Modern Arabic literary critics have argued that some Arab writers from colonial Egypt contempt toward religion, namely Islam, by transposing European secular-orientalist ideas into an Arab context. The assumption, however, that these Arab writers were purely secular and detached from Islam as a whole, is misleading.
By evaluating the specific modes in which the distinguished religious thinker Muhammad Abduh (1849–1905) was embraced, after his demise, in secular literary texts it will be possible to acknowledge the complex situation of living and writing in a colonial situation, and thus to reconsider the modern Arab renaissance (al-Nahda) beyond the conflict between the religious and the secular.
Hybrid lecture by Dr. Zahiye Kundos, University Halle, Interdisciplinary Center for Enlightenment Studies (IZEA), Thomasius-Zimmer, EG, 16 February at 18:15 Uhr.
Online participation needs registration: https://lmu-munich.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJwtdOiurz8qGNPLAIQ7oHaG1mMwU7o2J5ix.