Itzchak Weismann

Itzchak Weismann (Hebrew: יצחק ויסמן; born on 14 September 1961) is an Israeli historian and full professor in the Department of the History of the Middle East at Haifa University.

Weismann's work focuses on modern Islam and his research interests include the Salafis, the Muslim Brothers and the Sufis in the Middle East and South Asia, religious preaching and interfaith dialogue.

thesis, under the direction of Professor Butrus Abu-Manneh, was dedicated to the life and teachings of Said Hawwa, the principal ideologue of the Syrian Muslim Brothers under the rule of Hafez al-Assad.

As head of the Jewish-Arab Center he worked for the promotion of mutual understanding and connections between the communities through many conferences that brought together Israeli government ministers and Members of Knesset, academics, men of religion and leaders of social organizations.

It examines how these movements emerged from the pre-modern Islamic tradition, which had been dominated by the Sufi brotherhoods, and the ideological and organizational innovations they introduced in the wake of the encounter with the West and in light of modernization processes in the Muslim world.

[9] The first study shows that the Syrian Muslim Brothers, who actively participated in the election campaigns of the 1950s and served as Members of Parliament and ministers until the Ba'th takeover in 1963, favored democratic government, subject to the tenets of Islam.

In the past few years Weismann has devoted ever more time to the study of the evolution of the Salafi trend, to which belong the Jihadi organizations of al-Qaeda and the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS).

He tries to elucidate how the liberal-religious thought of the early enlightened Salafis of the late nineteenth century, which sought to balance selective appropriation of Western ideas and values with a return to the original Islam of the 'forefathers' (the Salaf), degenerated into the brutal violence we witness today.

Within this framework he published a biography of Abd al-Rahman al-Kawakibi, among the most eloquent spokesmen of early Salafism,[11] along with an editing a Hebrew translation of his main oeuvre, The Mother of Cities.