Sadik Al-Azm, born in Damascus, Syria, in 1934. Ph.D. from Yale University. Professor Emeritus of Modern European Philosophy at Damascus University. († 2016)
Guest of the Rector (1 September 2006 – 31 December 2006)
THE IMPACT OF CONTEMPORARY EUROPEAN AND AMERICAN PHILOSOPHICAL THOUGHT ON THE MAIN CURRENTS OF PRESENT-DAY ARAB PHILOSOPHICAL, SOCIAL, POLITICAL AND RELIGIOUS THOUGHT
As a guest of the Rector at NIAS I was able to catch up on my reading, complete unfinished work and continue work tracking down the uses and abuses theoreticians of 20th century Islamism make of traditional European rightwing critiques and denunciations of modernity as well as the conceptual frameworks, conclusions and analyses produced by European Postmodernism. I finished a paper, “Orientalism and Conspiracy” to be published by I.B. Tauris, London in a volume containing the proceedings of the colloquium organized by the Asia-Africa Institute of Hamburg University on the subject of “Orientalism and Conspiracy” in the Spring of 2005. I went over the English translation of my early Arabic essay, “The Tragedy of Satan” to appear in the same volume. I revised and expanded my paper on “Islam and the Science – Religion Debates in Modern Times”, originally delivered as a lecture at the Euro-Science Forum 06, (Munich, July 2006), and as a NIAS seminar. The paper is due to appear in the European Review of the Academia Europaea. I gave a lecture for the Department of Philosophy of the Free University of Amsterdam under the title, “Orientalism, Islamism and Postmodernism”. I expect to be able to write up the main body and results of this research in the near future in Arabic and English and to have them published in both languages. I also gave extensive interviews to Dutch, Italian, German and Swedish newspapers and magazines on current affairs in the Arab and Muslim worlds. I contributed a keynote address to the Veer Stichting Symposium of Leiden University and engaged in various activities of the Erasmus Foundation, the Prince Claus Fund and ISIM in Holland.
A Tribute to Sadek ‘al-Azm (1934 – 2016)