December 2023

Dear friends of the NVIC,

We just wrapped our fall MA Arabic and Islamic Studies and BA Middle East Studies programmes. From September, over 40 students from Gent University, KU Leuven, Leiden, and Copenhagen joined us for the fall semester and completed a four-month programme of Arabic-language training and content course seminars. Other than their classes at the institute, our students had the opportunity to take walking tours of downtown, attend concerts, films, and museums, and listen to talks by Middle East Studies scholars. We hope their time with us in Cairo was a fruitful one, and we wish them all the best in their future endeavors.

In November and December we also ran our Introduction to Ancient Egypt course for an audience of interested lay(wo)men, including members of the Dutch Embassy in Cairo. In a series of classes coupled with excursions to the Egyptian Museum on Tahrir Square and to the necropolis of Saqqara the group learned about the ins and outs of pharaonic culture and is now well equipped to interpret the ancient Egyptian heritage surrounding us.

On 21 October, we celebrated the festive opening of our new elevator, now standing on the side of our building and making all floors of the institute wheelchair accessible. The Leiden team responsible for the design, architect Ernst Hoek and Leiden University real estate managers Cloeck Beekhuis and Steven Menijn, who supervised the construction from the Netherlands, as well as Emad Fekry of Egyptian contracting company Maestro Interior all attended the event. A long awaited addition to our infrastructure, this elevator greatly improves the accessibility to the guest rooms and the rooftop.

On 23 November, Professor Karène Sanchez (professor and Chair of Middle East Studies at Groningen University) read her Cleveringa lecture entitled “Unsilencing, Rewriting and Nuancing Palestine: Experiencing and Historicising the Visual Archives of Frank Scholten on Palestine (1921-1923)” at our institute to a full house of attendees. She was introduced by Geert Klein Wolterink, who is a Leiden alumnus and currently posted to the Dutch embassy as First Secretary for Economic Affairs. Accompanying this event, we opened an exhibition of unique historic photographs by Dutch author and photographer Frank Scholten. The combined event, also including a movie screening, was held under the title ‘Unsilencing Palestine’. We thank Professor Sanchez and Mr Klein Wolterink for their cooperation in our event, and we are grateful to the Netherlands Embassy in Cairo for generously supporting it. After the lecture, we invited our visitors for drinks and snacks on the roof of our institute.

To bolster our public profile at home in Flanders, we also received several groups of interested Flemish travellers during our autumn semester. These visitors were accompanied by former assistant director of the institute Dirk Debeaussaert and his wife Katy Verhelle. On another occasion, professor (em.) Harco Willems of KU Leuven accompanied a group of visitors of the Flemish business association De Warande on a visit to our institute.

On behalf of all of us at NVIC, I wish you a merry festive season and a beautiful start of the New Year!

Rudolf de Jong, Director of NVIC