Bassam Tibi is since 2009 Professor emeritus of International Relations at the University of Göttingen where he taught from 1973 on until his retirement. In 2010 he was the Resnick scholar for the study of antisemitism at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. In 2011 he was chosen with no application and appointed as the visiting Koret Foundation Fellow at Stanford University but he decided in 2012 to return to retirement. Tibi is the author of the 2012-books: Islamism and Islam (Yale University Press) and: Islam in Global Politics. Conflict and Cross-Cultural Bridging (Routledge Press). Parallel to his retirement in 2009 Tibi published with Routledge (London and New York) his comprehensive life-time work on Islam under the title Islam’s Predicament with Modernity. Religious Reform and Cultural Change.

 
Born and educated in an Islamic culture in Damascus Tibi left 1962 to Germany for an academic training at the University of Frankfurt where he received his Ph.D in 1971. Hereafter he was habilitated to Dr. habil. at the University of Hamburg. In the years 1973 – 2009 Tibi served as the Georgia Augusta Professor of International Relations and director of International Studies at the University of Göttingen parallel to years-long appointments at Harvard and Cornell. Next to articles in leading academic journals and encyclopedias Tibi published 30 books written between 1969 and 2009 in German and 10 major monographs written in English. The US-books were completed at Harvard, Berkeley Cornell, and lately Yale. Among his books in English is the classic: Arab Nationalism. Between Islam and the Nation-State (three editions 1980, 1990, 1997). This monograph was followed by these three major US-books: Islam, World Politics and Europe (Routledge, 2008) next to the new editions of these two monographs: The Challenge of Fundamentalism (2002, University of California Press) and Islam Between Culture and Politics (Palgrave 2005).

Tibi’s published major articles appeared in Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions, in Theoria, Journal of Social and Political Theory, The Fletcher Forum of World Affairs, The Journal of Democracy, as well as in Telos and Studies in Ethnicity and Nationalism, Middle East Quarterly, Journal of Church and State, and in The Current (Cornell University). Earlier, he published major articles in Human Rights Quarterly, International Journal of Middle East Studies, Millennium, Theory-Culture-Society among others.

Tibi’s awards and affiliations are listed below. He is often blamed for being Europeanized, though a Muslim, who has been educated in Damascus in Islamic and Western schools. In his birthplace he received his high school education with the French Baccalaureat. In 1962 he came to Germany to study Social Science, Philosophy and History. His academic training was at the Wolfgang von Goethe University of Frankfurt/Main where he obtained his first Ph.D. in 1971. Among his academic teachers there (Frankfurt School) were the Holocaust survivors Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, in addition to Jürgen Habermas, Iring Fetscher and the psycho-analyst Alexander Mitscherlich. Tibi was “habilitated” to Dr. habil. (German Super PhD) hereafter at the University of Hamburg.

Career

Tibi’s academic career began as assistant and later on as associate professor at the universities of Frankfurt and Heidelberg 1970 - 1973. Hereafter, Dr. Tibi was then appointed 1973 as full Professor with a tenure for International Relations at the University of Goettingen, where he remained until his retirement 2009. Tibi never received any further appointment at other German universities in an academic culture of ethnic exclusion. But in the year 1988 he was appointed by a Royal Resolution of the Norwegian King Olav IV Professor of Comparative Politics as successor of Stein Rokkan at the University of Bergen/Norway. For purely family reasons (German wife) Tibi decided to accept the honor, but to decline the offer and to stay in Goettingen. In an appreciation by the then University President, the most decent scholar, the late Norbert Kamp, funds were provided for establishing the Center of International Affairs of which Professor Tibi was the Director until his retirement and the dissolution of the center 2009. At this center Tibi established the new approach of Islamology as a study of Islam and conflict in society and in international politics. This center was closed in September 2009 and International Studies were abolished altogether at the University of Göttingen along with Tibi’s retirement. The oldest university in North Germany decided to dispense with International Relations in an age  of intensifying globalization.

Since the beginning of his affiliation at Harvard in 1982 and throughout the following decades up to 2009 Prof. Tibi established global networks for teaching and research in Islamology as a social-scientific study of Islam and conflict in society and in international politics. Pursuant to  that appointment of Prof. Tibi at Harvard the Goettingen International Relations Center  was linked to international networks and gained a reputation through books completed at Harvard. This prestige was enriched through 18 visiting professorships in four continents. These were inter alias, in the United States (next to Harvard, Princeton, Berkeley, Michigan Ann Arbor, and most recently Cornell and Yale) Turkey, Sudan, Cameroun, and 2003/04 in Switzerland (St. Gallen), 2003 Indonesia and 2005 in Singapore. The honorary A.D. White Professorship-at-Large at Cornell University, USA is added to these appointments. Between 2005 and 2009 Tibi also taught classes at the Diplomatic Academy in Vienna on Islam and post-bipolar world politics. On leave from Goettingen and Cornell he spent his sabbatical in the academic year 2004/05 first as a Visiting Scholar returning to Harvard University and then as a Senior Research Fellow at the Asia Research Center/National University of Singapore. The conclusion of this career in the academic year 2008/09 Tibi had an appointment as visiting research fellow at Yale University. The major visiting appointment among the numerous ones was the one between 1982 and 2000 at Harvard, where Prof. Tibi was affiliated to that university with a few interruptions in a variety of capacities, the latest of which was The Harvard Bosch Fellow 1998-2000 next to his earlier Volkswagen Fellowship at the Harvard Weatherhead Center for International Affairs. Several books were completed there at Coolidge Hall. Two of these books were published in association with Harvard University. Next to Harvard are the Cornell and Yale appointments. In Spring 2008 Tibi was senior research fellow at the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies in Washington D.C. to which he returned as the Resnick Scholar for the study of antisemitism 2010" .

