with Prof. Dr. Karin van Nieuwkerk (Radboud University)
Date: 24/02/2026
Time: 4pm to 6pm
Venue: Room 6.60, Faculty of Arts, Blandijn, Blandijnberg 2, 9000 Gent
Contact: middleeast@ugent.be
book presentation with Prof. Dr. Yossef Rapoport (Queen Mary University of London)
During the later Middle Ages, peasants in Egypt and Greater Syria came to view themselves as members of Arab clans that had originated in the Arabian Peninsula. They expressed their Arab identity by wearing Arab headgear, adopting an Arab dialect, and circulating a new genre of popular epic that told heroic tales of pre-Islamic Arabia. In Becoming Arab, Yossef Rapoport argues that this proliferation of Arab village clans did not come about through mass migration and displacement but reflected an internal transformation. Drawing on extensive documentary, literary, administrative, and material evidence, Rapoport shows that the widespread formation of Arab village clans in late medieval Egypt and Greater Syria was a gradual process, the result of mass rural conversion to Islam and a new landholding regime in which peasants shifted from being landowners to being tenants. After the eleventh century, Rapoport contends, Middle Eastern villagers were turning Arab.
These Arab village clans were not merely administrative regimes imposed from above; villagers enthusiastically embraced their new identities. New converts to Islam adopted Arab lineages to claim status and as a counter-identity to urban-based Turkish elites. Arab identity was used by clans to mobilize rural uprisings against the ruling sultans and to resolve disputes among villagers. Challenging traditional historiography of the Middle East, which views Arab clansmen as pastoralists whose identity separated them from that of the wider peasantry, Rapoport argues that the pervasive establishment of Arab village clans was the most important development in the history of the Middle Eastern countryside in the Islamic era.
Date: 16/12/2025
Time: 4pm to 6pm
Venue: Room 6..60, Faculty of Arts, Blandijn, Blandijnberg 2, 9000 Gent
Contact: middleeast@ugent.be
with Prof. Dr. An Van Raemdonck (Ghent University)
Date: 25/11/2025
Time: 4pm to 6pm
Venue: Room 6.60, Faculty of Arts, Blandijn, Blandijnberg 2, 9000 Gent
Contact: middleeast@ugent.be
with Prof. Dr. Sara Mondini (Ghent University)
Date: 30/10/2025 (postponed due to our participation in the national academics and students strike for Palestine)
Time: 4pm to 6pm
Venue: room 6.60, Faculty of Arts, Blandijn, Blandijnberg 2, 9000 Gent
Contact: middleeast@ugent.be
with Laura Stauth (Ghent University)
Date: 20/05/2025
Time: 4pm to 6pm
Venue:Room 1.2, Faculty of Arts, Rozier 44, 9000 Gent
Contact: middleeast@ugent.be
book presentation with Dr. Laura Menin (University of Sussex)
Date: 29/04/2025
Time: 4pm to 6pm
Venue: Auditorium 1 Jan Broeckx, Faculty of Arts, Blandijnberg 2, 9000 Gent
Contact: middleeast@ugent.be
with Dr. Irem Gündüz-Polat (Ghent University)
with Dr. Vincent Thérouin (Ghent University)
Date: 23/04/2026
Time: 4pm to 6pm
Venue: Room 6.60, Faculty of Arts, Blandijn, Blandijnberg 2, 9000 Gent
Contact: middleeast@ugent.be
with Menna M. El Mahy (Ghent University)
Date: 24/03/2026
Time: 4pm to 6pm
Venue: Room 6.60, Faculty of Arts, Blandijn, Blandijnberg 2, 9000 Gent
Contact: middleeast@ugent.be
with Prof. Dr. Fokelien Kootstra
The project aims to develop an online, accessible, long-term database of the inscriptions documented in the AlUla valley, in Saudi Arabia, by the RCU. The inscriptions include texts from as early as the 6th century BC up to modern Arabic graffiti.
Date: 18/03/2025
Time: 4pm to 6pm
Venue: Room 1.2, Faculty of Arts, Rozier 44, 9000 Gent
Contact: middleeast@ugent.be
with Prof. Dr. Nir Shafir (UC – San Diego)
In the seventeenth century, Muslims in the Ottoman Empire became embroiled in a polarizing cultural war over the permissibility of everyday practices like worshipping at saints’ graves, smoking tobacco, and an odd medical procedure called “chickpea cauterization.” This talk traces this widespread religious and political polarization to the rise of a new “communication order,” focusing, in particular, on the advent of “pamphlets”: short, mobile, and polemical tracts, all copied by hand. The talk paints a new picture of the entire ecosystem of books in the manuscript culture of the early modern Ottoman Empire and how it fell into supposed disorder as middling readers stoked polemics, falsified authorship, and fashioned new reading publics.
Date: 12/12/2024
Time: 4pm to 6pm
Venue: Room 1.2, Faculty of Arts, Rozier 44, 9000 Gent
Contact: middleeast@ugent.be