Credit: CEU University
Aziz Al-Azmeh
Research project
Ex Oriente Lux: A History of Unbelief
Summary of the research project
The main preoccupation during the tenure of the chaire Averroès concerns a history of impiety, unbelief and freethinking, with an emphasis on Baghdad in 9th -11th centuries. Systematic stock is taken of the late antique legacy of polemics against religions and between them, and the byways of motifs of unbelief thereafter. The trans-Mediterranean heritage of Baghdadian unbelief and impiety is pursued historically and programmatically as it travelled north in many interesting and surprising ways and avenues, through Italy and Spain and on to the environment of the 17th century libertinage érudit implicit and explicit, not least in France and the Netherlands, ultimately converging with deism and, somewhat later, the beginnings of avowed atheism. Crucial to this work is not simply the pursuit of ideas in the way of intellectual history, but the study of the contexts, milieux, transmission and reception of freethinking and impiety in society and culture broadly understood.
A concurrent line of work is the gathering together and reworking of essays published in recent years on the emergence and composition of the Qur’anic text.
Biography
Aziz Al-Azmeh is a professor at the Department of History, Central European University, Vienna, Austria. He joined the CEU in 2002.
He has been a long-term fellow of the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, and was twice Directeur de Recherches Associé at the Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, Paris (Bourse Fernand Braudel). He was a fellow at the institutes for advanced study in Uppsala and Budapest, a fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt foundation, a fellow of the Käte Hamburger Kolleg, and a resident scholar at the Rockefeller Foundation Center for Scholars in Bellagio.
Mr. Al-Azmeh is the author of, among other books in English, Secularism in the Arab World (Edinbrugh, 2020), The Emergence of Islam in Late Antiquity (Cambridge, 2014), Islams and Modernities (London, 2009), and Muslim Kingship (London, 1996). His L’Obscurantisme postmoderne et la question musulmane (Paris, Actes Sud) appeared in 2004.
Mr. Al-Azmeh holds a D.Phil. in Oriental Studies from the University of Oxford.
