Acknowledgements
The volumes of this series grew out of the research, conferences, and workshops conducted during the ANR-DFG project “The Presence of the Prophet: Muhammad in the Mirror of His Community in Early Modern and Modern Islam” (2017–2021). This French-German project was directed by the principal investigators Rachida Chih (CNRS-CETOBAC Paris) and Stefan Reichmuth (Ruhr University Bochum), and a French and German core team of researchers including Nelly Amri (University of La Manouba, Tunis), Denis Gril (Aix-Marseille Université – IREMAM), Francesco Chiabotti (INALCO Paris), with the coordinators Dilek Sarmis (then CNRS-CETOBAC Paris, now Straßbourg University) and David Jordan (Ruhr University Bochum). The Website of the project (https:/prophet.hypotheses.org) was designed and organized by Francesco Chiabotti and Dilek Sarmis. The Archives de sciences sociales des religions and the French-German journal Trivium (both in Paris) offered important platforms for our publications.
Our project was funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) and the Agence Nationale de la Recherche (ANR), whose representatives Bernard Ludwig, Julie Sassia (both Paris), Achim Haag and Michael Sommerhof (both Bonn) also provided invaluable advice and care and hosted a meeting of all the current French-German projects in Paris in 2019. Several universities and institutes provided the venues for workshops and conferences in France, Germany, and Morocco. We are more than grateful to the Ruhr University Bochum with its Department of Oriental and Islamic Studies and its Center for Religious Studies (CERES), to the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) Paris with its Centre d’Études Turques, Ottomans, Balkaniques, et Centrasiatiques (CETOBAC), the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS), the Sorbonne Université Paris, and the Aix-Marseille Université IREMAM. Conference panels and meetings were also organized at the Congress of the Groupement d’Intérêt Scientifique (GIS) in Paris (2017, 2019), the Deutscher Orientalistentag (DOT) in Jena (2017), the Congress of the Deutsche Arbeitsgemeinschaft Vorderer Orient (DAVO) in Hamburg (2019) as well as the Maison des Sciences de l’Homme in Paris (2019).
We express our profound gratitude to the Moroccan Ministère des Habous et des Affaires Islamiques, to the Minister, His Excellency Prof. Ahmed Toufiq and to the director of the Ministry’s Centre Administratif et Culturel MOHAMED VI des Habous in Marrakech, Jaafar Kansoussi, for their cooperation and support during the International Conference of the project in Marrakech (2018), and to the Moroccan Royal Library (Rabat), the National Library (Rabat) and the Madrasa Ben Youssef Library (Marrakesh) who liberally shared their picture material for an exhibition of manuscripts during that conference.
Our great thanks also goes to Brill Academic Publishers, with the acquisition editor Abdurraouf Oueslati, the production editor Theo Joppe, the copy editors Sarah Campbell and Muhammad Ridwaan, and the indexer Pierke Bosschieter for their excellent cooperation along the different stages of the publication process. We are also very grateful to Caroline Kraabel (London) for her English translations of several French contributions.