious continuation and consistent development of similar ideas.
Dr. Khalilizand's second goal was to show how a Muslim philosopher philosophically underpins the religious idea of Allah, which is often taken as self-evident, and thus declared the primacy of philosophical truth versus religious truth, or rationality versus faith.This point becomes clearer when we learn that, according to Ṣadrā, Allah's attributes, which make him a personal God and bring him closer to the religious Allah as the origin of creation, do not emerge until the third degree, i.e., the stage of uniqueness.

Her results will be published in the scientific edition edited by Ahmad Milad Karimi: Her Speaking the Unspeakable – The Attributes of God in Islamic Thought.

Dr Sara Kuehn is a researcher, writer and lecturer working at the interdisciplinary juncture of (art) history, anthropology, theology, and religious and cultural studies. She is currently teaching at the Department of Islamic Theology at the University of Vienna. Her recent publications include chapters and articles on Sufi relics, remains, and traces in Saintly Spheres and Islamic Landscapes: Emplacements of Spiritual Power across Time and Place (Brill 2020), on Sufi visual-material practice in the Balkans in Religious Materiality in the Early Modern World (Amsterdam University Press 2019), on antinomian modes of life and the associated bodily, social, and spiritual disciplines of itinerant dervishes in the Interdisciplinary Journal for Religion and Transformation in Contemporary Society (2018), and on the visions of female Sufi leaders in the Western Sufi tradition in Religion in Austria 4 (2018).

Project name: Contemporary Art and Sufi Aesthetics in European Context

Project description: 

By investigating contemporary art and aesthetic dynamics of the Islamic mystical tradition or Sufism (Ar. taṣawwuf) in Europe, this research project attempts to establish the basis for a conversation about the aesthetic ideas of modern Sufism as well as the art forms in which they are manifested. Interdisciplinary in its methodology, it approaches the study of Sufi art and aesthetics from the perspectives of several disciplines to discuss what Birgit Meyer describes as an 'aesthetics of persuasion' that operates with and through 'sensational forms'. This sensory or perceptual side of culture and human interaction shapes religious content (beliefs, doctrines, sets of symbols) as well as norms (Meyer 2009). In doing so, this research aims to uncover new evidence and innovative analyses that can be utilised by different academic fields, from visual culture and (art) history, anthropology and religious studies, to Sufism and Islamic theology. As a new field of study, the research outcomes will also make valuable contributions to aesthetic education in Islam and is intended to stimulate inter-religious dialogue.

Project Results:

Kuehn, Sara, "Rachid Koraïchi's migratory aesthetics," in: Religiographies 1/1, Special Issue "Holy Places in the Mediterranean: Between Sharing and Partition", eds. D. Albera, S. Kuehn and M. Pénicaud (2022), 115–141. https://www.cini.it/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/Kuehn-2022-Heterography-1-1.pdf

Kuehn, Sara, "Contemporary Art and Sufi Aesthetics in European Context," in: Religions 14/196, Special Issue "Sufism in the Modern World", ed. S. Zarrabi-Zadeh (2023), 1–39. https://www.mdpi.com/2077-1444/14/2/196

Contact: Sara Kuehn; Department of Islamic-Theological Studies, University of Vienna; sara@sarakuehn.com / sara.kuehn@univie.ac.at 

Prof Alison Scott-Baumann has worked with British Muslim communities for 20 years. She recently led a major Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) funded project Islam on campus, which collected and analyzed the largest data sets on campus life around Islam (2015-18). In 2010 Scott-Baumann completed a project on imam training for the British government and was invited by the government in 2019 to conduct a follow-up project called the Universities and Muslim Seminaries Project (UMSEP). She uses continental philosophy to apply social justice principles and recently began a detailed mapping project on Jewish, Israeli and Hebrew curricula in London. Prof Scott-Baumann is an Associate Fellow of the British Psychological Society and a chartered psychologist.

Project: The Politics of Pedagogy: Islam and the ‘West’

Project description:

Within her work on the French philosopher Paul Ricoeur (1913–2005) and the university, commissioned as an open access monography by Springer, Prof. Scott-Scott Baumann – with the support of the AIWG Fellowship – has developed her much-needed research on the relationship between Ricoeur in the continental philosophical tradition and the much-neglected Islamic tradition. Her goal was to present in two chapters the Islamic tradition and its modern workings as integral to the European vision of the university and built upon her expertise in using Ricoeur’s ideas to set and meet educational goals with regard to university campuses, racism and discrimination, including islamophobia and antisemitism.

She has put Ricoeur and his ideas into conversation with the responses to those challenges by contemporary British Muslim philosopher and theologian Abdul Hakim Murad, British political philosopher Salman Sayyid, American philosopher and historian Ovamir Anjum and others. Thus, classical and modern Islamic ideas on freedom of expression were analyzed in the context of Ricoeur’s hermeneutical post-Kantian dialectical approach.

Thomas Lemmen hat katholische Theologie und Islamwissenschaft in Bonn und Sankt Augustin studiert. Seine Forschungs- und Arbeitsschwerpunkte sind der Islam in Deutschland sowie der christlich-islamische Dialog. Zum Thema „Muslime in Deutschland. Eine Herausforderung für Kirche und Gesellschaft“ hat er 1999 in katholischer Theologie promoviert. Seit 2018 ist er als Honorarprofessor in der Kölner Abteilung der Katholischen Hochschule Nordrhein-Westfalen am Fachbereich Sozialwesen tätig. Seit 2007 arbeitet er für das Erzbistum Köln im interreligiösen Dialog. Zudem betreut er dort als Studiengangsleiter den Masterstudiengang Interreligiöse Dialogkompetenz. Darüber hinaus engagiert er sich ehrenamtlich in der Christlich-Islamischen Gesellschaft e.V. (CIG).

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Projektname: Islamische Bestattungen in Deutschland: Eine Bestandsaufnahme der Anpassung bestattungsrechtlicher Regelungen von Ländern und Kommunen an religiöse Bedürfnisse und Erwartungen von Muslim_innen in Deutschland.

Kurzbeschreibung des Projekts:

Der Umgang mit den Toten sagt etwas über den Umgang einer Gesellschaft mit den Lebenden aus. Die Frage islamischer Bestattungen in Deutschland ist daher ein wichtiges Thema des gesellschaftlichen Diskurses von Muslim_innen und Nicht-Muslim_innen. Weit mehr als 200 Städte in Deutschland haben auf kommunalen Friedhöfen islamische Grabfelder angelegt.

Muslimische Bestattungen stehen im Spannungsfeld zwischen gesetzlichen Regelungen der Länder und Kommunen auf der einen, sowie den Vorgaben des islamischen Rechts beziehungsweise religiösen Bedürfnissen von Muslim_innen auf der anderen Seite. Zwischen beiden Ansprüchen können Konflikte entstehen, die eine zusätzliche Belastung im Trauerfall für die Angehörigen bedeuten, beispielsweise bei der Sargpflicht oder bei den Ruhefristen einer Grabstätte.

Insgesamt ist zu beobachten, dass die Bestattungsgesetze der Länder mittlerweile stärker individuelle sowie religiöse Bedürfnisse berücksichtigen. Im Rahmen dieses Forschungsprojekts sind zwei Fragen untersucht worden: Finden die Bemühungen der Länder in den Friedhofssatzungen auf kommunaler Ebene eine Entsprechung? Und werden die kommunalen Regelungen an die Bedürfnisse und Erwartungen von Muslim_innen an islamische Bestattungen angepasst?