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Menschenrechte zwischen Universalität und islamischer Legitimität

Mahmoud Bassiouni

Human Rights Between Universality and Islamic Legitimacy

Human rights are caught in a normative area of dispute in contemporary Islamic discourse. On the one hand, they have to be legitimised by Islam, i.e. ankered in Islamic legal thought; on the other, they have to be adaptable to a universal consensus.

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Arabic world rights (Al-Kamel)

Die Kultur der Ambiguität

Thomas Bauer

The Culture of Ambiguity

For over a thousand years, Islamic societies in the Arab world nurtured a ›culture of ambiguity‹: disparate truth claims were permitted to coexist in the interest of peaceful cohabitation. Thus, in the fourteenth century, for instance, the existence of different versions of the Qur’an and the multitude of potential interpretations was seen as enriching. For many Muslims today it is a source of great vexation.

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English world rights (Columbia UP), Russia (Directmedia), Arabic World Rights (Al Kamel), Slovenia (Založba Krtina), Turkey (Iletisim)

Der eigene Gott

Ulrich Beck

The Personal God

At the beginning of the 21st century the world’s religions are facing radical transformations. They exist simultaneously alongside one another and all the other cultural creations and symbols, and if extracted from their temporal and spatial context, are open for general use, for fundamentalist or individual appropriation.

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English world rights (Polity), Spanish world rights (Paidós Ibérica), Chinese simplex rights (Shanghai Translation Publishing House), Brazilian Portuguese rights (Tempo Brasileiro), Italy (Laterza), Korea (Ghil), Japan (Iwanami Shoten), Czech Republic (Karolinum Press), Slovenia (Studentska Zalozba)

Rigorismus der Wahrheit

Hans Blumenberg

The Rigorism of Truth

»Moses the Egyptian« is an essay by Hans Blumenberg, in which he engages with two of the defining thinkers of the 20th Century: Sigmund Freud and Hannah Arendt. Written at the end of the 1980s and preserved in a folder marked »Forbidden Fragments«, the essay is one of the most spectacular texts in Blumenberg’s posthumous œuvre.

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English world rights (Cornell UP)

Diesseits von Eden

Hans Peter Duerr

This Side of Eden

Some people experience the presence of something divine when they listen to a piece of music. Others feel like they are possessed by a strange power when speaking in tongues or they feel a connection to the other side when they find themselves in deep trance and ecstasy. The mysterious, unfathomable can cause dread and fear but at the same time it fascinates us.

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Romania (Lebada Neagra)

Islam - Zivilisation oder Barbarei?

Alexander Flores

Islam – Civilization or Barbarism?

The debate on Islam is always a polemic one: salafism, sharia, women’s rights, Boko Haram, the IS – we have an opinion on all of them. But do we really know what’s hiding behind these phenomena? Alexander Flores provides an antidote to our lack of knowledge by dedicating this book to the facts.

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Im Bannkreis der Freiheit

Hans Joas

Under the Spell of Freedom

How do the history of religion and the history of political freedom relate to one another? The diversity of opinions on this in the fields of philosophy, the humanities and social sciences and in the public is vast and confusing. And yet, the sublime synthesis in which Hegel once united Christianity and political freedom is still of enormous guiding power for many – despite or maybe because of Friedrich Nietzsche’s influential provocations.

Rights available

Die Macht des Heiligen

Hans Joas

The Power of the Sacred

The Power of the Saint is the attempt to demystify »disenchantment«. In order to do so, Hans Joas has dedicated himself to exemplary cases of scientific engagement with religion since the 18th century. In a direct confrontation with Weber, he develops the outline of a theory that can satisfy religion’s potential to support existing power structures as well as critique them.

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France (Seuil), Netherlands (Lemniscaat), English edition available through Oxford UP

Die Sakralität der Person

Hans Joas

The Sacredness of the Person

A persistent debate over the last few decades has focused on the question: where does the concept of human rights originate? Does it come from our Christian-Jewish roots or is it an invention of the Enlightenment? It is neither one nor the other according to the social theoretician Hans Joas, who narrates quite a different history of human rights in his latest publication.

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Spanish rights Latin America (UNSAM Edita), Chinese simplex rights (Shanghai People’s Publishing House), Brazilian Portuguese rights (UNESP), France (Labor et Fides), Italy (Franco Angeli), Croatia (Breza)

Der Gottesbegriff nach Auschwitz

Hans Jonas

The Concept of God after Auschwitz

With a ceremonial address entitled The Concept of God After Auschwitz, Hans Jonas gave thanks for having received the Faculty of Protestant-Theology at the University of Tübingen’s 1984 Dr. Leopold-Lucas Prize which honored »both an oeuvre of comprehensive scholarship as well as the integrity and intensity of the effort through rational argument to give people living in a dangerous time an insight into and understanding of the necessity of an ethics of responsibility.«

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Brazilian Portuguese Rights (Paulus), France (Payot & Rivages), Italy (Il Nuovo Melangolo), Sweden (Faethon); previously published in the respective language / territory; rights available again: Chinese simplex rights (Huaxia)

Geschichte der Reformation in Deutschland

Thomas Kaufmann

History of the Reformation in Germany

The traditional interpretation of history influenced by Protestantism regarded »Luther’s deed« as a liberation from the »dark powers« of the papal church and an »end of the Middle Ages«. However, the late Middle Ages were neither »dark«, nor was Luther a luminous figure.

