Dr Islam Dayeh

Analytic Method Working Group
Dr. Islam Dayeh is the Academic Coordinator and co-director of the research program Zukunftsphilologie. Islam Dayeh studied at the University of Jordan (BA in Islamic studies), University of Leiden (MA in Religious Studies) and University of Oxford (MSt in Jewish studies). He completed his PhD dissertation in Arabic philology at Freie Universität Berlin under the supervision of Angelika Neuwirth. Dayeh’s research interests focus on comparative philology, commentary cultures and text-editing practices in European and Arabic textual traditions. He investigates the emergence of the discipline of “Semitic philology” (Semitistik) and its introduction in the Arabic language academies and curricula of the 19th and 20th centuries and the impact of European constructions of Semitic race, language, and religion on Arab philologists of the 19th and 20th centuries. In relation to this, his research engages with the development of historicist methodologies in the study of the Bible (Bibelwissenschaft) and their applicability, given their rootedness in particular hermeneutical traditions, to the Qur’an. Dayeh situates his research in a broader context of the intellectual and cultural entanglements that have shaped relations between Europe and the Arabic-Islamic world from the medieval period to this day. He is currently completing two monographs. The first is a study of the intellectual cosmos of the Cairene-Damascene exegete, philologist, geometrician, logician and historian Burhan al-Din al-Biqai (1406–1480). The second is a study of the impact of the messianic movement of Sabbatai Zewi on the Jews of Yemen. The study is based on a critical edition of several manuscripts documenting exchanges between Yemeni Muslim jurists over the legal status of contemporaneous Jews in the wake of the Sabbatian messianic disturbances in Yemen (17th–19th century).
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