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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)

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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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 (SPPH), 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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Chinese simplex rights (Huaxia), Brazilian Portuguese Rights (Paulus), France (Payot & Rivages), Italy (Il Nuovo Melangolo), Sweden (Faethon)

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 US)

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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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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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)

Im Schatten des Sinai

Peter Sloterdijk

In the Shadow of Mount Sinai

The reflections on the theory and history of religion which Peter Sloterdijk outlined in Gottes Eifer (2007; translated as God’s Zeal, Polity 2009) and Du mußt dein Leben ändern (2009; translated as You Must Change Your Life, Polity 2012) attracted a great deal of interest, but have also given rise to a number of misunderstandings and critical objections.

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English world rights (Polity), Poland (Aletheia)

Nach Gott

Peter Sloterdijk

After God

In his epoch-making book Spheres, which describes globalization from its beginnings to its state at the end of the 20th century, Peter Sloterdijk characterizes God as the »ultimate source of insurance coverage«. This assumption common to all (monotheistic, at least) religions unleashes paradoxes that had devastating consequences from the Middle Ages to modernity: the fundamentalism that has been triumphing since the turn of the century is the worst repercussion.

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English world rights (Polity), Spanish world rights (Siruela), Brazilian Portuguese rights (Vozes), Italy (Cortina)

Domestic Rights Sales: German Book Club (WBG)

Manual für den Kampf der Kulturen

Stefan Weidner

Manual for the Clash of Cultures

In the mid 1990s when Samuel Huntington presented his theory on the clash of cultures, he was met by widespread repudiation. Meanwhile, the conflict with Islam has estab-lished itself in the media as an ongoing issue and one cannot but speak of a real clash of cultures.

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