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French world rights (Labor Et Fides), Korea (Ghil);
Domestic Rights Sales: Bookclub Edition (WBG – published, rights reverted)

Der Koran als Text der Spätantike. Ein europäischer Zugang

Angelika Neuwirth

The Koran as a Text from Late Antiquity

Is the Koran a purely Islamic text and therefore foreign to predominantly Christian and Jewish cultures? Or rather, is it a new and wilful voice in the chorus of debates on Late Antiquity during which the theological foundations of Judaism and Christianity were also laid?

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English world rights (Oxford UP)

Der Koran

Hg.: Angelika Neuwirth

The Quran

Is the Quran a purely Islamic text and therefore foreign to us? Or is it not rather a new and unconventional voice in the concert of late antiquity debates in which the theological foundations of the Jewish and Christian religion were also laid down? It is not the Quran that must be reshaped as a result of new manuscript findings or with the help of linguistic experiments – it is our perspective of the Quran that needs to undergo a decisive change, if we wish to seek out its revolutionary originality.

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English world rights (Yale University Press)

Kommunismus als Religion

Michail Ryklin

Communism as Religion

The Bolsheviks were inspired by the faith – a kind of secular religion – in the possibility of radically changing their backward feudal society. From the outset, they declared an inexorable war on Orthodoxy, installed a system of communist rites, and produced effective propaganda for the achievements of the new regime. The Lenin Mausoleum became the centre of the Soviet Cult, and still harbours the embalmed corpse of the dead Party Chairman.

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Croatia (Fraktura), Greece (Epikentro)

Kampf der Fundamentalismen

Heinrich Wilhelm Schäfer

Battle of Fundamentalism

Is fundamentalism a result of a »collision of cultures?« How does it work? What is the reaction towards the modern, modified version? Does the purchasing of religious material play a part? What does complete fundamentalism mean?

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Nach dem Islamismus

Werner Schiffauer

After Islamism

The Milli Görüs Islamic Community is among the most controversial Turkish organizations in Europe. Supported by many years of field research, Werner Schiffauer draws a differentiated portrait of the community’s development.

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Turkey (Perspektif)

Wohlstand, Glück und langes Leben

Helwig Schmidt-Glintzer

Prosperity, Luck, and Longevity

Predictions were already being made in the 1980s that religion would once again have a future in China. In his book, Helwig Schmidt-Glintzer provides evidence of how this prognosis in present-day China proved true.

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Sabbatai Zwi

Gershom Scholem

Sabbatai Zwi

In his opus magnum Scholem reconstructs a biography that had a unique impact on the history of Judaism. The history of the Jewish faith, of mysticism and Kabbala, thousands of years old, form the background in front of which the story of Sabbatai Zwi (1626 – 1676) unfolds.

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Italy (Adelphi), Turkey (Alfa); previously published in the respective language / territory; rights available again: Japan (Hosei UP)

Gottes Eifer

Peter Sloterdijk

God's Zeal

The conflicts between the religions that have a common origin, i.e. the religions in the tradition of Abraham define our contemporary world to an unprecedented degree. In his essay, Peter Sloterdijk initially inquires into the politico-social and psychodynamic preconditions under which monotheism arose.

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English world rights (Polity Press), Spanish world rights (Siruela), Brazil (UNESP), Portugal (Relogio d’Agua), Arabic world rights (Librairie Orientale), France (Meta), Italy (Raffaello Cortina), Netherlands (Boom), Korea (Doddle Saeghim), Poland (Aletheia), Romania (Curtea Veche), Estonia (Tallinn University Press), Bosnia (Zenicke sveske)

Den Himmel zum Sprechen bringen

Peter Sloterdijk

Making the Heavens Speak

Detours are the most direct paths to the centre. Peter Sloterdijk’s new work is proof of this theory: Located beyond topicality, theopoetics is, on first glance, about the attempts to make God or the gods speak stored in the library of humanity: either they speak themselves, directly, or their deeds and thinking are reproduced indirectly by the poets.

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English world rights (Polity), Spanish world rights (Siruela), Brazilian Portuguese rights (Estação Liberdade), France (Payot & Rivages), Netherlands (Boom)

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