AZIZ AL-AZMEH ° Sentence first, verdict later

In Germany intensified tropes of culturalism have been weaponised following controversies around the documenta exhibition in 2022, accentuated after the Hamas attacks on 7. October 2023. They have produced internal cleavages on grounds of religion and ethnicity, with exclusion proclaimed by restrictions upon free speech and opinion. Proscription and segregation are conceived together, managed and policed by organs of state. How and why does a liberal democratic political system create, then enforce the decomposition of one of its foundational principles?

Part of Episode XXX: “The Condition of No. What ar the Limits?”
With Aziz Al-Azmeh, Susan Neiman & Florian Malzacher

05. March 2025 – Villa Stuck, Munich / Austria

This edition is part of the series The Condition of No. German Case Studies of Cancellation and Boycott at Villa Stuck Munich, curated by Tania Bruguera, Florian Malzacher, Roland Wenninger.
In coproduction with Villa Stuck & INSTAR.

Biography

Aziz Al-Azmeh is University Professor emeritus at the Central European University. He has held visiting professorships at Columbia, Yale, Berkeley, Georgetown, the Institut d’Etudes Politiques, Paris, and the Aga Khan University. He has been a long-term fellow of the Institute for Wissenschaftskolleg, Berlin, and Directeur de Recherches Associé at the Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, Paris, a Fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt Stiftung. He was a fellow at the institutes for advanced study in Uppsala and Budapest, a fellow of the Käte Hamburger Kolleg, and a resident scholar at the Rockefeller Foundation Center for Scholars in Bellagio. He is held the Chaire Averroes at the Mediterranean Institute for Advanced Research in Marseille in 2002.
Among his books in English are Secularism in the Arab World (Edinburgh, 2020), The Emergence of Islam in Late Antiquity (Cambridge, 2014), Islams and Modernities(London, 2009), Muslim Kingship (London, 1996), and Arabic Thought and Islamic Societies (London, 1986).