Mediterranean Programme - [02/16/2007]

CIDOB, in a project on "Religion, State and Nation in the Muslim World"

Eduard Soler, co-ordinator of the CIDOB Foundation’s Mediterranean Programme, participated in a meeting in the Swedish Research Institute in Istanbul, from which emerged a research project on Religion, State and Nation in the Muslim World. In Istanbul, possible lines of research, theoretic frameworks and the geographic spectrum were laid out for a project in which Soler will form a part, within a co-ordination committee.

Elisabeth Özdalga, a sociologist with the Orta Dogu Teknik Universitesi (Middle East Technical University) in Ankara, will lead the co-ordination committee for this interdisciplinary project that will begin in 2007 and will last for three or four years. Also forming part are Catharina Rauvdere, a professor at the University of Copenhagen and Leif Stenberg, Head of the Department of Islamic Studies at Lund University.

The meeting brought together a group of European, American and Middle Eastern scholars, among whom were Sami Zubeida, of Birkbeck College in London; Sukru Hanioglu, of the Department of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton; Umut Özkirimli, of Bilgi University and Bo Petersson, of the University of Lund.

With this involvement, the CIDOB Foundation takes on a commitment to an international project that aspires to analyse, among other issues, the role of political Islamism in the processes of national construction, the political use of history and the existence of a transnational Islam, in addition to an intent to nationalise the religious factor, recalling the specificities of a European, Turkish, Moroccan and even a Catalan Islam.

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