Next to his 18 regular teaching appointments, Prof. Tibi lectured worldwide at least in thirty universities in all five continents including all Ivy League universities in the US in addition to Stanford, UC Berkeley, UC Los Angeles and Denver/Colorado and Washington D.C.. Tibi lectured at various universities in the Middle East, North, West and East Africa, South and Southeast Asia as well as in Australia. Between 1999 and 2001 he was in a row of three years among the Community of the Fellows of The World Economic Forum/WEF in Davos.

Prof. Tibi delivered a variety of prominent lectures such as The Bosch Lecture (Stuttgart 1994), The Global Village Lecture (Stockholm 1997), The Vienna Lecture (Hofburg/Vienna, twice 1999 and 2000) The Anne and André Leysen Lecture (Louvain/Belgium 2005), and many others. He also had the great honor to speak at the historical Paulskirche in Frankfurt am Main twice on the occasion of two historical events: First, at an BMW-Quandt-sponsered event after the Gulf War 1991 and second, after 9/11, 2001. Both lectures were directly fully televised.

Publications

Tibi published in Arabic, German and English. The work of Prof. Tibi completed in English is published in translations into 16 languages. The core of these publications are 30 books written in German (translated in 13 languages) and ten further books written directly in English. His work deals with conflict and modernity in Islamic civilization with a focus on the Middle East, the Mediterranian region, and Southeast Asia. His recent focus has been Islamic migration to Europe. Tibi is also an expert on jihadism’s irregular war and the religious fundamentalism of political Islam. The discipline he established for dealing with these issues is Islamology. Additionally, Bassam Tibi has been the co-author of a few dozens of books that grew from international research projects such as: The Fundamentalism Project of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (five volumes), the Culture Matters Research Project/Fletcher School (two volumes), The Human Rights Project/Wilson Center. From 1968 onwards, his articles and essays were published in leading journals such as International Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, Millenium, The Fletcher Forum of World Affairs, Religion-Staat-Gesellschaft, Human Rights Quarterly, Middle East Journal. His most recent articles were published in these journals: Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions, Journal of Democracy, Studies in Ethnicity and Nationalism, Theoria, Middle East Quarterly and The Current. Encyclopedias such as The Oxford Encyclopedia of Modern Islam, Routledge Encyclopedia of Government and Politics, Encyclopedia of Democracy and Encyclopedia of Non-Violent Action as well as three recent Sage Encyclopedias (2009-12) include Tibi’s articles and entries. He was a consulting editor of Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions and of Theoria and was in the Advisory Board of The International Journal of Humanities, and of Religion-Staat-Gesellschaft.

Next to his major three monographs listed at the beginning of this CV the following successful books, written and published in English, are to be mentioned: Arab Nationalism, Between Islam and the Nation State, published 1980 and in a third edition 1997. The Crisis of modern Islam (Utah University Press 1988), Islam and the Cultural Accommodation of Social Change (Westview 1990, reprinted 1991), Conflict and War in the Middle East (St. Martin’s Press 1993, new expanded edition published jointly with Harvard 1998).

Professor Tibi is board member of many significant institutions and the recipient of many prizes. The then President of Germany, Roman Herzog, decorated him in 1995 with the “Bundesverdienstkreuz” First Class. This Cross of Merits is the highest Medal of the State. It was awarded to Prof. Tibi for his accomplishments, in particular for his mediation between the civilizations. In 2003 he received at the elite school ETH in Zurich the annual prize of the Swiss Foundation for European Awareness. He was also board member of CIVIS Foundation of the German ARD television and was earlier on the board of the Bosch Foundation, as well as a member of the Goethe Institute Assembly for five years. Throughout the 1990s he was a frequent contributor to German media and newspapers, among others for Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (1987 - 2000) and Der Spiegel (1992 - 2000). Tibi retired completely by September 2009 to start a new life in a retreat from scholarship, politics and media. This happens with some bitterness over the annihilation of the work Tibi completed in Germany and over the related exclusion, as well as the closing of the center he established. This is the background of Tibi’s research interest in Ethnicity in Europe and his contribution to the Stanford University Press book on Ethnic Europe (2010), edited by Roland Hsu. Despite all of these odds Tibi expresses deep gratitude to the University of Göttingen and foremost to his former German associates in the acknowledgement to his U.S. conclusive book Islamism and Islam published 2012 by Yale University Press.

New Book Release

Islamism and Islam Yale University Press 2012)

Islam in Global Politics Conflict and cross-civilizational bridging (Routledge 2012)

Islam's Predicament with Modernity Religious reform and cultural change (Routledge 2009)