Theobald, Simon
Junior Fellow: October 2021–September 2022
Research Project: Educating Doubt: Scepticism and Certainty in the Translation and Transmission of Knowledge in a Modern Shi’ite Community
This project, based on eleven months of ethnographic field research, proposes to analyse how the language of philosophical and religious scepticism is communicated, translated, and transmitted by multi-lingual “Islamists”—both clerics and lay persons—associated with the Islamisches Zentrum Hamburg, a major centre for the Shi’ite community in Germany and one affiliated with religious figures representing conservative elements within Iran. Despite engagement by leading liberal intellectuals in the Shi’a world (for example, Abdolkarim Soroush), the concept of religious scepticism typically plays a subordinate role in the theology and philosophy of Iran-based Shi’ite “Islamist” movements, which instead tend to stress a vocabulary rooted in a moral universe structured by concepts like certainty, divine truth, and perfection. By examining how religiously conservative institutions and communities engage with, translate, and transmit these conceptual inventories of certainty and scepticism in the liberal socio-political order of post-reunification Germany, rather than presenting an intellectual impasse, we are afforded a fertile opportunity to explore both the limitations and potential extensions of religious scepticism.
Simon Theobald is a postdoctoral fellow and holds a PhD in anthropology from the Australian National University in Canberra, Australia.