Alon Dar graduated from the Departments of General History and Middle East Studies at Ben Gurion University, Israel. He was enrolled in two MA programs: Intellectual Encounters of the Islamicate World at Freie Universität, Berlin and the MA program at the Department of Middle East Studies, Ben Gurion University. In addition, he was a research assistant at the Center for the Study of Conversion and Inter-Religious Encounters, and editorial board member of Jama’a Interdisciplinary Journal of Middle East Studies.

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He will examine the way governance was implemented and received in the provinces. Two provinces serve as case studies: Egypt and Khurasan, who went through different historical trajectories before and after the Islamic conquests. Egypt was a Byzantine territory, with defined borders who soon developed a centralized center: Fustat. Khurasan, on the other hand, was conquered by the Muslims from the Sassanid Empire, and is an arena of resistance to Muslim rulers in the 7th and 8th centuries. Thus, this comparison is helpful to uncover the different ways in which the Muslim state has developed in different areas, and in accordance to its specific characteristics. In his study, he focuses on three main themes: centralized authority, strategies of survival by locals and lower strata inhabitants, and the process of acculturation undergo in these provinces.