The Historiography of Power Relations in Islam:
Can the history of Islam be studied with a Foucauldian analysis?
13. Juli 2023 │ 18 s.t. Uhr │ Raum HAS 1, Hammer Straße 95
Foucault claims that all his writings and his philosophical project are a toolbox, where researchers can open it and use a sentence an idea or an analysis to study analyze and deconstruct the systems of power (Foucault 1994: 720).
This lecture attempts to explore Foucault’s idea through two case studies from Islamic history: How did the Caliph rule and How did Islamic scholars contribute to the rewriting of Islamic history through their Quranic exegesis? Yassine Yahyaoui draws on two basic tools: looking at the political history of Islam in terms of power relations; and re-evaluating the idea of tradition in Islam by using the arguments of discontinuity and rare event that Foucault developed in: “Folie et Déraison” (1961) and “L'Archéologie du savoir” (1969).
Yassine Yahyaoui also takes into account the need to distinguish between the historical tools used by Foucault and the philosophical tools, with the importance of placing historical tools in the context of the traditions of “the Annales School” and “the New History”.