Activity: Hosting a visitor › Hosting an academic visitor › Academic
Description
The emergence of the reformist Salafi Islam was from the beginning a result of a multi-level interaction between Muslim societies and modern Europe. In this process, which accompanied the transformation of the autochthonous Islamic worldview through the transfer of modern European concepts, Muslim travelers to Europe played a very decisive role. Long before the era of telecommunication, their eyewitness accounts were considered as one of the most important sources of information on Europe, its culture, and its envied technical and scientific progress. But contrary to the assumption that these visitors to Europe always represented the spearhead of liberalization and modernization in their societies, this group seems to have produced some of the fiercest critics of the emulation of Europe in the interwar and during WWII period.