"I can reach young Muslims in Germany and other countries"

It is sometimes enough to drive one to despair. For twenty years, Islam scholar Thomas Bauer has been working hard to create a nuanced image of Islamic culture, writing books and articles, giving interviews, and speaking with politicians. And then what happens' Germany is suddenly talking about "barbaric hordes of Muslim men gang-raping women", or about whether politicians of the Alternative für Deutschland (Alternative for Germany; AfD) are guilty of hate speech in their tweets. But fortunately for him - and for his research - Bauer has a tendency not to lose hope. "I build upon the force of the arguments", says the 56-year-old about the perception of Islam in Germany. He will not be able to banish the - deliberately - wrong ideas held by people with prejudices. But his depictions of the enormous cultural diversity in the tradition of Islam find a sympathetic audience among young, educated Muslims in Germany and other countries - among those, "looking for a third way between a rigid, conservative Islam and a superimposed, liberal Islam that seeks to break with all traditions." And fortunately - again! - Bauer has developed a concept for his literary-studies view of "a different history of Islam", a concept that has become a hermeneutic key for under-standing Islamic culture better and that has been repeatedly taken up in a short space of time in cultural studies: namely, "tolerance of ambiguity", by which Bauer means the ability or lack of ability of a person or a society, "to endure equivocality, to allow conflicting values and truths to stand side-by-side without insisting on the validity of one's own convictions".