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This article is part of the TRAFO series “Emerging Topics. Insights from ‘Behind the Scenes’”. Today, we put the spotlight on the conference “‘Islam’ as an Epistemic Field: Imperial Entanglements and Orientalism in the German-Speaking World since 1870” which will take place 11–12 October 2018 in Berlin. The conference is a collaboration of the Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient Berlin (Research Cluster “Trajectories of Lives and Knowledge”) and the Freie Universität Berlin.Conference posterNils Riecken is a research fellow at the Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient (ZMO). He holds a PhD from Berlin Graduate School Muslim Cultures and Societies, Freie Universität Berlin where he graduated in 2013 with a study on “Abdallah Laroui and the Location of History. An Intellectual Biography”. In October 2012, he joined the Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient where he is now working in the BMBF research program “Muslim Worlds – World of Islam? Conceptions, Practices, and Crises of the Global”.You are one of the conveners of the conference “‘Islam’ as an Epistemic Field: Imperial Entanglements and Orientalism in the German-Speaking World since 1870”. Why did you organize this conference?“Islam” isat the center of current societal and academic debates in Germany. These highlypolitical debates revolve around such issues as the status and rights ofrefugees, of migrant workers, of Muslim women and headscarves, and the questionof whether “Islam” and “Muslims” can belong to a politically- and historically-constitutedentity called “Germany” – a nation-state that identifies itself as secular. The idea that “Islam” itself poses a majorpolitical “problem” for German politics has important historical precedents. ThisGerman history extends beyond 2001, 1990, 1945, 1918, and even 1870. Already atthe turn of the twentieth century, the German public discussed “the Islamicquestion” (“die Islamfrage”) and “Islamic policy” (“Islampolitik”) regarding Germancolonial policy. “Islam” constituted a “problem” to be analyzed, as theinfluential scholar of Islam (“Islamwissenschaftler”) Carl Heinrich Beckerwrote in the first issue of the then newly-established journal “Der Islam”(1910). Imperial Germany had not only been concerned with Protestantism andCatholicism in the so-called “culture wars” (“Kulturkampf”), but Islam too helda central role. The same applies to larger narratives of the German polity—thenotion that “German society” has successfully become “Westernized,” that it hadcompleted its long journey to the West, and thus completely embodies a secular foundationin contradistinction to “Islam” as a completely theological one. A history ofknowledge can critically address and inquire into how such narratives haveshaped practices of producing knowledge about “Islam.”We haveorganized this conference because there is a dearth of works concerned with a“history of knowledge” of “Islam” as a historically-constituted field of debateand state intervention in German-speaking settings that can address thesehistorical, epistemological, and political dimensions of discursive practicesand their varying degrees of institutionalization. To this end, the conferencebrings together for the first time historians, scholars in Islamic studies, andcritical secular scholars that have been concerned with this “German” historyof knowledge production on Islam in a transregional perspective. In the call for papers, you argued that Islam can be understood as an unmarked center of what is called German history. In your opinion, what is at stake in the public und scientific debates about “Islam” and “Muslims”, and what are the particularities of the German case?At stake inthose debates is no less than the raisond’étre of “Germany” as a sovereign nation-state, and its very grounding ina certain understanding of the political as a “democratic”, “secular”, “liberal”,“Western”, “tolerant”, polity. The question is who and whose traditions get tohave a say in the continuously-needed re-articulation of this grounding—onlythose who are deemed “German,” “secular,” “liberal”? Or also those coming fromelsewhere in terms of other traditions and other places? Knowledge producedabout “Islam” and “Muslims” forms part of such larger, historically-situatedrationalities. What wecurrently see is that struggles over how “Islam” and “Muslims” are seen anddiscursively defined in relation to what is authoritatively “German”  are tied to practices of racializing Muslims.One example is Thilo Sarrazin’s book Germany Abolishes Itself: How We ArePlaying with Our Future, in which Sarrazin’s “apocalyptic vision” (Meng2015) develops a biopolitical, racialized vision of a “German population”,where “Muslim migrants”, in having too many children are not “productive”enough and “conquer” Germany, what he makes look like a case of settlercolonialism. It is hardto stomach how such views can be circulated publicly in a nation-state whose verygrounding is the claim to have overcome racism after 1945. We must thereforecritically inquire into this narrative itself, the way it establishes a certainunderstanding of history, time, and politics. Moreover, as Gil Anidjar haspointed out, we must ask about the shared history of knowledge production aboutJews and Muslims, the links between the histories of Imperialism, racism,Orientalism, and anti-Semitism before and after 1945.What are the unique perspectives and insights that the participants might gain from attending your conference? Let us imagine these potential participants. If they are interested in gaining a broader and methodologically-ambitious perspective on current and past debates on “Islam” and “Muslims” as essential to questions of “German identity”, and how “Islam” is framed as “Islam” in these debates and practices, they will probably benefit from the way the conference brings together approaches from the global history of knowledge, global intellectual history, and genealogy. They will partake in what we see as a collective experiment of discussing fourteen highly interesting case studies to think through how “Islam” has long become an epistemic and thus political object of contention, tied to certain claims and rationalities that have been essential to the contested imagination of the political in the German-speaking world.Citation: “Islam” as an Epistemic Field: Imperial Entanglements and Orientalism in the German-Speaking World since 1870 –  Interview with Niels Riecken, in: TRAFO – Blog for Transregional Research, 09.10.2018, https://trafo.hypotheses.org/13722.