By Hamizza Jasman
GOMBAK, 23 February 2015: Lecturers and students of the Kulliyyah of Islamic Revealed Knowledge and Human Sciences today had a great opportunity to listen to the talk by a known speaker from the University of Southern Denmark, Prof. Dr. Dietrich Jung. The talk was held at Al-Tabari Conference Room, HS Building, KIRKHS.
Entitled œIslamic Studies: The emergence of modern Islamic studies in the context of historical development of humanities, Prof. Dr. Jung shared his views with the audience on his research on science and social differentiation between the Islamic and Western scholarship in terms of religion.
The Professor highlighted five important aspects of his research: Orientalist (Ernest Renan and William R. Smith), Islamologue (Snouck Hurgronje, Ignaz Goldziher and Muhammad Iqbal), global discourse, followed by Islam and Islamic studies.
Prof. Dr. Dietrich Jung is Head of Department at the Centre for Contemporary Middle East Studies, University of Southern Denmark. He is a member of the American Association for the Sociology of Religion (ASR). He is also a member of German Middle East Studies Association (DAVO); Board member of Nordic Middle East Studies Association and Middle East Studies Association of North America (MESA). He is currently the editor of the Palgrave Series on the Modern Muslim World. He has previously edited the Palgrave Series on Governance, Security and Development.
Prof. Jung is also the author of Comparative Islamic Studies Orientalist, Islamists and The Global Public Sphere: A Genealogy of the Modern Essentialist Image of Islam.
The two-hour talk was organised by the Department of Political Science, Kulliyyah of Islamic Revealed Knowledge and Human Sciences. The talk was later followed by a discussion, and question and answer session.
For Prof. Jung, science is a system that functional differentiation and the modern Islamic studies in the context of historical development of the humanities include the science itself, and education, law, and religion could develop the disciplines of humanities. Furthermore, orientalist studies such as Sinology, Japanology, Indology, Semitic, and Ancient oriental studies focused more on the languages rather than religious studies such as Islamic studies and Jewish studies in the same field of oriental studies.
œBasically, this is our second time hosting Prof. Dr. Jung, who has carried out research and shared his experience in the Muslim world and part of the research in Europe must be understood, Head of Department of Political Science, Dr. Tunku Mohar Tunku Mohd. Mokhtar said.
œThis time around, Dr. Jung is here to share his research interest with us. He is writing on the Muslim sensitivity, the idea that the West, especially the Europeans, not to stereotype, not to label the Muslims, and to understand the complexity of the Muslims in that part of the world. Dr. Tunku Mohar added. ***
Photos taken by Quraibah Razak