Notes on Contributors
Ahmed Ibrahim Abushouk is a Professor of Modern and Contemporary History, Qatar University. Received his Ph.D. in History at Bergen University, Norway, in 1998. Before joining Qatar University in 2012, he worked at Bergen University (1998–1999) and International Islamic University Malaysia (1999–2012). He was a researcher and visiting professor at the Center for Modern Middle Eastern Studies in Berlin (2010, 2012, and 2016), the University of Pittsburgh, USA (2015), and the University of Wisconsin (2017). He authored more than twenty books and fifty articles, published in both Arabic and English by regional and international publishers and in peer reviewed journals. His latest publications include: The Sudanese Revolution (2018–2019): Its Motives, Phases and Challenges: Doha: Arab Centre for Research and Policy Studies, 2021; The Anglo-Persian Oil Company and the Gulf Arab Emirates, Doha: Forum of Arab and International Relations, 2019; King Abdul Aziz in al-Manar Magazine, Beirut: Arab Scientific Publishers Inc., 1914.
Sean W. Anthony is a professor of Near Eastern and South Asian Languages and Cultures at the Ohio State University. He is also the author most recently of Muḥammad and the Empires of Faith: The Making of the Prophet of Islam (University of California Press 2020) and Crucifixion and Death as Spectacle: Umayyad Crucifixion in Its Late Antique Context (American Oriental Society 2014).
María Luisa Ávila († 2021) was Researcher at the Escuela de Estudios Árabes-CSIC (Granada). Her research focused on the social and intellectual history of al-Andalus. She is the author of La sociedad hispanomusulmana al final del Califato (aproximación a un estudio demográfico) (Madrid, 1985) and many articles dealing with the rich biographical literature of al-Andalus, such as “The search for knowledge: Andalusi scholars and their travels to the East” (Medieval Prosopography: Arab-Islamic Medieval Culture, ed. M. Marín, 2002). She designed and directed—together with Luis Molina—the online database Prosopografía de los Ulemas Andalusíes (= PUA)
Teresa Bernheimer is research fellow at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität, Munich. Educated at SOAS, University of London (BA), and Oxford (M.Phil, D.Phil), she taught early Islamic History at SOAS from 2009–2017. Her research has focused on the history of the Middle East in the period ca. 600 to 1200 CE. She has published on the history of Shiʿism, the Prophet Muhammad’s family in early Islam (The ‘Alids: The First Family of Islam, EUP 2013), and on Islam’s place in the study of Late Antiquity. She is very interested in the use of material culture in early Islamic historiography, and on approaches to the teaching of early Islam. She is currently working on colour in early Islam as part of the BMBF-funded project Beyond Conflict and Coexistence. The Entangled History of Jewish-Arab Relations.
Philip Bockholt is junior professor for the history of the Turco-Persian world at the Institute of Arabic and Islamic Studies at the University of Münster (since October 2022). From 2022 to 2028, he will head the Emmy Noether Junior Research Group “Inner-Islamic knowledge transfer in Arabic-Persian-Ottoman translation processes in the Eastern Mediterranean (1400–1750)”. Previously, he was a research associate at the Institute of Oriental Studies at the University of Leipzig. He received his Ph.D. in Islamic Studies from Freie Universität Berlin in 2018. His Ph.D. dissertation examines historiography in Iran in the early Safavid period (16th century) and provides an analysis of Khvāndamīr’s Ḥabīb al-Siyar (Beloved of Careers) and its readership. It has been published in two separate volumes by Brill (Leiden/Boston) as Weltgeschichtsschreibung zwischen Schia und Sunna and Austrian Academy of Sciences Press (Vienna) as Ein Bestseller der islamischen Vormoderne in 2021–2022. A series of research fellowships took him to Istanbul, Jerusalem, Madrid, Paris, and Saint Petersburg.
