This book offers a new direction for the study of contemporary Islam by focusing on what being Muslim means in people’s everyday lives.

On young Muslims seeking to understand their place and make their way in a transformed world.

Knowledge of Muslim societies is essential to function in a globalised world and to fully understand our own Dutch society. Leiden researchers explore the languages, cultures, religions, legal systems and history of Muslim societies and in this way contribute to a centuries-old tradition.

LUCIS affiliated members are researchers outside Leiden University who are actively involved in the study of Islam and/or Muslim societies and who regularly participate in LUCIS activities. LUCIS affiliate membership offers possibilities to cooperate with LUCIS as well as network opportunities. Contact…

This programme starts from the idea that cultural discourse is one of the main engines of intellectual history and the history of ideas.

With Brill, LUCIS publishes a peer-reviewed book series, “Leiden Studies in Islam and Society” (LSIS), aimed at an international academic audience.

Meet Nathal Dessing, LUCIS director as of 1 November 2018. Dessing is a lecturer for the Leiden University Centre for the Study of Religion (LUCSoR) and education director at the Leiden University Institute for Area Studies (LIAS).

Reconfigurations of Practice, Community and Authority in Contemporary Aceh

Thirteen Centuries of Creed, Conflict and Coexistence

How does the religious identity of islamic primary schools in the Netherlands relate to the social demands?

Can we speak of a single Islamic discourse in fields like politics, militancy, economics, sustainable development, and the like, and what interaction does this Islamic though have with ‘Western’ thought?

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Links to related organisations, institutes, journals and archives.

Conference, LUCIS 10th annual conference

LUCIS What's New Lecture

Khadija Kadrouch-Outmany defended her thesis on 16 September 2014.

The FOI project has a number of topics it aims to investigate. These are: State, Economy, Culture and Papyri. You will find links to bibliographies on this page.

This project explores how Muslim authorities and writers use Russian to transmit Islamic contents, and whether this leads to a specific "Islamic sociolect" of the Russian language.

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What forms does Muslim religiosity take in daily life? What is the relation between representations of Islam and Muslims by scholars and the views that exist in the ‘real world’?

Policymakers and Academics Speaking with Each Other

The Issues beneath the Surface

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In Women and Property Rights in Indonesian Islamic Contexts, eight scholars of Indonesian Islam examine women’s access to property in law courts and in village settings.

The Indonesian Experience after the Fall of Suharto

What made the early Islamic empire so successful and have we missed the story by neglecting crucial evidence? The 7th-century Arab conquests changed the socio-political configurations in the Mediterranean and Eurasia forever. Yet we do not really know how the Arabs managed to gain dominance of this…

Studies on the Ottoman Jihad on the Centenary of Snouck Hurgronje's "Holy War Made in Germany"

LUCIS promotes high-quality research on Islam and Muslim societies and actively communicates the insights and findings of that research to the larger public.

By examining the impact of Islam on the daily life of those living under its rule, the goal of this project is to understand the striking newness of Islamic society and its debt to the diverse cultures it superseded. Questions will be the extent, character, and ambition of Muslim state competency at…

On February 20th, Gulnaz Sibgatullina succesfully defended her doctoral thesis and graduated. The Leiden University Centre for Linguistics congratulates Gulnaz on this great result.

This month, the NISIS publication “Islamic Studies in the Twenty-first Century: Transformations and Continuities” was published by Amsterdam University Press. This volume brings together contributions of various speakers at past NISIS Autumn Schools, providing an overview of important issues in the…

Primary-school teachers who aren’t Muslim themselves but do have Muslim children in their class sometimes face dilemmas and cultural or religious differences. The ‘Islam in the Classroom’ course at the Leiden Islam Academy can help them resolve these. A new round begins on 9 September.

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A Biography of Sayyid ʿUthman (1822–1914)

Islam can be a difficult or sensitive subject to discuss with pupils, regardless whether they are Muslim. Fourteen secondary-school teachers and university lecturers went on a fact-finding trip to Morocco accompanied by experts from NIMAR (the Netherlands Institute in Morocco). What did they learn from…

Anthropology of Law in Muslim Sudan analyses the hybridity of law systems and the plurality of legal practices in rural and urban contexts of contemporary Sudan, shedding light on the complex relation between Islam and society.

How have Muslims imagined the world before Muhammad? Stories about pre-Islamic times feature across all genres and periods of Arabic literature, and while many writers have derided the pre-Islamic past as disorderly paganism, others celebrate its memory as a time of Arab nobility and fine literature.…

Professor Maurits Berger is presenting an online course, starting on 6 November, on the images that Islam and the West hold of one another. The course will be useful for diplomats from Teheran to Islamabad.

Understanding the history of Islam and Muslim societies sheds a clear light on the complex and changing social structures of the Middle East, including the current trouble spots whose effect spreads all the way to Western Europe.

Systematic investigations into religious precepts, worldly rules of law and legal practices in the Muslim world show clearly how these societies deal with justice and injustice. Sharia, the Islamic ‘legal system’, plays an important role in this context.

Thanks to its early civilisation and continuous mix of influences, the Muslim world has a rich and varied culture. The study of material culture, books, stories, films and increasingly television series teaches us about the structure of modern-day Muslim societies.

Islam is often studied as a distinct and uniform phenomenon that is or should be kept private, and stands apart from any other human activity, be it in the field of economics, law or politics.

As Lila Abu Lughod pointed out in 1989, North Africa has been one of the geographical ‘zones of prestige’ for the development of canonical approaches and crucial theoretical debates regarding the comparative study of Islam.

Southeast Asia is a term to denote a collection of at present eleven nation-states with an enormous diversity in languages, cultures and religions. Muslims can both take a majority and a minority position.

‘Islam in de klas’ is a new course targeting primary school teachers to go online on 18 March by the Leiden Islam Academy (LIA). The online course aims to help teachers get better equipped when dealing with Islam-related dilemmas in primary classrooms.

How did people experience Islam on a day-to-day basis in the early centuries of Islam? That's where the papyri come in, says professor of Arabic Petra Sijpesteijn in the fourth video of the Leiden | Islam interview series.

With Leiden University Press, LUCIS publishes a peer-reviewed book series “Debates on Islam and Society” aimed at a broad audience. All books in this series are available in open access.