Thread by @HusseinAboubak

No, no, no. Muslim-German relations didn't start with anti-imperialism. They go way deeper than that. It was German Orientalists who discovered and uncovered Islamic civilization. By 18th century, classical Islam had almost disappeared. It degenerated into vulgar saint worship /1

in slums filled with disease and ignorance. What now is recognized as the canon of classical Islam, all the works of theology, law, kalam, hermeneutics, Quranic exegesis, etc. were all forgotten. It was Prussian, Austrian, and Hungarian scholars that dug all those up. Germans /2

were the ones who made Orientalism in the 19th century and rediscovered Islamic civilization and history. This created a close affinity and admiration on the highest intellectual level possible between Muslims and Germany from 19th century upward. To understand this you have /3

to undo the thick mist of the terrible Leftist ideology of today. Before Edward Said made Orientalism into a dirty word, many Muslim intellectuals held deep admiration and appreciation for Orientalists even if they disagreed with them on many fronts. They realized they were /4

to be thanked for rediscovering their religion. To this day, Germany is a major center of Islamic studies. The fascination with Islam also had a major effect on 19th century Germany and featured in the writings of all major German philosophers and thinkers from Kant to Nietzsche.

So this is more than politics, more than Nazis, more than the British, and more than just antisemitism. This is the story of the globalization of modernity. This also continues throughout all modernity, through post-modernism that also used Islam as a parody of the West.

In the process of this cross-pollination, Muslim thinkers acquired "totality" as a way of cognition. Thinking in totality is foreign to both Judaism and Islam, both religions based on the analytical Jewish way of thinking, and not a "total" way of thinking. This is one /

of major differences between Athens and Jerusalem. "In the beginning, God created heavens and the earth.." and not the totality of the cosmos.

Thinking in totality is the way of thinking the led to totalitarian political philosophy. Total man, total society, total world, total ideas, total solution. Modern Islam is part of this world, the total idea of Islam, and the total Muslim society is engaged in total worship.If /

you forget all you think you know about Islam and go to classical books of Islamic law and Islamic thought you will not find this at all. You will find just an analytical legal way of thinking. The total thinking is projected backward on all Islamic civilizations (PLURAL)

There is also the question of Sufism that was immensely popular among the German romantics and was used as an imaginative source for imaginative esoteric existential hermeneutics. This is obviously an oversimplified rudimentary sketch of possible ways to think about the

the intellectual history of modernity in a globalized context and requires a significant amount of research to examine.