Bassam Tibi

Bassam Tibi
Bassam Tibi in 2016.
Born	(1944-04-04) April 4, 1944 (age 80) Damascus, Syria
Nationality	Syrian, German
Alma mater	Goethe University Frankfurt (B.A.) University of Hamburg (D.Phil)
Known for	Islamic themes
Scientific career
Fields	Political science, Islamic studies, Middle Eastern studies
Institutions	University of Göttingen, Cornell University

Bassam Tibi (

Bassam Tibi's views can be accurately stated by a quote from the German distinguished Professor Walter Reese-Schäfer. This scholar writes on Tibi "Unlike other authors Bassam Tibi bases his views as a scholarly observer on his participation in the matter he deals with", that is he writes as an insider. The views of Bassam Tibi can be best referred to by quoting from his twelve books written and published in English. In his book on Arab Spring "The Shari'a State" (2013) he enlists himself among the other Muslims identified as "enlightened Arab thinkers who are clear about the need for the introduction of democracy into the Arab world". Thus, Bassam Tibi subscribes to the "enlightened Muslim thought". This is a contemporary school of thought in Islamic civilization. In another book on "Islamism and Islam" published by Yale University Press (2010) Bassam Tibi discards the Islamist rejection of democracy (chapter 4) and concludes in the final chapter 9 with a commitment to "civil Islam as an alternative to Islamism".

On Islam

Tibi is a Muslim,^[3] but criticizes Islamism and advocates "reforming" Islam.^[4] Tibi also suggests that Muslim immigrants should refrain from engaging in religious missionary activities, Dawa.^[5]

On Europe

When it comes to Europe, Tibi distinguishes positive and negative elements of European culture. The positive ones are, according to Tibi,

He criticizes European imperialism, arguing that it disrupted and deformed other cultures. Acknowledging that Muslim conquerors also did wrongs, Tibi argues that, unlike the European conquests, Muslim conquests were not driven by any kind of racism.^[7]

On Germany

He has criticised the left-green dominated German media for stifling debate about Islam in Germany, leading to ordinary people being afraid to state their opinions. As an example he gives Uwe Tellkamp, who expressed criticism against the German policy of migration and was attacked in mainstream media and painted as a right-extremist.^[8] He has also criticised authorities in Germany for not standing up to the large organised Islamic community organisations like the Turkish-Islamic Union for Religious Affairs and for not supporting liberal Muslims like Seyran Ateş and Necla Kelek.^[8]

On Israel

Bassam Tibi has criticized the Likud party of Israel as blocking the peace process. He states that in the 1990s, the Likud adopted the "Three Nos" policy:^[9]

"No to the Palestinian State, no to dividing Jerusalem, no to returning Golan Heights to Syria.

According to Tibi, the Likud government of 1996 engaged in provoking Arabs by constructing Har Homa in Arab Jerusalem, and digging a tunnel under the Temple Mount, and thereby exposing Israel to terrorism.^[9]

Awards

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In 1995 he was decorated by the President of Germany,

• The Crisis of Modern Islam: A Preindustrial Culture in the Scientific-Technological Age. Translated by Judith von Sivers. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1988.
• Islam and the Cultural Accommodation of Social Change. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1990.
• Conflict and War in the Middle East: From Interstate War to New Security, new expanded ed. 1998, published in association with WCFIA/Harvard University.
• Arab Nationalism. Between Islam and the Nation-State, first ed. 1980, second ed. 1990, third expanded and revised ed. 1997, Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan.
• The Challenge of Fundamentalism: Political Islam and the New World Disorder. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998; updated edition 2002.
  ISBN 0-520-23690-4 Publisher's abstract at the Wayback Machine
  (archived June 25, 2008)
• Islam between Culture and Politics. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire; New York Cambridge, Mass: Palgrave, in association with the
  ISBN 1-4039-4990-5
• Crusade and Jihad: Islam and the Christian World. Wilhelm Goldmann Verlag, München, Random House GmbH, 2001
  ISBN 963-13-5238-2
• Political Islam, World Politics and Europe. Routledge, New York, 2008.
  ISBN 0-415-43781-4
• Islam’s Predicament with Modernity: Religious Reform and Cultural Change Routledge, NY and London, 2009,
  ISBN 978-0-415-48472-5
• Islamism and Islam. Yale University Press (May 22, 2012)

