About the Leiden Lectures on Arabic Language and Culture

Arabic was taught at Leiden University almost from the moment it was founded in 1574, but the decision by the university board, the city of Leiden, and representatives of the newly established Republic of the Netherlands to acknowledge the fundamental significance of Arabic to the academy by financing a professorship was a watershed moment. On May 8, 1613 the first professor of Arabic, Thomas Erpenius held his inaugural lecture entitled ‘On the excellence and dignity of the Arabic language.’ He explained why knowledge of Arabic was so important, stressing that the books and ‘wisdom of the Arabs’ contained more essential information for academics and the general public than any other source.

The Leiden chair is now the oldest continuously existing one that exists outside the Arabic-speaking world. On February 4, 2013, the current professor of Arabic, Petra Sijpesteijn, commemorated this splendid history with a lecture entitled ‘The wisdom of the Arabs. 400 years of cross-cultural interaction.’ The decision was made to honour Leiden’s long and rich tradition of Arabic studies through an annual lecture series. Outstanding scholars in the field are invited to present subsequent lectures opening up the rich and enjoyable variety of classical Arabic texts and their significance and relevance for today’s world.

Lectures in this series

6 February 2024	Translating Jurjani: Why read an eleventh-century text about Arabic poetics?	Lara Harb (Princeton)
7 February 2023	Why Poetry? A Sufi Response	Bilal Orfali (AUB)
24 May 2022	What (and Where) on Earth is Waqwaq?	Shawkat Toorawa (Yale)
6 February 2020	900 Years of Trickery: al-Hariri from Leiden to Los Angeles	Michael Cooperson (UCLA)
16 May 2019	Where Have All Those Books Gone? Translocation and Provenance in Studying Medieval Middle Eastern Writerly Cultures	Konrad Hirschler (Freie Universität Berlin)
15 February 2018	Feelings Matter: Emotions in Medieval Arabic	Julia Bray (Oxford)
2 February 2017	A Forgotten Heyday of Arabic Culture: Literary Life in Mamluk Syria and Egypt (1250-1517 CE)	Thomas Bauer (Münster)
4 February 2016	Modernity in the Ninth Century: the Controversy around Abū Tammām	Beatrice Gründler (Freie Universität Berlin)
8 October 2015	Antidotes and Anecdotes: A Literary History of Medicine from 13th-Century Syria	Geert Jan van Gelder (Oxford)
12 February 2015	On Hedgehogs, Foxes and Magpies, and Why the World Should Read Classical Arabic Poetry	James Montgomery (Cambridge)
4 February 2013	The Wisdom of the Arabs. Four Hundred Years of Cross-Cultural Engagement	Petra Sijpesteijn (Leiden)

Publications

• The lectures by Julia Bray and Shawkat Toorawa will be published together in one volume of the Journal of the School for Abbasid Studies.
• The lecture by Beatrice Gründler was published in Studia Islamica 112 (2017) and can be accessed here.
• The lectures by Petra Sijpesteijn, James Montgomery, and Geert Jan van Gelder have been compiled into one publication, entitled Wit and Wisdom in Classical Arabic Literature. 
• The lecture by Michael Cooperson  was published in The Journal Of Abbasid Studies (2023) and can be accessed here.

• arabic
• arabic history
• arabic language
• arabic language and culture
• arabic language and literature