Friday seminar with Dr. Amr Ryad, Utrecht University, at The Centre for Islamic and Middle East Studies and in cooperation with The New Middle East: Emerging Political and Ideological Trends.
The lecture will highlight the political, religious and intellectual activities of Muslims as engaged actors in the European and international space. The focus of the lecture is on the encounters and experiences of Muslim actors after WWI from within. And the argument is that Muslims in interwar Europe were not only part of colonial Middle Eastern history, but were also entangled with European trans-cultural history as well. More historical reflection on Islam in Europe can put the present “fear” for the Islamization of the West into perspective.
Dr. Amr Ryad is currently associate professor of Islamic Studies at the University of Utrecht. He has been working as assistant professor of Islamic Studies, Leiden University Institute for the Study of Religions (2008-2014). He studied at the Faculty of Languages and Translation, Al-Azhar University in Cairo (BA Islamic Studies in English, 1998) and obtained his MA degree in Islamic Studies (cum laude) from Leiden University (2001), where he also received his PhD degree in June 2008 with the thesis Islamic Reformism and Christianity: A Critical Study of the Works of Muhammad Rashid Rida and His Associates (1898-1935)(Brill, 2009). Ryad’s current research focuses on the modern Islamic intellectual and religious history, dynamics of the networks of Islamic reformist and pan-Islamist movements, Muslim polemics on Christianity, the history of Christian missions in the modern Muslim World, and transnational Islam in interwar Europe. He is currently leading the ERC Starting Grant project: “Neither visitors nor colonial victims: Muslims in interwar Europe.”
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