Blessed Eid al-Fitr - More summer internships than ever
Ramadan has ended and we would like to wish our Muslim friends a blessed Eid al-Fitr!
In a previous newsletter, we wrote about our agreement with the Data Archiving and Networked Services in the Netherlands (https://dans.knaw.nl/en). We now have 9 interns studying outside Egypt and 5 interns studying inside Egypt working at the Center for Arab-West Understanding this summer. All of them are working on various aspects of the DANS-project. Although we are already numbering 14, we are expecting our numbers of interns to increase even more in July and August as new interns have committed to working on the DANS project.
Intern Romana Moussa is leading the Interview Documentation Project. Romana is working with a team of 9 interns to document approximately 600 interviews we have recorded in the past twenty years. These interviews include unique recordings with luminaries such as former Sudanese Prime Minister Sadeq el-Mahdy, powerful conversion stories from Islam to Christianity and vice versa, and interviews with leading Egyptian clergy, politicians and scholars.
Mona Feisse worked on 25 interviews related to our forthcoming academic book, on Islamist movements in 2013 to be published by Tectum Publishers in Germany. Most interviews were conducted in the weeks before former President Mohammed Mursi was removed and thus give a fantastic insight into views expressed during this crucial moment in Egypt’s history.
Matthew Sparks and 5 other interns are working are working on classifying and reviewing the AWR Reports, a collection of around 1,000 documents on Muslim-Christian relations written by researchers at Arab-West Report covering a period spanning from 1998 to the present. Matthew’s AWR-Reports classification project, along with Romana’s Interview Documentation Project, are the two remaining wings of the DANS project which we aim to have near completion by September.
It is fascinating to have such a large number of interns this summer. It is equally fascinating that we can upload our own findings into the database of DANS which greatly helps in the development of plans to make our data better accessible for university libraries.
Cornelis Hulsman
Deputy Chairman Center for Arab-West Understanding
July 7, 2016
Cornelis Hulsman
Deputy Chairman Center for Arab-West Understanding
Emerging Perspectives on Intercultural and Interreligious Relations
Dialogue Across Borders is a database of summary translations of Arabic newspaper articles with references to their sources about intercultural and interreligious relations, focusing primarily but not exclusively on Muslim-Christian relations. The database also contains articles with editorial analysis and interviews on the subject.