Sonja Brentjes is a historian of science, with specialization in Islamicate societies. Her research areas are the mathematical sciences at courts and in madrasa; cross-cultural exchange of knowledge, mapmaking and historiography. Publications: Teaching and Learning the Sciences in Islamicate Societies (800–1700). Turnhout: Brepols, 2018; Sonja Brentjes, Jens Høyrup, and Bruce O’Brien, Translation across Eurasia and Africa: From Babylonia to Colonial India. Turnhout: Brepols, 2022; Sonja Brentjes, ed., with Peter Barker and Rana Brentjes, Routledge Handbook on the Sciences in Islamicate Societies. Practices from the 2nd/8th to the 13th/19th Centuries. London: Routledge, 2023. Awards and prizes: Kenneth O. May Prize in the History of Mathematics, 2021; Research Award of the Annemarie Schimmel Foundation for Islamic Studies, 2022.
Christiane Czygan is a researcher at the University of Bonn. She received her master’s degree in Turkish Studies, History, and French Literature from the University of Hamburg and studied in Istanbul Ottoman History and Literature with Orhan Şaik Gökyay. She finished her Ph.D. at the University of Hamburg, where she taught Ottoman History and Ottoman Literature. She has published Zur Ordnung des Staates. Jungosmanische Intellektuelle und ihre Konzepte in der Zeitung Hürriyet. (Klaus Schwarz, 2012) as well as a book and several articles on premodern Divan poetry. Her field of research are the nodes between literature and history in premodern Ottoman poetry, modern conceptual history, and the history of the press.
David Durand-Guédy is a historian specializing in eleventh-thirteenth-century Iran and the wider Persianate world. He has published a monograph on the history of Isfahan in the Saljuq period (Routledge 2010) and numerous articles on the way of life of the Saljuqs. He received his Ph.D. in 2004 from the University of Aix-en-Provence. His latest publication is the volume co-edited with Jürgen Paul, Personal Manuscripts: Copying, Drafting, Taking Notes (de Gruyter, 2023). In 2023, he began a DFG-funded project dedicated to an inshāʾ (compilation of letters) manuscript from Mongol Anatolia (Asien-Afrika-Institut, University of Hamburg).
Anne-Marie Eddé is Emeritus Professor, was professor of medieval history at the University of Reims from 1997 to 2000 and then Director of Research at the CNRS (2000–2013) where she was appointed for five years Director of the Institut de Recherche et d’Histoire des Textes (IRHT). From 2013 to 2018 she was Professor of Islamic Medieval History at the University of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne. Her research interests are Arabic historiography and manuscripts; political, economic, cultural and social history of Syria in the Middle Ages, mostly from the eleventh to the fourteenth century; Saladin and the Ayyūbids; representation and practices of power.
Fatma Sinem Eryılmaz is an intellectual historian whose work is often at the crossroads of political, literary, and art history. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 2010. She has published extensively on Ottoman dynastic literature of the sixteenth century, receiving the Barakat Trust Major Award (2018–2020) that funded her study of the enigmatic Imperial Scroll. She has collaborated in various international projects on cross cultural history as associate researcher and earlier, as postdoctoral fellow in Universitat Pompeu Fabra (Barcelona), Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Scientíficas (CSIC, Madrid), and Scuola Normale Superiore (Pisa). Currently she is working as an adjunct professor of modern history at Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona and following the traces of pre-modern successors of the tenth century fraternity of Muslim Neoplatonic intellectuals, the Brethren of Purity (Ikhwān al-Ṣafā’), in Anatolia.
Maribel Fierro is Research Professor at the Institute for the Languages and Cultures of the Mediterranean—CSIC (Madrid). She received her Ph.D. from the University Complutense, Madrid, in 1985. She has published on the political and intellectual history of the pre-modern Islamic West (al-Andalus and North Africa) with books such as ʿAbd al-Muʾmin. Mahdism and caliphate in the Islamic West (2021), The Almohad revolution (2012), ʿAbd al-Rahman III, the first Cordoban caliph (2005), and Al-Andalus: saberes e intercambios culturales (2001). She has edited The Routledge Handbook on Muslim Iberia (2020) and The Western Islamic world, eleventh-eighteenth centuries, vol. II of The New Cambridge History of Islam (2010).
