OIB-COSIMENA Research Colloquium II on Knowledge Transfer

Biography of the Speaker

Prof. Dr. Albrecht Fuess studied History and Islamic Studies at Cologne University and Cairo University. He obtained his Ph.D. in Cologne in 2000 with a dissertation on the history of the Syro-Palestanian coast in Mamluk times (1250-1517). Since 2010 he has been a Professor of Islamic Studies at the University of Marburg.

Registration Link: https://www.daad.de/surveys/199876?lang=en

Deadline for Registration: 12 June 2024

Key information

Date: Thursday, 13th June 2024

Time: from 6:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m. (CLT)

Location: DAAD Regional Office Cairo (11- El-Saleh Ayoub Street, Zamalek, Cairo)

This public lecture aims to shed light on the following perspectives

• Exploring the aspects of knowledge transfer in the Mamluk period
• Describing the processes of (knowledge) transfer and (personal) mobility
• Showcasing the mobility situation in the pre-modern period of Egypt and beyond

Biography of the Speaker

Dr Hoda El-Saadi is an adjunct faculty member in the Department of Arab and Islamic Civilizations at the American University in Cairo (AUC) and a co-founder of the Woman and memory forum. She received both her BA and MA from the American University in Cairo and her PhD from Cairo University in Islamic History. She has a wide variety of teaching experiences at both national and international Universities and through participating in graduate educational workshops at different national universities. El Saadi developed an interest in gender issues in the Islamic tradition. The objective of her research is to empower women by making available historical information that demonstrates women’s involvement in public life. She believes that social and cultural issues should be studied in relation to larger issues such as Islamic law, Islamic civilization, and the changing social political, and economic structures. There is an urgent need to study Islamic law in order to understand the development of the social practices and to find out how Islamic law and local practices shaped Islamic societies. This made her join the Islamic studies program at AUC, and earn a diploma in the field.

Registration Link: https://www.daad.de/surveys/616895?lang=en

Deadline for Registration: 23 June 2024

Key information

Date: Wednesday, 26th  June 2024

Time: from 6:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m. (CLT)

Location: DAAD Regional Office Cairo (11- El-Saleh Ayoub Street, Zamalek, Cairo)

This public lecture aims to shed light on the following perspectives

• Exploring the ways of knowledge transfer by women in pre-modern Islamic societies
• Describing the active historical presence of women in fields of theology and religious sciences
• The role of women as Muslim agents in pre-modern Islamic societies

Concept Note

“Why are Muslims backwards?” and “What caused the decline of Islam?”. These questions stem from the high age of imperialism. Typically, the paradigm of modernization as Westernization was coupled with that of an Islamic decline. Both paradigms have by now been refuted, the first mainly by social theorists, and the second by historians of the Islamic Middle East. However, no alternative model or narrative to these obsolete paradigms has yet been established. This contributes to the lasting purchase of notions of Islamic decline and Western progress in non-specialized academic fields and amongst the public. This lecture will revisit the main trends and options in the writing of modernity in the Middle East and discuss especially their underlying premises. Against internalist perspectives and culturalist explanations, it will argue for the need for connected histories, departing from the synchronic emergence of modernity in the colonial encounter.

Biography of the Speaker

Florian Zemmin is a Professor of Islamic and Middle East Studies (Islamwissenschaft) at Freie Universität Berlin and Director of the Berlin Graduate School Muslim Cultures and Societies. Previously he was a Senior Researcher at the Humanities Center for Advanced Study “Multiple Secularities: Beyond the West, beyond modernities” at the University of Leipzig.

His main field of research is religion and society in the modern and contemporary Arab and Islamic world. In that field, more specific topics include Islamic reformism, theories of secularity, and Arabic sociologies of religion. Next to the sociology of religion and sociology of knowledge, he mainly works with approaches to conceptual history.

