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Umar Ryad

Professor of Arabic and Islamic Studies at KU Leuven

About me

Umar Ryad is Professor of Arabic and Islamic Studies and head of the Research Unit of East Asian and Arabic Studies at the University of Leuven. Currently he is holder of Alexander von Humboldt Fellowship for Experienced Researchers (2021-2024) at the Centrum für Nah- und Mittelost-Studien (CNMS), Philipps-Universität Marburg (2021-2024); and member of the Young Academy of Belgium (2018-2023).

Prior he has worked as assistant professor at the University of Leiden (2008-2014) and as associate professor at Utrecht University (2014-2017). He earned a BA in Islamic Studies in English from Al-Azhar University in Cairo (1998), followed by an MA degree in Islamic Studies (2001, Cum Laude) and a PhD degree (2008), both from Leiden University. His doctoral dissertation analyses the writings of the well-known Muslim reformist Muhammad Rashid Rida (1865-1935) on Christianity and Christian missions in the colonial age, which was publishes as the monograph, Islamic reformism and Christianity : a critical reading of the works of Muhammad Rashid Rida and his associates (1898-1935) (Brill, 2009). In this work, Ryad makes use of the private family archive of Rashid Rida, which has set the tone of Ryad’s later research and collecting of Arab and Muslim archives in the Arab world and Europe. His current research also includes the dynamics of the networks of pan-Islamist movements, Arab reception of Orientalism, Muslim polemics on Christianity, the European trans-imperial connections with the Hajj, transnational Islam in the modern world and the application of Digital Humanities to Arabic and Islamic Studies.

He led a European Research Council (ERC) project which focused on the “History of Muslims in Interwar Europe and European transcultural history” (2014-2019). The project studied the intellectual and religio-political roles played by Muslim “intellectual agents” during the interwar years and up until the end of World War II (1918-1946). He has been also a co-applicant of two ongoing international research projects: 1) Marie Curie ITN-project “Mediating Islam in the Digital Age” (MIDA) and 2) research consortium “The Computational Study of Culture: Cultural Analytics for Modern Arab and Muslim Studies”, which is funded by Qatar National Research Fund and is based at Doha Institute for Graduate Studies.

Ryad also taught at the universities of Bern and Oslo; and was a research fellow at the University of Bonn, the Berlin Graduate School Muslim Cultures and Societies (Free University of Berlin), the Leibniz Zentrum Moderner Orient (ZMO) in Berlin and the Leibniz Institute of European History (IEG) in Mainz. He is a board member of the Netherlands Interuniversity School for Islamic Studies (NISIS). He is also a member of the editorial board of Philological Encounters, Leiden: Brill; peer-reviewed journal Zukunftsphilologie: Revisiting the Canons of Textual Scholarship, the journal Trajecta. Religion, Culture and Society in the Low Countries (Amsterdam University Press), and member of the editorial team of Christian-Muslim Relations, A Bibliographical History 1500-1900, Leiden: Brill, hosted by the University of Birmingham. He was a panel member and chairman of various evaluation committees by Dutch-Flemish Accreditation Organization (Nederlands - Vlaamse Accreditatieorganisatie, NVAO.