• "Islam and Modern European Ideologies." International Journal of Middle East Studies 18, no. 1 (1986): 15–29.
• "The European Tradition of Human Rights and Culture of Islam." In Human Rights in Africa Cross Cultural Perspectives, ed.
  Abdullahi Ahmed An Na`im
  and Francis M. Deng, 104. Washington DC: Brookings Institution, 1990.
• "The Simultaneity of the Unsimultaneous - Old Tribes and Imposed Nation-States in the Modern Middle East." In Tribes and State Formation in the Middle East, ed. Philip S. Khoury and Joseph Kostiner, 127–152. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990.
• "Islamic Law/Shari'a, Human Rights, Universal Morality and International Relations." Human Rights Quarterly 16, no. 2 (1994): 277.
• "The Worldview of Sunni Arab Fundamentalists: Attitudes toward Modern Science and Technology." In Fundamentalisms and Society, ed. Martin E. Marty and R. Scott Appelby, 73–102. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993.
• "War and Peace in Islam." In Ethics of War and Peace, ed. Terry Nardin, 128–145. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996.
• "The Fundamentalist Challenge to the Secular Order in the Middle East." The Fletcher Forum of World Affairs 23 (1999): 191–210.
• "Post-Bipolar Order in Crisis: The Challenge of Politicised Islam." Millennium 29, no. 3 (2000): 843–860.
• "Europeanizing Islam or the Islamization of Europe," in: Peter Katzenstein, ed., Religion in an Expanding Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006)
• "The Totalitarianism of Jihadist Islamism and its Challenge to Europe and to Islam." in: Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions, Vol. 8, No. 1, March 2007, 35–54.
• "A Migration Story: From Muslim Immigrants to European “Citizens of the Heart?“" in: The Fletcher Forum of World Affairs Vol.31 (Winter 2007) 1: 191-210.
• "Euro-Islamic Religious Pluralism for Europe. An Alternative to Ethnicity and to "Multiculturalism of Fear"," in:
  The Current
  , Vol. 11 (Fall 2007) 1: 89-103.
• "Islamism and Democracy: The Case of the Arab World," in: Leonard Weinberg, ed., Democratic Responses to Terrorism (New York: Routledge, 2008), 41–61.
• "Religious Extremism or Religionization of Politics? The Ideological Foundations of Political Islam", in: Hillel Frisch and Efraim Inbar, eds, Radical Islam and International Security (New York: Routledge, 2008), Chapter One, pp. 11–37,
  ISBN 978-0-415-44460-6
  .
• "The Return of the Sacred to Politics as a Constitutional Law. The Case of the Shari’atization of Politics in Islamic Civilization", in: Theoria. A Journal of Social and Political Theory, vol. 55 (April 2008), issue 115, pp. 91–119,
  ISSN 0040-5817
  .
• "Turkey’s Islamist Danger. Islamists Approach Europe", in: Middle East Quarterly, vol. 16,1 (Winter 2009), pp. 47–54.
• "Euro-Islam: An Alternative to Islamization and Ethnicity of Fear", in: Zeyno Baran (Ed.), The Other Muslims: Moderate and Secular, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010

External links

• Homepage of Bassam Tibi
• Europeanisation, not Islamisation Bassam Tibi argues for Euro-Islam as a bridge between civilisations
• Voices on Antisemitism Interview with Bassam Tibi from the US Holocaust Memorial Museum
• From Sayyid Qutb to Hamas, The Middle-East Conflict and the Islamization of Antisemitism, in Yale Initiative for the Interdisciplinary Study of Antisemitism, online working paper, 2010