Director of studies at the EPHE (École Pratique des Hautes Etudes), PSL, chair of “Intellectual History of Contemporary Sunnism”, Dominique Avon has a degree in history and a diploma in Arabic. He was a lecturer at the University of Montpellier III, then Professor at the University of Le Mans. He taught in Egypt (1992-1994) and Lebanon (2004-2005). He has been a visiting professor in the United States (2014), Belgium (winter 2015-2016) and Italy (April-May 2020). He has established ongoing cooperations with scholars in Morocco, Tunisia, Switzerland, Germany, Russia and Canada.
He is a member of the laboratory GSRL-Groupe Sociétés, Religions, Laïcités (UMR 8582). Since 2020, he has been the director of the IISMM (Institute for the Study of Islam and Societies of the Muslim World), after having coordinated the HEMED Community (“Euro-Mediterranean History”), co-directed the IPRA (“Institute of Religious Pluralism and Atheism”) and chaired the AFHRC (“French Association of Contemporary Religious History”). He is a member of the LabEx haStec (“History and Anthropology of Knowledge, Techniques and Beliefs”), and is in charge of the DCIE collection “Dynamiques citoyennes en Europe” (Peter Lang editions).
Between 1996 and 2022, he wrote, edited or co-edited some twenty books, as well as eighty articles on contemporary religious history, mainly on Islam and Christianity. He has specialised in the study of ideas and doctrines, institutions of religious knowledge formation, and networks of intellectuals.
publication
MIDÉO No. 37: Recitation in the early centuries of Islam
The history of reciting the Quran has been rarely studied. This volume comprises most of the papers presented at the Third IDEO Conference held in Cairo in October 2020 on reciting in the early Isl...
publication
Luther and Mohammed. Western European Protestantism and Islam (16th-18th centuries)
Publisher’s presentation Autumn 1611: while visiting France, a young Dutch Protestant student refines his knowledge of Arabic with a Muslim of Castilian origin he met in the Paris region. Tho...
article
Original Sin and the Qur’an
The present article addresses the common view that the Qur’an has no doctrine of original sin. It begins by defining original sin with attention to the Bible and Christian tradition. Thereafter the...
videos
The 19th century as a new ‘axial era’. Some epistemological aspects of the authority crisis
Conference « Religious Authority in Islam », organised by the Centre for the Study of Cultures and Religions and the Research Unit of the Catholic University of Lyon (UCLy), on 18 and 19 November 2...
videos
Muslim-Christian Dialogue : the approach of the White Fathers
Involved in the Muslim world since its foundation by Bishop Charles Lavigerie in 1868, the Society of Missionaries of Africa, whose members are known as the White Fathers, has contributed to the em...
publication
The essentials of Islam
Today, Islam in Europe and the West arouses curiosity, mistrust and questions. This book summarises the foundations of this religion, its history, its currents and the challenges it faces today, in...
videos
Muslim as ‘Other’ in former Yugoslavia
Balkan Islam, and in particular that of the former Yugoslavia, is plural because of its ethnic diversity. However, the collective perception does not see it that way, due to a double homogenisation...
article
Jalāl Al-Dīn Al-Suyūṭī: An Historical Contextualization Between Life and Works
Jalāl al-Dīn al-Suyuṭī (1445-1505), as a religious scholar of the Egyptian Mamluk era, one of the most prominent scholars of the pre-modern Islamic world, is the most prolific author in all of ...