• Intellectual and cultural history of the Nahḍa
• Sociology of Islam
• Contemporary Ismailism

Religion, Culture, Society, selected posts:

• “A Brief Note on the Translation of the Word ‘Secular’ into Arabic during the 19th C” (23 Nov 2018), available at: <https://cutt.ly/8tE74XO>
• “Oriental(ist) Metal Music” (30 Jan 2014), available at: <http://bit.ly/2qpTzNm>

2006, BSc. Mathematics, University of Damascus

2010, MA Muslim Cultures, Institute for the Study of Muslim Civilisations (AKU-ISMC), London

2016, PhD Islamic Studies, University of Leipzig

11/2014 – 10/2015, Associate Researcher, Institute of Religious Studies, University of Leipzig

04/2016 – 10/2018, 06/2019 – 09/2020, Senior Researcher, Centre for Advanced Studies in the Humanities and Social Sciences “Multiple Secularities – Beyond the West, Beyond Modernities”, University of Leipzig

10/2018 – 05/2019, Visiting Research Fellow, Orient-Institut, Beirut

02/2023 – 06/2024, Senior Researcher, Research Project “Fragmented Sovereignties in the Colonial Age: ʿAbd al-Qādir al-Jazāʾirī (1808-1883) and the Making of an ‘Arab Hero’ ” (funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation)

Religion in the Early Arabic Press in Beirut: An intellectual History

(funded by the German Research Association)

The project is a study of the various ways religion was conceptualized in the early Arabic press of Beirut, Ottoman Syria, between 1870 and 1890. It systematically examines how, when, and under which circumstances the topic of religion came up in a selection of periodicals and how it was articulated in relation to concepts referring to other social spheres, institutions, practices, and identities. The project addresses these questions within the framework of intellectual history while drawing on scholarly literature from three primary research areas: first, debates in religious studies on the evolution and the globalization of the concept of religion; second, literature on the development of secular thought in the Arab world and intellectual responses to this development; and finally, studies of social and cultural history of the Nahḍa. The goal of this project is to contribute to the historicization of conceptions of religion in late-Ottoman Arab social thought in light of transfers, entanglements, and encounters across confessional, cultural, and geographic lines.

The project concentrates on four periodicals with different confessional backgrounds and intellectual orientations: al-Jinan (est. 1870 by Butrus al-Bustani), Thamarat al-Funun (est. 1875 by Islamic educational charity Jamʿiyyat al-Funun), al-Bashir (est. 1870 by the Jesuit mission), and al-Nashra al-Usbuʿiyya (est. 1871 by the American Protestant mission). While the focus in this study is on the content of these periodicals, attention will also be given to the role of the press as a modern medium of communication that contributed to the formation of a trans-regional and trans-confessional Arab public sphere. In terms of methodology, the project follows an extensive approach (as opposed to selective), seeking to capture as many discussions of religion and its relevance for society in these periodicals as possible regardless of genre of text, subject, and authorship.

• (2024) Translations of extracts from “Salim al-Bustani, ‘Tawḍīḥ al-Niẓāmāt al-Asāsiyya’ (al-Jinan, 1877)”; “Muhammad Abduh, al-Islām wa al-Naṣrāniyya maʿa al-ʿilm wa al-Madaniyya, (1902-3)”; “Farah Antun, Ibn Rushd wa Falsafatuh (1903)” in Dreßler, Stadler, Yavari, Zemmin (Eds.) Global Secularity: A Sourcebook Beyond the West, Vol. 3 (forthcoming).
• (2023) “Mahmoud Pargoo, Secularization of Islam in Post-Revolutionary Iran. London and New York: Routledge, 2021” [Book Review] in Arab Law Quarterly, p. 1-6.
• (2020) A Reflexive Islamic Modernity: Academic Knowledge and Religious Subjectivity in the Global Ismaili Community, Baden-Baden: Ergon [nominated for The Karim and Rosemin Karim Prize for Ismaili Studies].
• (2019) “Secularity in the Syro-Lebanese Press in the 19^th Century”, in Companion to the Study of Secularity.Edited by HCAS “Multiple Secularities – Beyond the West, Beyond Modernities.” Leipzig University.
• (2019) “Transnationalizing Multiple Secularities: A Comparative Study of the Global Ismaili Community”, in Historical Social Research, Vol. 44, No. 3, p. 150-179.
• (2015) “Ismaili Discourse on Religion in the Public Sphere: Culture as a Mediating Concept”, in Y. Suleiman (Ed.) Muslims in the UK and Europe I, Centre of Islamic Studies, University of Cambridge, p. 140-149.
• (2013) “Book Review: Carsten Wieland, Syria – A Decade of Lost Chances: Repression and Revolution from Damascus Spring to Arab Spring (Seattle: Cune Press, 2012)”, in The Syrian Studies Association Bulletin, Vol. 18, No. 2.
• (2013) “Heavy Metal as Religion and Secularization as Ideology: A Sociological Approach”, The Religious Studies Project.
• (2012) “Cultural Dynamics in the Syrian Uprising”, paper presented at The annual conference of the Graduate Section of the British Society for Middle Eastern Studies, London.