Notes on Contributors
Nelly Amri
is Professor of Medieval History at La Manouba University in Tunis. Her research focuses on the history of Sufism and sainthood in Ifrīqiya and the medieval Maghrib. Her main publications include Croire au Maghreb médiéval. La sainteté en question XIVe–XVe siècle, Cerf (Collection Islam. Nouvelles approches, 2019); Sîdî Abû Sa’îd al-Bâjî (1156/1231) (Contraste Editions, 2015); Un « manuel » ifrîqiyen d’adab soufi. Paroles de sagesse de ‘Abd al-Wahhâb al-Mzûghî (m. 675/1276) compagnon de Shâdhilî (Contraste Editions, 2013); La sainte de Tunis. Présentation et traduction de l’hagiographie de ‘Âisha al-Mannûbiyya (m. 665/1267) (Sindbad-Actes Sud, 2008); Les saints en islam: les messagers de l’espérance. Sainteté et eschatologie au Maghreb aux XIVe et XVe siècles (Cerf, Collection Patrimoines Islam, 2008); and, co-edited with Denis Gril, Saint et sainteté dans le christianisme et l’islam. Le regard des sciences de l’homme (Maisonneuve et Larose, 2007).
Emma Aubin-Boltanski
is a social anthropologist and senior researcher at the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS). In 2007, she published her PhD dissertation on two Muslim pilgrimages in Palestine (“Pèlerinages et Nationalisme en Palestine”). Since 2008, she has undertaken research on visionary experiences and Virgin Mary apparitions in Lebanon, Syria, and Egypt (Le corps de la Passion. Experiences religieuses et politiques d’une mystique au Liban, éditions EHESS, 2018), eschatological expectations in the contemporary world, and on the shifting roles of Syrian women in the context of revolution, war, and exile. On the latter issue she translated with Nibras Chehayed from Arabic into French testimonies gathered by the Syrian novelist Samar Yazbek in 19 femmes (Babelio, 2019).
Sana Chavoshian
is a post-doc researcher at Leibniz Zentrum Moderner Orient (ZMO) in Berlin. She is an affiliated member of the Centre for Advanced Studies in Humanities and Social Sciences “Multiple Secularities: Beyond Modernities, Beyond the West” in Leipzig University. Her fields of interest include anthropology of Islam, affect and atmosphere theories, martyrdom, military anthropology, secularism, material religion, and justice movements in the Middle East. She has published articles in Historical Social Research, Religion and Society, GENDER, Asiatische Studien, and Soziale Welt.
Rachida Chih
is a senior researcher at the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) and a member of the Center for Turkish, Ottoman, Balkan, and Central Asian Studies (CETOBAC), École des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS), Paris. She has done extensive research on the history, literature, and anthropology of Sufism and Sufi orders in early modern and modern Egypt and Morocco. Her most recent published works include Sufism in Ottoman Egypt: Circulation, Renewal and Authority in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (Routledge, 2019); “The Apogee and Consolidation of Sufi Teachings and Organizational Forms (1453–1683)” in The Wiley-Blackwell History of Islam and Islamic Civilization (Wiley-Blackwell, 2018); and Sufism, Literary Production and Printing in the Nineteenth Century, co-edited with Catherine Mayeur- Jaouen and Rüdiger Seesemann (Nomos Verlagsgesellschaft, 2015).
Vincent Geisser
is a sociologist, political scientist, and researcher at the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS). His recent publications include “French Muslims: A Silent Community?”, in Facing Terrorism in France: New Insights into the 2015 Paris Attacks (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021); “The Imaginary Shiite: The New Other for French Islam?”, Revue des mondes musulmans et de la Méditerranée 145 (2019); and La grande épreuve. Les musulmans de France face au terrorisme (Éditions de l’Atelier, 2016).
Denis Gril
is an emeritus professor at the University of Aix-Marseille (AMU-France) and a member of IREMAM (Institut de Recherches et d’Études sur le Monde arabe et musulman). His research focuses on the history of Sufism, the work of Ibn al-ʿArabī, and Sufi exegesis of the Qurʾān. He is the author and co-author of various works, including the Ibn al-ʿArabī translation Le dévoilement des effets du voyage and Le Livre de l’Arbre et des quatre oiseaux (L’éclat, 1994, 2015). He has also translated and published La Risala de Safi al-Din Ibn Abi l-Mansur Ibn Zafir: Biographies des maîtres spirituels connus par un cheikh égyptien du viie/xiiie siècle (Institut Français d’Archéologie Orientale, 1986). He recently published Le Serviteur de Dieu. La figure de Muhammad en spiritualité musulmane (Le Cerf, 2022).
