Carl Heinrich Becker

Carl Heinrich Becker (12 April 1876 – 10 February 1933) was a German orientalist and politician in Prussia. 1921 and 1925–1930 he served as Minister for Culture in Prussia (independent). He is one of the founders of the study of the contemporary Middle East and an important reformer of the system of higher education in the Weimar Republic.

Becker was born a banker's son in Amsterdam. He attended universities at Lausanne, Heidelberg, and Berlin, and travelled in Spain, the Sudan, Greece, and Turkey before earning his doctorate in 1899.

In 1902, Becker became a privatdozent for semitic philology at the University of Heidelberg, where he came in contact with Max Weber. After his habilitation in 1908, he was appointed Professor of History and Culture of the Orient at the newly founded Kolonialinstitut and Director of the Seminar for History and Culture of the Orient in Hamburg. In 1910 he founded Der Islam, a journal for the history and culture of the Middle East, and was its first editor. In 1913 he accepted an offer from Bonn University, where he was Professor of Oriental Philology.

Becker and his colleague Martin Hartmann were the first who introduced modern sociological thinking into Islamic studies. He was an opponent of the Kulturkreistheorie (theory of cultural circles) of Ernst Troeltsch.

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