The hinterland of important centres like Petra (Southern Jordan) can provide essential information that contribute to the understanding of their rise, expansion and decline.

When it comes to languages and cultures, Leiden University is the university. The global expertise present places our university at the top. In Leiden and The Hague, we study languages and cultures from all regions of the world and from prehistory to the present day. In this way we create a broad view…

If you follow the western media, you are likely to think of ‘Africa’ as the continent of origin of desperate migrants, a continent of hunger and disease and a breeding ground for international terrorism. But if you want to see the bigger picture, you should look no further than the African Studies scholars…

How should the Quran be read? The manuscript of this holy book makes different interpretations possible. Researcher Marijn van Putten has been awarded an ERC Consolidator Grant of two million euros to explore centuries-old recitations.

Athens is universally known as a symbol of democracy, philosophy, and ancient Greek aesthetics. Some of the most famous classical monuments, including the Parthenon and the temple of Hephaestus, can be found here.

Lecture, LIAS Lunch Talk Series

The new Middle Eastern Library (MEL) will bring together the UBL's own Middle Eastern collections and the collections of the library of The Netherlands Institute for the Near East (NINO), which has been part of the Leiden University Libraries since 1st January 2018.

Religion, Philosophy, and the Pre-modern World

Leiden University works close with Indonesian and Dutch scholarship providers in order to expand the opportunities for Indonesian students to study in Leiden.

This project aims to revisit the ways in which religious minorities in the Middle East participated in, contributed to, and opposed the Arab nationalism of the post-war years, when the British and French ruled the region via the Mandates. Research question: How did religious minorities in the Middle…

Aesthetic formations and cultural repertoires give meaning to our reality in ways that are never neutral. Focusing on the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) and its global interlocutors, this project brings together a team of scholars from Leiden University who bring in inter-disciplinary, inter-area…

PhD defence

PhD defence

This study offers a new approach to the history of sites, archaeology, and heritage formation in Asia, at both the local and the trans-regional levels.

This book examines the impact of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) on national and international jurisprudence, since its adoption in 1989.

This project examines the notion of sacred fertility and sacred landscapes, associated rituals and material culture, both archaeological and ethnographic manifestations in the Horn of Africa.

Huda Abi-Fares defended her thesis on 10 January 2017.

In the Special Issue of Matatu: “Power to the People?” Patronage, Intervention and Transformation in African Performative Artspaper, Annachiara Raia seeks to investigate the manifold relationships between traditional and contemporary, oral and written Swahili poetry, in the utendi and mashairi forms…

In August 2006 a young American called Raed Jarrar discovered Arabic’s potency. Detained by four guards at New York’s Kennedy Airport for wearing a T-shirt with “We will not be silent” on it in Arabic, he was told that he may as well be entering a bank with a T-shirt announcing “I am a robber.”

An interdisciplinary collection of the best international scholarship on Muslim youth.

On 18 May 2022, Annelien Bouland defended her thesis 'Please give me my divorce: an ethnography of Muslim women and the law in Senegal'. The doctoral research was supervised by Prof.dr. J.M. Otto, Prof.dr. M.M.A. Kaag and Dr.ir. C.I.M. Jacobs.

LUCIS is directed by Nathal Dessing, who is advised by a steering committee.

Leiden Journal of Pottery Studies 23, 2007

Proceedings of the First International Conference on Byzantine and Ottoman Archaeology, Amsterdam, 21-23 October 2011

This new handbook by Frits Naerebout and Henk Singor places the history of the Greeks and Romans within the larger context of the contemporary Eurasian world.

This book presents an understanding of the concept of Countering Violent Extremism from a critical terrorism studies perspective using case studies from different countries while examining the issues it raises.

This book provides a grammatical sketch, glossed texts and a glossary of Tarifiyt Berber, which is the main heritage language of the Moroccan community in the Netherlands, Belgium and Germany.

The Netherlands Institute in Morocco (NIMAR) is a Leiden University institute. It is financed by the Ministry of Education, Culture and Science and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

Did you know that Arabic was for centuries the lingua franca in an area stretching from the south of Spain to the Chinese border? And that the Middle East under Muslim rule was the world’s beating heart of trade, but also of science and scholarship?

Jasmijn Rana demonstrates in the article 'Secular-religious self-improvement: Muslim women’s kickboxing in the Netherlands' that young Muslim women who kickbox develop agentive selves by challenging gender norms and living out their religious subjectivities.

In 2011, the Udhruh Archaeological Project was launched, bringing together teams of Jordanian and Dutch archaeologists to investigate the region and reconstruct ancient water harvesting techniques in the extremely arid landscape of Udhruh. Access to fresh water remains one of the most pressing global…

Lecture, LUCIS What's New?! Series

In the Faculty of Archaeology depots, many artefacts, accumulated after decades of fieldwork across the world are stored. The Leiden Inventory of the Depot (LID) project aims to unlock the door to this wealth of information. Elizabeth Hicks, a Research Master’s student at the Faculty, will be re-evaluating…

Lecture

Pastoralist Societies, Rock Art and Literacy in Jordan’s Black Desert (200 BC to 800 AD)

Paolo Sartori is a Senior Fellow at the Institute of Iranian Studies of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, Vienna. In Leiden he will deliver one guest lecture on Twilight of the Persianate: The Vernacularization of Central Asia (18th - early 20th Centuries) on 12 April and a masterclass on How can we…

This fall, LUCIS will have the pleasure of welcoming Professor Hugh Kennedy from SOAS University of London to Leiden. He is the fourth Abdulaziz Saud Al-Babtain Cultural Foundation Visiting Professor in Arabic Culture at Leiden University.

The main focus of this research project is to investigate why people in Eastern Arabia chose to reuse ancient tombs and how this can be linked to collective memory.

Library of Arabic Literature: Critical Edition and Translation of Ibn Qutaybah’s Faḍl al-ʿArab.

Stella Morgana defended her thesis on 31 March 2021

Archaeological and Historical Perspectives on Eastern Cuisine and Western Foodways

The study by Tahir Abbas and Liselotte Welten reveals a structural and nuanced understanding of how the question of Salafism in the Netherlands has become an increasingly discussed phenomenon and the types of threats that ought to give genuine concern to security, intelligence and policing services.