Registration Link:  https://www.daad.de/surveys/296175?lang=en

Deadline for Registration: 18 September 2024

Key information

Date: Monday, 23rd  September 2024

Time: from 6:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m. (CLT)

Location: DAAD Regional Office Cairo (11- El-Saleh Ayoub Street, Zamalek, Cairo)

This public lecture aims to shed light on the following perspectives:

• Revisiting the main trends and options in the writing of modernity in the Middle East
• Understanding of connected histories, its various perspectives and culturalist explanations
• Explaining the paradigm of modernization and its relationship with Islam

Concept Note

Translations from European languages were an important instrument of modernization for roughly four decades beginning in the 1830s. Besides being documents of intellectual acumen and linguistic proficiency, they may reflect, and in fact react to, the unequal power relations characteristic of the colonial setup. Tahtawi’s first modern Arabic literary translation, nearly forgotten today, his translation of the French constitutional law, and the translations of the huge corpus of the five French law books, which he supervised, give evidence of the translators’ strategies of cultural self-assertion and, potentially much more important, their endeavor to convey practically and politically relevant knowledge beyond cultural boundaries.+

Biography of the Speaker

Prof. Dr Stefan Leder was chair of Arabic and Islamic Studies at the University of Halle, then director of the Orient-Institut Beirut. The current project on Arabic translation during the colonial period correlates to his research on the genealogy of Orientalism. Further research areas concern premodern Arabic historiography, Islamic ethics and political literature, and conceptual history.

Registration Link: https://www.daad.de/surveys/698776?lang=en

Deadline for Registration: 27 October 2024

Key information

Date: Wednesday, 30th October 2024

Time: from 6:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m. (CLT)

Location: DAAD Regional Office Cairo (11- El-Saleh Ayoub Street, Zamalek, Cairo)

This public lecture aims to shed light on the following perspectives:

• Discuss the translation of European languages as an instrument of modernization
• Explaining Tantawi’s translation of French constitutional law and translations of a huge corpus of five French law books
•  Illustrating translators’ strategies of cultural self-assertion

Concept Note

Islamic law admittedly finds its origin in the major principles contained in the Quran and the Sunna of the Prophet. Following his death, the judges appointed by the expanding nascent state made their utmost to decide cases and settle down rising disputes in order to keep peace and tranquility in the society. They succeeded in their mission and set lots of precedents that were created by their efforts. Their creative endeavor was termed later on as Ijtihad. The novel precedents helped solve disputes on one hand and the development of the legal systems. The case of the three girls playing the horse rider and driver game, for example, sets the principle of contributory negligence. It was decided by the fourth caliph, Ali bin Abi Talib. Many other cases established essential legal principles transferred to future generations through oral transmission up to the time of documenting them in the manuals of jurisprudence. Creative Ijtihad continues and its high value for securing justice and peace in society necessitated the preservation of the legal knowledge up to the present day. Taqlid exercised by the learnt jurists or التقليد المستبصر in the language of al Shatibi has played a vital role in the transfer of legal knowledge.

Biography of the Speaker

Prof.  Mohamed Serag is a professor of Islamic studies at the Sheikh Hassan Abbas Sharbatly, Department of Arab and Islamic Civilizations at The American University in Cairo (AUC). Serag was a professor and chair of the Islamic Law Department at the Alexandria University Faculty of Law, Egypt; chair of the Department of Islamic Law at Cairo University; and assistant and associate professor of law at the International Islamic University in Islamabad. He authored, translated, and co-edited numerous books on Islamic law, including books on the Islamic law of trusts; Islamic legal theory and practice; Islamic laws of contract, inheritance, and bequests; the Islamic banking system; and torts in Islam.

Registration Link: https://www.daad.de/surveys/432517?lang=en

Deadline for Registration: 03 November 2024

Key information

Date: Tuesday, 5th November 2024

Time: from 6:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m. (CLT)

Location: DAAD Regional Office Cairo (11- El-Saleh Ayoub Street, Zamalek, Cairo)

This public lecture aims to shed light on the following perspectives:

• Tackling the origins of Islamic law and the development of legal systems
• Explaining the significance of Ijtihad and its influence on future generations
•  Illustrating the role of Taqlid in ensuring foundational principles

Concept Note

Muḥammad ʿAlī (r. 1805-1848) is generally regarded as the father of modern Egypt, who, through the development of industry and infrastructure and the creation of a modern army, transformed the backward country into a powerful state capable of challenging even the sultans in Istanbul.

