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Massimo Campanini

 “I remember that, when I taught history and institutions of the Islamic world at Urbino university in the late 1990s, sometimes my classes were literally empty. After 9/11 the classes were filled up of students (I was teaching in Milan at that time), but how much was their interest sincere? Actually, popular interest in Islam is strongly conditioned by contingent outward circumstances and today xenophobic  and Islamophobia propaganda does not help to develop the field.  Again: Italy is a parochial country.

I believe to be a free-thinker, normally antagonist towards consolidate [sic] and mainstream positions, both in thinking and in politics. I am not comfortable with the Western society I live therein because I believe it is grounded on hypocrisy and false prejudices. The main one is the conviction that we Europeans and Americans (mostly white of course, WASP) are depositary of absolute and universal truths, eternal, out of history – we would be indeed the makers of the end of history. Europeans and Americans are the Biblical elected people (remember the Pilgrim Fathers) and God incarnated for us; therefore we have the burden to civilize the world. Since my early youth I was uncomfortable with this perspective. Unfortunately, Westerners predicate peace, but often wage war. It is not by chance that one of the heroes of my youth was Giordano Bruno, a “heretic” thinker  burnt by Roman Inquisition.”

Italian scholar Massimo Campanini (1954-2020)


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