Adam Gaiser teaches courses in Islamic studies. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Virginia, History of Religions, in 2005. His research focuses on the development of early Kharijites and Ibadiyya. He has two books on the subject: Shurāt Legends, Ibādī Identities: Martyrdom, Asceticism, and the Making of an Early Islamic Community (University of South Carolina Press, 2016), and Muslims, Scholars, Soldiers: The Origin and Elaboration of the Ibāḍī Imamate Traditions (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010). His third book, Sectarianism in Islam: The Umma Divided is forthcoming with Cambridge University Press.
Angelika Hartmann († 2023) she was Prof. em. at Marburg University, was Professor of Arabic and Islamic Studies at Würzburg University 1989–1993, Chair and Professor at Giessen University 1993–2006 where she also served as project leader in the Collaborative Research Center “Memory Cultures” of the German Research Association (DFG) 2000–2008. 2006–2008 Professor of Islamic Studies at the Center for Near and Middle Eastern Studies (CNMS) at Marburg University. Heinz-Maier-Leibnitz-Award of DFG, 1980. She received her Ph.D. from Hamburg University in 1971. Research interests: Middle Eastern History, especially the last period of the Abbasid caliphate, Arabic and Persian manuscripts, history of Sufism and Islamic culture in the Middle Ages, Muslim civil societies and Islamism at the present time. Main book publications: an-Nāṣir li-Dīn Allāh (1180–1225). Politik, Religion, Kultur in der späten ʿAbbāsidenzeit (Berlin/New York 1975); Geschichte und Erinnerung im Islam (Göttingen 2004); together with Sabine Damir-Geilsdorf and Beatrice Hendrich: Mental Maps–Raum - Erinnerung (Münster 2005).
Livnat Holtzman is Associate Professor in the Department of Arabic at Bar-Ilan University. She specializes in Islamic traditionalism and the Ḥadīth. Her publications include Anthropomorphism in Islam: The Challenge of Traditionalism (700–1350) (Edinburgh University Press 2018) and articles and book chapters on the religious thought of traditionalist thinkers like Aḥmad b. Ḥanbal, Abū Yaʿlā, Ibn al-Jawzī, and Ibn Taymiyya and his pupil Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya. She is currently working on the gestures, physical mannerisms, and the body language of the Prophet Muḥammad as reported in the Ḥadīth and other literary genres.
Maher Jarrar is Professor at the American University of Beirut, both at the Civilization Studies Program and at the Department of Arabic. He received his Ph.D. from Tübingen University in 1989. He is honorary member of Middle East Medievalists; director of the Anis Makdisi Program in Literature, and former director of AUB’s Center for Arts and Humanities 2012–2016, and he served as chairperson of the Civilization Studies Program from 2004 to 2007, and 2011 to 2014. He was Visiting Professor at Harvard (1996 and 2011) and Fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin (2002–2003). His areas of interest include the biography of the Prophet Muhammad, Zaydi Studies, early and modern Arabic narratology, The Arabian Nights, and the literature of Islamic Spain, al-Andalus. He published numerous books and over 40 articles in the field of Islamic studies, Arabic literature, and literary criticism in academic journals, encyclopedias and chapters in books. Among his latest publications: Arabic critical edition and a study of al-Ḥakīm al-Samarqandī’s (d. 342/953), Kitāb al-Sawād al-aʿẓam), forthcoming Princeton, NJ: Gorgias Press, 2022., and in collaboration with Sebastian Günther, Doctrinal Instruction in Early Islam: The Book of the Explanation of the Sunna by Ghulām Khalīl (d. 275/888). Arabic edition, English translation, and a critical study in five chapters. Leiden: Brill, 2020.