The present event will take a closer look at these processes of change, knowledge transfer and creation in the fields of culture and education, developments that are often referred to as the “Nahda”, the cultural, especially literary, reawakening of the Arab world during the 19th and early 20th centuries, which had its main stages in Egypt and Lebanon.

Muḥammad ʿAlī’s modernisation activities are often associated with the Europeans who served him as advisers, educators and managers. Rarely mentioned is the fact that there was also a south-south transfer of knowledge and expertise by mostly Christian Syrians who had immigrated to Egypt since the 18th century. Their role will be examined in more detail. Special attention will be given to “Don Raphael” (Rūfāʾīl Zakhkhūr), an illustrious figure of Syrian origin who was an advisor to Napoleon in Egypt and the only Arab member of the famous Institut d’Egypte. Don Raphael was involved in many of Muḥammad ʿAlī’s educational and cultural projects, such as the medical school, the printing press and translation activities. Through the portrayal of him and a few others, it will be shown that ‘Syrians’ already contributed significantly to the early stages of the ‘Nahḍa’ in Egypt.

Biography of the Speaker

Dr Carsten Walbiner, director of the DAAD office in Cairo since December 2022, received his doctorate from the University of Leipzig in 1995. A specialist in the history of Arab Christianity in the Ottoman period, he is a member of the Research Centre for the Christian Orient at the Catholic University of Eichstätt and for the past decade has been section editor for Christian Arabic texts in the mega-project “Christian-Muslim relations: a bibliographic history” (CMR), implemented by the University of Birmingham and Brill Publishers. He has published on a wide range of topics, including church history, travel literature, book printing and manuscripts.  He is currently preparing two catalogues of the Oriental manuscript collections of Andechs Abbey (Bavaria) and the Custody of the Holy Land in Jerusalem.

Registration Link: https://www.daad.de/surveys/184164?lang=en

Deadline for Registration: 20 November 2024

Key information

Date: Wednesday, 27^th November 2024

Time: from 6:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m. (CLT)

Location: DAAD Regional Office Cairo (11- El-Saleh Ayoub Street, Zamalek, Cairo)

This public lecture aims to shed light on the following perspectives:

• Tackling the transformation of the industry and infrastructure under Muhammed Alis’s rule.
• Showcasing knowledge and expertise transfer under Christian Syrians who immigrated to Egypt since the 18th century
• Exploring the contributions of “Don Raphael” in Muhammed Alis’s educational and cultural projects

Concept Note

While it has been argued that knowledge production was a traditionally male enterprise, this lecture attempts to share a different view by showing women in the field of knowledge transmission and production. This is based on the biographical accounts and chronicles to show the names of and information about warraqāt or muwarriqāt (‘paper-ologist’), nāsikhāt (scribes, copyists), khaṭṭaṭāt (calligraphers) and munamnimāt or munammiqāt (illuminists). In addition, we will present some codicological features of manuscripts that have been written by women and follow their professional patterns.

Biography of the Speakers

Prof. Dr Walid Ghali is a professor of Islamic and Arabic studies and the head of the Aga Khan Library in London. He works in different research areas suh as Islamic codicology, Sufism and Muslim reformers in the 19th century. He is also a novelist, published two collections of short stories and one novel.

Dr Yasmin Amin is an Egyptian-German who received her PhD in Islamic studies in 2021 from Exeter University’s Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies researching ‘Humour and Laughter in the Ḥadīth’. Her research covers various aspects of gender issues, early Muslim society and culture as well as the original heritage texts. Since 2022, she is the OIB’s representative in Cairo.

