Arabic Folktales

This project is a comparative study of pre-modern written Muslim, Jewish, and Christian Middle Arabic. It challenges the long-held assumption that social and cultural segregation of Jews, Muslims, and Christians in Ottoman-era Egypt caused significant divergences in their written languages.

Caliphs on the Throne of Constantine

By studying how kingship was conceptualised by a large group of Christian subjects of Islamic rule (the Syriac Orthodox, in the mid 7th through 10th centuries), this project probes how Christians adapted their tradition on kingship to accommodate Islamic kings.

Studies on Simʿān ibn Kalīl

The aim of this project is to critically analyse the exegetical work of the Coptic author Simʿān ibn Kalīl (d. ca. 1236/37) on the Gospel of Matthew.

Communities of Knowledge

In the Communities of Knowledge project (https://usaybia.net), we examine the social encounters of Jewish, Christian, and Muslim scholars in the Abbasid Near East (750–1258).