Amine Hamidoune
obtained his PhD at the University of Aix-Marseille (AMU-France). His thesis is dedicated to the development of an Islamic piety centred on the Prophet Muḥammad, through the practice of the “prayer on the Prophet” (“La pratique de la ‘prière sur le prophète’ en Islam”, 2012). He is currently doing research on the thought of the Moroccan Muslim thinker Shaykh Abdessalem Yassine (d. 2012), founder of the religious association Justice and Spirituality (al-ʿAdl wa-l-Iḥsān), focusing on Yassine’s ideas and programme for an Islamic revival through a method centred on the Prophetic path (al-minhāj al-nabawī).
David Jordan
is coordinator of the German side of the ANR/DFG “The Presence of the Prophet” project team and research associate for Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies at Ruhr University Bochum. His research focuses on the entanglement of religion and politics in the modern history and contemporary era of the Middle East (particularly Iraq and Iran), Arab nationalism, and Sufism. Recently, he published State and Sufism in Iraq: Building a “Moderate Islam” under Saddam Husayn (Routledge, 2022); “Sufism, Subjectivity and Parapsychology: Refashioning the Dirbāsha Ritual Among Sufis in Modern Iraq”, Asiatische Studien – Études Asiatiques 75/3 (2021); “‘So Let Today Be All the Arabs Muḥammad’: The Prophet in the Discourse of the Iraqi Baʿth Party”, in The Presence of the Prophet in Early Modern and Contemporary Islam: Heirs of the Prophet: Authority and Power (Brill, 2021); and as co-editor The Presence of the Prophet in Early Modern and Contemporary Islam: Heirs of the Prophet: Authority and Power (Brill, 2021).
Hanan Karam
holds an MA in Islamic and Religious Studies and currently works as a doctoral candidate in Islamic Studies on her thesis “Transnational Life of Northern Moroccan Imazighen in the Ruhr Area” at Ruhr University Bochum. Her research focuses on Moroccans in Germany and Europe, Imazighen, and Thmazight, as well as on the Moroccan-Arabic dialect, 3arabizi, and the history, politics, society, and culture of Morocco. Her recent publications include “‘3arabizi’ – (Marokkanisches) Internet-Arabisch als transnationale Lösungsstrategie der Diaspora” (Jusur, 2020) and “Imazighen in Deutschland und das B-Wort” (dis:orient, 2021).
Kai Kresse
is Professor of Social and Cultural Anthropology at the Free University of Berlin and Vice-Director of Research at Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient (ZMO), Berlin. Previously, he was an associate professor at MESAAS, Columbia University, New York, a lecturer in social anthropology at the University of St Andrews, and Evans-Pritchard lecturer, All Souls College, Oxford, in 2005. His research interests include Islam in (East) Africa; the Swahili coast and the Western Indian Ocean; the anthropology of knowledge, thinkers, and intellectual practice; African philosophy; and Southern theory. His publications include the monographs Swahili Muslim Publics and Postcolonial Experience (Indiana University Press, 2018) and Philosophising in Mombasa: Islam, Knowledge and Intellectual Practice on the Swahili Coast (Edinburgh University Press, 2007).
Jamal Malik
studied in Bonn (MA 1982), acquired his doctorate from Heidelberg (1989), and completed his post-doctorate at Bamberg (1994). In 1998, he was appointed Head and Chair of Religious Studies, University of Derby. Since February 1999 he is Chair of Islamic Studies at the University of Erfurt. He is a member of the European Academy of Sciences and Arts, and Fellow of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland. He is the co-editor of Culture of Daʿwa: Islamic Preaching in the Modern World (The Utah University Press, 2020) and Sufism East and West: Mystical Islam and Cross-cultural Exchange in the Modern World (Brill, 2019), and author of Islam in South Asia (Brill, 2008; Black Swan, 2012 (reprint)).
Youssef Nouiouar
holds a PhD in Sociology and Islamology from Paul Valéry University of Montpellier and is an associate researcher at the Laboratory of Studies and Research in Sociology and Ethnology in Montpellier (LERSEM). His recent publications include “L’islam traditionnel de sensibilité marocaine en France”, in Les minorités religieuses en France (Bayard, 2019) and “Le métier d’imam en France”, al-Afkar (2016).