Registration Link: https://www.daad.de/surveys/274197?lang=en

Deadline for Registration: 16 December 2024

Key information

Date: Monday, 18^th November 2024

Time: from 6:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m. (CLT)

Location: DAAD Regional Office Cairo (11- El-Saleh Ayoub Street, Zamalek, Cairo)

This public lecture aims to shed light on the following perspectives:

• Discuss the role of women in the field of knowledge transmission and production
• Present codicological features of manuscripts that have been written by women and follow their professional patterns

Concept Note

Classical Muslim thinkers left a rich legacy of educational theories, presenting a unique pedagogical outlook. They explored teaching methods, learning processes, educational aims, and the roles of students and teachers.

These scholars also addressed didactics, including curriculum design and methods of knowledge transfer. Despite the significance of their contributions, a comprehensive study of classical Islamic pedagogy remains lacking.

Biography of the Speaker

Professor Dr Sebastian Günther (*1961) holds the Chair of Arabic and Islamic Studies at Georg August University Göttingen. His research focuses on the intellectual and cultural history of Islam, Islamic ethics, education, the history of Arabic-Islamic sciences, and Arabic literature.

Registration Link:  https://www.daad.de/surveys/244428?lang=en

Deadline for Registration: 25 January 2025

Key information

Date: Wednesday, 29 January 2025

Time: from 6:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m. (CLT)

Location: DAAD Regional Office Cairo (11- El-Saleh Ayoub Street, Zamalek, Cairo)

This public lecture aims to shed light on how classical Muslim thinkers:

• left a rich legacy of educational theories and presented a unique pedagogical outlook.
• explored teaching methods, learning processes, educational aims, and the roles of students and teachers
• addressed didactics, including curriculum design and methods of knowledge transfer.

Concept Note

The talk will explore the distinction between the natural and the artificial is an old one in “western” philosophy. But it must be questioned in the face of self-developing neural networks that are the basis of AI. And what is natural intelligence? Is not all intelligence culturally determined?

Biography of the Speaker

Prof. Dr Michael Hampe studied Philosophy, Psychology and Biology at Heidelberg and Cambridge. He has been a full-Professor for theoretical Philosophy at Die Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule Zürich, ETH Zürich, (Federal Institute of Technology Zurich) since 2003.

Registration Link: https://www.daad.de/surveys/481591?lang=en

Deadline for Registration: 19 February 2025

Key information

Date: Wednesday, February 26^th, 2025

Time: from 6:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m. (Cairo Local Time)

Location: DAAD Regional Office Cairo (11- El-Saleh Ayoub Street, Zamalek, Cairo)

This public lecture aims to shed light on the following perspectives:

• The philosophical distinction between the natural and the artificial, particularly in relation to AI.
• The nature of self-developing neural networks as a basis for artificial intelligence.
• The concept of intelligence and whether it is inherently natural or culturally determined.

Concept Note

The talk will explore the pivotal role of scholarly communication in collection-based research, with a focus on the Oriental manuscript collection at the Gotha Research Library, one of the largest of its kind in Germany. The gradual digitisation of this collection not only provides global access to these valuable sources but also enhances their scholarly contextualisation. Platforms such as GOTHA.digital serve as key interfaces, linking the Oriental collection with holdings from the archive, library, and museum, thereby making them visible, globally connected, and opening up new research perspectives.

The presentation will demonstrate how collection-based research and digital strategies can be effectively integrated. Using the Oriental collection as a case study, practical formats for digital knowledge transfer and scholarly communication will be introduced and discussed. Digital exhibitions and interactive dialogue formats offer opportunities to make the collections accessible to a broader audience while fostering interdisciplinary academic collaboration. The Gotha Research Library works closely with the academic community to advance not only the digital cataloguing and scholarly exploration of its collections through research infrastructures and collaborative projects but also to enhance the transfer of knowledge to the wider public.

Biography of the Speaker

Dr Hendrikje Carius is a historian and works as Deputy Director and Head of the Department of Use and Digital Library at the Gotha Research Library of the University of Erfurt.

