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Katajun Amirpur (German:[kataːˈjuːnamiːɐ̯ˈpuːɐ̯];Persian:کتایون امیرپور[kætɒːˈjuːnɛæmiːɾˈpuːɾ]; born 1971) is a German-Iranian professor ofIslamic Studies at theUniversity of Cologne.
Amirpur graduated in Iranian Studies at theUniversity of Bonn. She subsequently taught at theFree University of Berlin, theUniversity of Bamberg and the University of Bonn. In 2000, she was awarded her doctorate by the University of Bamberg on theShiiteexegesis of theQur'an with a thesis on the "Thought and Influence ofAbdolkarim Soroush in the Islamic Republic of Iran".[1] In February 2010, she was appointed Assistant Professor for Modern Islamic World with a focus on Iran by the university board of the University of Zurich. In June 2011, she was appointed Professor of Islamic Studies at the University of Hamburg. She is one of the editors of the magazineBlätter für deutsche und internationale Politik.Her father, Manutschehr Amirpur, was an Iraniancultural attaché under ShahMohammad Reza Pahlavi. Her mother is German.
She also writes for theSüddeutsche Zeitung,taz andDie Zeit,[2] as well as comments for the German radio stations,DLF andWDR.
Amirpur lives inCologne. Until 2020, she was married to the orientalistNavid Kermani.[3]
Commenting on the internal political situation in Iran after the victory of conservatives in the2004 Iranian legislative election she wrote:
Responding to an interview question about the2006 Idomeneo controversy she observed:
In an article on the current debate about Muslim women, she concluded:
In March 2008, Amirpur wrote in theSüddeutsche Zeitung that "the danger of a nuclear Iran, still nurturing its fantasies of the annihilation of Israel, is artificially talked up in order to justify a military strike against Iran." This arose from a statement by Iranian PresidentMahmoud Ahmadinejad which he made at the Tehran conference "A World without Zionism" on 26 October 2005, which had reportedly been mistranslated by the "big western news agencies".[7]
MEMRI translated the sentence as follows: "This regime that is occupying Qods [Jerusalem] must be eliminated from the pages of history."[8] The English translation criticized by Amirpur, which was used by Iranian state radioIRIB and then by many other agencies was[9] "Israel must be wiped off the map".She herself translated the sentence as "This regime ... must vanish from the pages of history."[7] Amirpur was heavily criticized for this article in some quarters. The Islamic scholar Mariella Ourghi accused her in theSüddeutsche Zeitung of "splitting hairs" since there was no change to the "meaning and purpose " of the sentence.[10]
Benjamin Weinthal wrote in theJerusalem Post that German critics of the Iranian regime have accused Amirpur of downplaying the threat faced by Israel and the West from Iran.[11]
In response to the question of how many Iranians sharedAhmadinejad's Holocaust denial, Amirpur stated that "the average Iranian feels no solidarity with the Arabs", that there was little support for the Palestinians among Iranians, and that Ahmadinejad was not addressing Iranians but Arabs, and instead saying what 95 percent of Arabs thought.[12][13]
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