Islam Dayeh is a research professor of Arabic and Islamic Studies in the Department of Languages and Cultures at Ghent University, and an associate member of the Department of History.
His research focuses on the Islamic intellectual tradition, with a particular interest in the dynamics of religious thought, forms of knowledge and textual practices. He also works on the formations of modern Arab and Islamic thought in the context of colonial and anti-/decolonial discourses.
Before joining Ghent University in 2024, he was an Assistant Professor of Arabic Studies at Freie Universität Berlin. During this period, he focused on the history of marginalised non-European textual cultures before the colonial encounter. In this line of research, he was the Academic Director of the research programme Zukunftsphilologie: Revisiting the Canons of Textual Scholarship (2010-2023), and the Principal Investigator of the project Arabic Philology and Textual Practices in the Early Modern Period (Deutsche Forschungsgesellschaft, 2015-19).
More recently, he has focused on the formation and integration of disciplines of knowledge in premodern Islamic culture. With this line of research, Islam Dayeh is the Principal Investigator of the ERC Consolidator Grant KNOW: Polymathy and Interdisciplinarity in Premodern Islamic Epistemic Cultures, a project that examines the interactions between disciplines of knowledge in the postformative period, 1200-1800 CE.
Other recently completed research projects examined the Arabic reception of Wittgenstein’s philosophy, modern innovations in Arabic editorial practices, methodological intersections between microhistory and philology, and the forgotten role of Arab intellectuals in the making of 19th century German orientalism.
Islam Dayeh received his PhD in Arabic Studies from Freie Universität Berlin in 2012. He received an MA in Islamic Studies from the University of Leiden in 2003, an MSt in Jewish Studies from the University of Oxford in 2009, and a BA in Islamic Studies from the University of Jordan, Amman, in 2002. He has held several visiting professorships and research fellowships, including at Columbia University, University of Turin, American University in Cairo, Luxembourg School of Religion & Society, Library of Congress, the Arab Centre for Research and Policy Studies in Doha, and the Maria Sibylla Merian Centre Conviviality-Inequality in Latin America (Mecila) in São Paulo.
Islam Dayeh is the founder and editor of Philological Encounters.