Luca Patrizi
obtained his PhD at the University of Aix-Marseille (AMU-France) in co-tutoring with the University of Naples “L’Orientale” with a thesis entitled “The Divine Banquet: Formation and Development of the Notion of adab in Islam, from Its Origins to the Literature of the ādāb al-ṣūfiyya”. He teaches Islamic Studies at the University of Turin and Islamic Theology at the University of Pavia. He has been a research fellow at the Universities of Geneva, Sorbonne-Paris, Turin, Bonn, Exeter, and currently at the University of Naples “L’Orientale”. His interests lie in theological and ethical issues and the doctrines and practices of Islamic esotericism. His recent publications include “Holy War of Images: New Islamic Religious Cinema between Ramadan Series and Internet Streaming”, Journal of Religion, Media and Digital Culture 10/2 (2021) and “Sufi Terminology of Power”, in Handbook of Sufi Studies, Volume 1: Sufi Institutions (Brill, 2020).
Thomas Pierret
is a senior researcher at the University of Aix-Marseille (AMU-France). His research focuses on politics and religion in modern Syria. He is the author of “Religious Governance in Syria amid Territorial Fragmentation”, in Islamic Institutions in Arab States (Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2021) and Religion and State in Syria: The Sunni Ulama from Coup to Revolution (Cambridge University Press, 2013).
Stefan Reichmuth
was trained in Berlin and Münster, then worked at Bayreuth University and later as Professor of Arabic and Islamic Studies at Ruhr University Bochum until his retirement. He conducted extended field work in Sudan and Nigeria and is the Principal Investigator of the German side of the ANR/DFG “The Presence of the Prophet” project team. His research has focused on the history of Arabic language and literature in Africa, Islamic education, learning, and the sciences, and on transregional scholarly networks in the Islamic world in the early modern and modern periods. He was chief editor of the journal Die Welt des Islams (2002–16, since then as a board member). He is the co-editor of Religious Dynamics under the Impact of Imperialism and Colonialism: A Sourcebook (Brill, 2017) and author of “Aspects of Prophetic Piety in the Early Modern Period”, Archives de sciences sociales des religions 178 (2017) and The World of Murtaḍā al- Zabīdī (1732–91): Life, Networks, and Writings (Gibb Memorial Trust, 2009; Arabic translation to appear in 2023).
Youssouf T. Sangaré
is Associate Professor of Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies at the Institut National des Langues et Civilisations Orientales (Inalco). His current research focuses on contemporary Islamic thought, particularly the works of Muslim intellectuals and reinterpretations of Islamic sources by traditional scholars. He is the author of Le Scellement de la prophétie en islam (Geuthner, 2018) and Repenser le Coran et la tradition islamique: une introduction à la pensée de Fazlur Rahman (Albouraq, 2017; translated and published in Arabic, 2018).
Besnik Sinani
is a research fellow at the Chair for Hadith Studies and Prophetic Traditions, Center for Islamic Theology, University of Tübingen. He completed his PhD at the Free University of Berlin, writing his dissertation on Sufism in contemporary Saudi Arabia. Following the completion of his doctoral studies, he was a research fellow at the Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient in Berlin, where he conducted research on the emergence of post-Salafism in Saudi Arabia. He is currently working on modern transformations of Muslim perceptions of the Prophet Muḥammad, with a focus on modern writings of sīra.
Fabio Vicini
is a senior researcher in anthropology at the University of Verona. Previously, he taught and conducted research at Istanbul 29 Mayis University (2014–20), the Berlin Graduate School Muslim Cultures and Societies (2011), and Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient, Berlin (2011). In 2013, he was given the Malcolm H. Kerr Award in the Social Sciences by MESA. His most recent monograph is titled Reading Islam: Life and Politics of Brotherhood in Modern Turkey (Brill, 2020). His work has also appeared in several edited collections and in journals such as the British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, Ethnicities, Culture and Religion, Anthropology and Education Quarterly, La Ricerca Folklorica, and Sociology of Islam.
Ines Weinrich
studied Arabic and Islamic Studies and Ethnomusicology and holds a PhD in Arabic Studies from the University of Bamberg. She is a researcher at the University of Münster, where she conducts a research project on the performative elements in texts celebrating the birth of the Prophet Muḥammad (mawlid). From 2008 to 2013, she was a research associate at the German Orient-Institut Beirut (OIB) and conducted fieldwork on Muslim religious chanting in Syria and Lebanon. Her research focuses on Arab performative cultures (poetry, music, theatre), the dynamics between oral and written texts, and the sonic dimensions of Islamic ritual. She recently edited In Praise of the Prophet: Forms of Piety as Reflected in Arabic Literature (Ergon, 2022) and is the author of “From the Arab Lands to the Malabar Coast: The Arabic mawlid as a Literary Genre and a Traveling Text”, Entangled Religions 11/5 (2022), special issue: “The Indian Ocean and Its Periphery”.