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Christoph Herzog is professor of Turcology at the University of Bamberg, Germany. He studied Middle Eastern and modern European history in Freiburg, Germany and in Istanbul. He works on late Ottoman history and modern Turkish historiography.

Mashrutiyyat and Modernity. A Historiographical Predicament: The constitutional revolutions in the Ottoman Empire and in Iran at the beginning of the 20th century have each for itself received considerable academic attention. In 2011 Nader Sohrabi has published a study that took things to a new level by a comparative perspective on the two revolutions and a view to their global context (Revolution and Constitutionalism in the Ottoman Empire and Iran). In the same year Thomas Bauer has published his much-lauded work on Islam as a culture of ambiguity (The Culture of Ambiguity - An Alternative History of Islam / original title: Die Kultur der Ambiguität. Eine andere Geschichte des Islams).

Both books offer partly complementary and partly conflicting perspectives on modernity. The paper will confront these two perspectives in a critical reading and explore the meta-historical environment in which academic texts offering explanations of modernity are bound to operate.