Robert S. Kramer is Professor of Middle East History at St. Norbert College in De Pere, Wisconsin, where he has taught since 1989. His research interests are Islamic intellectual and political movements of the nineteenth century, identity formation in the Sudan, slavery in the Nile Valley, and urbanization. He is the author of Holy City on the Nile: Omdurman during the Mahdiyya, 1885–1898 (Princeton: 2011), as well as several articles on the Sudan in peer-reviewed journals and scholarly reference works. He was the chief author and editor of the Historical Dictionary of the Sudan, 4th edition (Lanham, MD: 2013) and has also written on Islamic scholarship in West Africa.
Christian Mauder is Professor of Islamic Studies at the Freie Universität Berlin. Before coming to Berlin in 2023, he taught as associate professor at the University of Bergen and completed postdoctoral appointments at Yale University, the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New York University Abu Dhabi, and the University of Bonn. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Göttingen in 2017. In his research, he studies the intellectual, religious, and social history of the Islamic world with a focus on the late middle period. His publications include the monographs In the Sultan’s Salon: Learning, Religion and Rulership at the Mamluk Court of Qāniṣawh al-Ghawrī (r. 1501–1516) (Brill, 2021) and Gelehrte Krieger: Die Mamluken als Träger arabischsprachiger Bildung nach al-Ṣafadī, al-Maqrīzī und weiteren Quellen (Olms, 2012).
Matthew Melvin-Koushki is Associate Professor of Islamic History at the University of South Carolina, and founder of its new MA in Magic and Occult Science. He specializes in early modern Islamicate intellectual and imperial history, with a philological focus on the theory and practice of the occult sciences in Timurid-Safavid Iran and the broader Persianate world to the nineteenth century, and a disciplinary focus on history of science, history of philosophy and history of the book. His forthcoming books include The Lettrist Treatises of Ibn Turka: Persian Pythagoreanism and Imperial Occultism in the Timurid Renaissance and The Occult Science of Empire in Aqquyunlu-Safavid Iran: Two Shirazi Lettrists and Their Manuals of Magic. President of Societas Magica, he is co-editor of the volumes Islamicate Occultism: New Perspectives (2017) and Islamicate Occult Sciences in Theory and Practice (2020), and cofounder of the international working group Islamic Occult Studies on the Rise (IOSOTR), at
Letizia Osti is Associate Professor of Arabic Language and Literature at the University of Milan. She has published on classical Arabic prose and narrative techniques in biographical collections, historiography, literature, and intersections thereof. Her monograph on Abū Bakr al-Ṣūlī (History and memory in the Abbasid caliphate: writing the past in medieval Arabic literature) was published by Bloomsbury in 2022.
Jürgen Paul is Senior Member at the Centre for the Study of Manuscript Cultures, Universität Hamburg, and Emeritus Professor of Islamic Studies at Martin-Luther-Universität, Halle-Wittenberg. He specialises in the medieval and early modern history of Iran and Central Asia, focusing on forms of local rule and the relations between local and imperial rule.
Petra G. Schmidl is a research partner at the International Consortium for Research in the Humanities (IKGF), Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg, Germany, is a historian of science with a focus on pre-modern astronomy, astronomical instruments, and astrology, prognostic practices, and occult sciences in Islamicate societies. Her recent research project aims at the edition, English translation, commentary, and study of the Kitāb al-Tabṣira fī ˁilm al-nujūm written by al-Ashraf ˁUmar in 13th century Yemen. She largely contributed to the handbook “Prognostication in the Medieval World” edited 2021 by Matthias Heiduk, Klaus Herbers, and Hans-Christian Lehner.
Tilman Seidensticker (born 1955) was professor of Arabic and Islamic Studies at Jena University from 1995 to 2021. Since October 2021, he is Senior Professor at Hamburg University and member of the Cluster of Excellence Understanding Written Artefacts at the same university. He was head of the Arabic manuscripts section of the project Katalogisierung der Orientalischen Handschriften in Deutschland (KOHD) in Jena since 1997 and head of the KOHD project from 2013 to 2022. He served as both vice dean (2014–2019) and dean (2019–2021) of the Faculty of Arts at Jena University. His other fields of scholarly specialization besides Arabic manuscriptology are Arabic language and literature, and Islamism.