UvA Religious Studies

Do you want to know more about al-Andalus under Muslim rule? Then come to the talk by Prof. Gerard Wiegers on 29/1/26! Tickets + info:

https://www.podiumhogewoerd.nl/agenda/granada

🎉🎉🎉📣📣📣New publication📣📣📣🎉🎉🎉

Dr. Liana Saif () has just published an entry on divination in EI3 (Encyclopedia of Islam 3). This entry surveys the practice and interpretation of divination in the Islamicate world, situating it within broader occult, philosophical, and cultural traditions. Drawing on historical sources, the article highlights diverse divinatory practices such as geomancy and physiognomy, exploring how their epistemological and theological implications were negotiated.

See more via: https://www.academia.edu/145390493/Divination_EI3?fbclid=PAT01DUAOqpsRleHRuA2FlbQIxMABzcnRjBmFwcF9pZA81NjcwNjczNDMzNTI0MjcAAac5UDIboJrq3oGtXHLfGe4LvDgsIpBKwZzts8dhPnCVIC6Eku84aV8gSEhdLw_aem_5dD_URViHcooBAVBqmKNOw

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***Publications***
Dedicated to Prof Mohammad Ali Amir-Moezzi, Orkhan Mir-Kasimov & Mathieu Terrier’s “De la letter à l’esprit/From the Letter to the Spirit” constitutes a monumental, 2-volume, 1362-page work on all aspects of spiritual Islam. The Festschrift consists of 44 contributions on topics ranging as far as from Manichaean Ideas in Sufism to Purity and Sexuality in Twelver Shiʿi ḥadīṯ or the 1920s correspondence of Christiaan Snouck Hurgronje. The complete table of contents and all information on the volume is available at https://www.brepols.net/products/IS-9782503618159-1.

Our student association Ars Notoria is organizing a movie night - everyone is welcome!

📣📣📣 New event in Current Issues, organized by Dr. Jacqueline Borsje 📣📣📣 everyone is welcome!

Last night, the MA students enrolled in the Fieldwork Practicum course visited the Haarlem branch of the Universal Sufism movement and observed the meditation ceremony. Universal Sufism in the Netherlands has a history of over a century and traces its origins to Inayat Khan (1882–1927), an Indian Sufi teacher and musician who founded the movement. In addition to the Haarlem center, there are active branches in Amsterdam, The Hague, and Arnhem.

**No photos because we forgot to take them**

A view from the women’s section of the Fatih Mosque in Amsterdam, located where the church altar once stood.

The students following the courses on Fieldwork Practicum (MA) and Women in World Religions (BA) visited the mosque today with Dr. Dženita Karić. Fatih Mosque in Amsterdam was built as a Catholic church in 1930s, then converted into a music store in 1970s before it became a mosque in 1982. The Turkish community that bought it used to pray in a place on Dam which is now *the Amsterdam Dungeon* (torture museum).

⚠️⚠️Check this out if you're interested in Islamic manuscripts (different geographies)⚠️⚠️

Call for proposals | Visit Leiden and study our Special Collections in residence with a Scaliger Institute Fellowship grant!
The submission deadline is set for 1 February 2026.
Learn more about the fellowships via: https://www.library.universiteitleiden.nl/news/2025/11/call-for-proposals-scaliger-institute-fellowship-grants

The Leiden University Libraries' Scaliger Institute offers several fellowships, each with a different focus. From fellowships with a broad Humanities scope, like the Brill fellowship, to programs aimed at specific collections, like the Juynboll Fellowship, which enables scholars to study Arabic and Islam-related Special Collections, the Isaac Alfred Ailion Fellowship with a focus on Japanese culture and language or the Lingling Wiyadharma Fellowship, which offers the opportunity to three scholars to spend up to three months conducting research using the Southeast Asian and particularly the Indonesian special collections.

We are also happy to announce a NEW fellowship: The Bibliotheca Thysiana Fellowship that will support research into the late humanist collection that has been kept virtually unchanged in the eponymous library on the Rapenburg canal in Leiden since the 17th century.

Find out more about these and even more fellowship programmes via the link above and send in your proposals before 1 February 2026.

Prof. Gerard Wiegers took part in the exhibition on the life of the sacred book - the Qur'an - among Mudéjars and Moriscos (Muslim minorities in the Iberian peninsula), which was organized this year by the Educational Program of the University of Granada in collaboration with the Spanish Foundation for Science and Technology (FECYT) of the Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities. Prof. Wiegers contributed to the bilingual catalogue of the exhibition, which covered topics such as The Craft of the Reed Pen, Memorizing the Word of Allah, The Qur'an Between Life and Death, The Qur'an in Christian Hands, and Exile and Concealment.

📣📣📣 Call for papers 📣📣📣

(From the announcement):

From the Renaissance up to the thresholds of the 20th century, the human body was never a simple biological object, but a genuine “incarnate secret” and a conceptual nexus at the crossroads of scientific knowledge and occult lore. The body has often been perceived as the greatest of Nature’s secrets. For centuries, the inquiry into the body represented a battlefield and a point of collaboration between disciplines. This thematic issue of the Arcana Naturae Journal proposes to explore the long duration and deep complexity of this relationship, analyzing how the body became the primary epistemological territory shared and disputed between medicine and the secret sciences. Particular attention will be paid to the body-as-sign (between manifestation and dissimulation), the body-as-medium (a laboratory for occult forces), and the body-as-science (corporeal epistemology and knowledge communities)



More info: https://www.academia.edu/144955638/Call_for_Contributions_The_Incarnate_Secret_The_Human_Body_Between_Medicine_and_Secret_Sciences_Arcana_Naturae_Journal_Thematic_Issue_8_2027_

The biennial NGG (Nederlands Genootschap voor Godsdienstwetenschap) conference took place at Utrecht University from 5–7 November 2025. Our colleague Dr. Johanneke Kroesbergen-Kamps was one of the organisers. Prof. Wouter Hanegraaff and Dr. Dženita Karić also participated in the conference. You can read the conference report here: https://godsdienstwetenschap.nl/2025/11/15/report-ngg-conference-religion-imagination/

📣📣 New publication 📣📣

Dr. Liana Saif participated in a roundtable on The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi (a novel by Shannon Chakraborty), "at once a work of historical fiction and fantasy, following a band of pirates led by a roguish woman captain across the ocean we recognize and into uncharted magical territories" (Shireen Hamza). All the articles of the roundtable were published in al-Usur al-Wusta and are available online:

https://journals.library.columbia.edu/index.php/alusur/article/view/uw33hamzaintro

And there is also a podcast version of the roundtable with all the contributions:

https://www.ottomanhistorypodcast.com/2025/11/chakraborty.html