Registration Link: https://www.daad.de/surveys/183231?lang=en

Deadline for Registration: 12 April 2025

Key information

Date: Wednesday, April 16^th, 2025

Time: from 6:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m. (CLT)

Location: DAAD Regional Office Cairo (11- El-Saleh Ayoub Street, Zamalek, Cairo)

This public lecture aims to shed light on the following perspectives:

• Exploring the pivotal role of scholarly communication in collection-based research, with a focus on the Oriental manuscript collection at the Gotha Research Library.
• Demonstrating how collection-based research and digital strategies can be effectively integrated.
• Showcasing how platforms such as GOTHA. digital serve as key interfaces, linking the Oriental collection with holdings from the archive, library, and museum, thereby making them visible, globally connected and fostering interdisciplinary academic collaboration.

Concept Note

Who owns the cultural heritage, who has the authority over it, who is the data owner of the digitized cultural heritage?

This is a particularly relevant issue for Egypt, but also for the MENA region as a whole, because if the digitization and analysis of cultural heritage are determined solely by technical and financial means, there is a risk that digital expropriation of cultural heritage will also take place.

The digitization and research of cultural heritage produce research data. Effective research data management (RDM) should be consistent with the FAIR and CARE Principles. While the FAIR Principles are about facilitating data sharing and re-use, the CARE Principles are about ensuring that data is used ethically.

The presentation will discuss how to ensure authority over digitized cultural heritage and whether the CARE Principles are a useful approach to address this issue.

Biography of the Speaker

Dr Josef Jeschke holds a Ph.D. in Semitic Studies. In his current position at Martin Luther University of Halle-Wittenberg, he focuses mainly on DH strategies, especially Open Access, research data management in line with FAIR and CARE principles, and how to make MENA relevant material available for digital analysis.

Registration Link: https://www.daad.de/surveys/178581?lang=en

Deadline for Registration: 19 May 2025

Key information

Date: Wednesday, May 21st 2025

Time: from 5:00 p.m. to 6:30 p.m. (CLT)

Location: Online via Microsoft Teams

This public lecture aims to shed light on the following perspectives:

• The challenges of determining ownership and authority over digitized cultural heritage in Egypt and the MENA region
• The risks of digital expropriation when digitization is driven solely by technical and financial capabilities
• The relevance of the CARE Principles in safeguarding ethical management of research data related to cultural heritage

Concept Note

This lecture examines the historical evolution of information management in Gospel manuscripts, from ancient scriptoria to contemporary digital practices. Using Arabic Gospel translations as a case study, it traces how methods of organizing, analyzing, and preserving Gospel texts parallel modern data management concepts. The presentation highlights three pivotal developments: lectionaries as early database systems, Ibn al-Assal’s 13th-century “critical edition”, and 19th-century scientific textual criticism. It then explores how digital tools and Artificial Intelligence have transformed manuscript studies. The lecture demonstrates how technological advances continue to reshape our understanding and analysis of Gospel texts while building.

Biography of the Speaker

Dr Elie Dannaoui is Associate Professor of Church History and Director of the Digital Humanities Centre at Balamand University, Lebanon. He holds a PhD in Eastern Ecclesiastical Sciences from Rome’s Pontifical Oriental Institute, an M.A. in Educational Technology from the University of Poitiers (France). He is a member of the Research Centre for the Christian Orient at the Catholic University of Eichstätt, Ingolstadt. His research focuses on digital approaches to studying Eastern Christianity’s history and literature, particularly developing digital tools and databases for analyzing Arabic Christian manuscripts.

• Registration Link: https://www.daad.de/surveys/454378?lang=en
• Registration Deadline: May 14^th 2025

Key information

Date: Wednesday, May 28^th 2025

Time: from 6:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m. (CLT)

Location: The German Embassy in Cairo: Zamalek, 2 Balin St., Off Hassan Sabry St., Cairo

This public lecture aims to shed light on the following perspectives:

• The Historical Development of Information Management in Gospel Manuscripts
• Using Arabic Gospel translations as a case study, it traces how methods of organizing, analyzing, and preserving Gospel texts parallel modern data management concepts.
• The Impact of Digital Tools and Artificial Intelligence on Manuscript Research