The German-Syrian political scientist and author is an expert on the Arab world and political Islam. Starting in 1965, Bassam Tibi studied social sciences and philosophy, under Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno among others, as well as history at the University of Frankfurt. He completed his doctorate there in 1971 with a dissertation on Arab Nationalism. From 1973 until his retirement in 2009, he was Professor for International Relations at Göttingen University. Tibi also held several other professorship and guest professorships, including at the University of St. Gallen, the Islamic University of Jakarta in Indonesia and Harvard University.
Several terms coined by Tibi are influential in the German and European discourse on migration, such as “Leitkultur”, parallel society, Euro-Islam and Sharia Islam. His “Theory of Half-Modernity” is a critical examination of developmental tendencies in societies that are predominantly Islamic, in which Tibi notes a partial modernisation in the field of science and technology with a simultaneous rejection of the worldview of cultural modernity.
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