The Team

Armina Omerika is a Professor of Islamic Intellectual History at Goethe University Frankfurt. Following her PhD in Islamic Studies (2009) from Ruhr University Bochum, she gained teaching and research experience at various universities in Europe and the United States. Her academic career includes an acting professorship for Islamic Theology at the University of Hamburg (2014) and a visiting professorship for Islamic Theology and Education at the University of Zurich (2017). Her research focuses on the history of modern Islamic thought within the framework of global intellectual history, the development of Islam in Southeastern Europe, historical narratives and concepts of history in Islamic theology, as well as contemporary issues of Islam in digital spaces and digital hermeneutics in Islamic Theology.

Akif Tahiiev is currently a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Goethe University Frankfurt. Additionally, he serves as a research and teaching assistant in the Department of Human Rights and Legal Methodology at Yaroslav Mudryi National Law University in Kharkiv, Ukraine. Previously, he held research fellow positions at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity in Göttingen, the University of Vienna, and the Institute for Human Sciences (IWM) in Vienna, Austria. He earned his PhD from Yaroslav Mudryi National Law University, where he focused on the particularities of Shia Islamic Law. His broader research interests encompass Shia Islam, Digital Religion, Islam in Eastern Europe, Minority Studies, and Islamic Law.

Project description:

Images of Early Shi‘a History in the Digital Space

In discussions of Early Islamic history, events are often framed either through a Sunni lens or a generalized Muslim perspective that frequently aligns with the Sunni narrative due to their demographic predominance. This dominant framework tends to overshadow the rich diversity within Islam, marginalizing alternative perspectives on history that deviate from mainstream narratives. The advent of new technologies and the digitalization of historical discourse have shifted these debates into virtual spaces, where biases against minority interpretations persist. This project aims to reconstruct digital interpretations of pivotal events in Early Islamic history from the perspective of Shi‘i actors, to analyze the strategies employed in the digitalization of these historical narratives and to spotlight the dynamics of underlying power relations.

Nadeem Elias Khan is a research associate at the Academy for Islam in Research and Society (AIWG). He holds degrees in History and Islamic Studies as well as Global History from the Universities of Tübingen and Heidelberg. Currently, he is pursuing his PhD in Medieval History at the University of Münster.

Previously, Nadeem Khan served as a research associate at the Cluster of Excellence “Religion and Politics” and the Chair of Medieval Studies II in Münster. Most recently, he worked as a project coordinator at the Center for Religious Studies at Ruhr University Bochum.

His research centers on the interplay between religion, politics, and violence in the Islamicate World. Alongside his work at AIWG, he lectures on this subject at the universities of Bochum and Dortmund and conducts independent consulting on Islamist movements and online propaganda.

Lale Diklitaş received her master’s degrees in Cultural Studies of the Middle East (2018-2023) and Turkish Studies (2017-2021) from the University of Bamberg, and her bachelor’s degree in Islamic Studies and Political Science from the University of Tübingen (2014-2017). She spent a semester abroad at Istanbul Şehir University. Her master’s thesis about Turkish intellectuals’ debates on the Encyclopaedia of Islam in the 1940s within the context of official religious politics earned her the PUSh Prize by the Academic Equal Opportunity Officer at the University of Bamberg. She worked as a student and research assistant in various projects at the Universities of Bamberg and Potsdam. As a tutor, she taught methods in Islamic Studies as well as Turkish. Most recently, in 2023/24, she worked as a lecturer at the University of Mainz, teaching Arabic for historians. She was supported by a scholarship from the Gutenberg Graduate School of the Humanities and Social Sciences (GSHS) to prepare for doctoral studies.

She is interested in themes related to the history of knowledge and its interconnection with memory, postcolonial discourses, and the interaction of various media forms and genres. Passionate about different formats and issues in science communication, she was a co-editor of the student magazine ya3ni published in Munich. Additionally, she is a freelance translator and interpreter.

Project description:

Muslim Memory in German-speaking Social Media

In my research project, I explore the topics and events from Islamic history that German-speaking Muslim actors—such as influencers, activists, or theologians—engage with on Instagram and how they represent them. Using a netnographic, content, and discourse-analytical approach, I focus par-ticularly on how these individuals critically foreground underrepresented voices and perspectives from their point of view. I am especially interested in how media functionalities and platform lo-gics—such as the specific interplay of text and image, diverse linking possibilities, practices of self-presentation, or the strong connection to everyday life—transform the ways in which historical and Islamic knowledge is portrayed.

Furthermore, I aim to examine the sources these actors draw upon in their posts and how they con-tribute to questioning what makes history “Islamic” in the first place. Beyond the impact of social media on historical representations and processes of remembrance, I also seek to understand how interpretations of Islamic history are shaped by the specific positioning of these individuals as members of a religious minority in Germany. In this context, I am particularly interested in the op-portunities social media platforms like Instagram offer for amplifying new perspectives and coun-ter-narratives—both with regard to narratives in the German majority society and to intra-Muslim debates.

Mohammad Gharaibeh is a Professor of Islamic Intellectual History at the Berlin Institute for Islamic Theology at Humboldt University of Berlin. He completed his studies at the University of Bonn, where he also received his PhD in 2011 with a dissertation on the Wahhābī doctrine concerning God’s attributes, entitled “Zur Attributenlehre der Wahhābīya unter besonderer Berücksichtigung der Schriften Ibn ʿUṯaimīns (1929–2001).”

During his postdoctoral career, he served as an academic coordinator at the Annemarie Schimmel Kolleg “History and Society of the Mamluk Period (1250–1518)” and later at the Alexander von Humboldt Kolleg “Islamicate Intellectual History” at the University of Bonn. In 2019, Prof. Gharaibeh completed his Habilitation with a thesis titled “The Sociology of Commentarial Literature – An Analysis of the Commentary Tradition of the Muqaddimat Ibn aṣ-Ṣalāḥ (d. 643/1245) from the Perspective of the Sociology of Knowledge.”

His research interests encompass Arabic, Islamic historiography, Hadith studies, canon and censorship in premodern Muslim societies, intellectual history, commentarial literature, premodern and modern reform movements, as well as Islam and Muslims in Germany, Wahhabism, and Salafism.

Ali Aghaei is a Research Associate at the Berlin Institute of Islamic Theology at Humboldt University. He earned his MA in Qurʾān and Hadith Studies from Usūl ad-Dīn College in Qom in 2002 and his PhD from Islamic Azad University in Tehran in 2012. From 2004 to 2013, Aghaei was a member of the Academic Board at the Encyclopaedia Islamica Foundation in Tehran, where he contributed to the Encyclopaedia of the World of Islam (Dāneshnāmeh-ye Jahān-e Eslām). During the 2013/2014 academic year, he was a postdoctoral fellow in the EUME program at Forum Transregionale Studien in Berlin and subsequently served as a Research Fellow in the Corpus Coranicum project at the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities (BBAW) from 2014 to 2015.

His research has primarily focused on the philological, palaeographical, and codicological aspects of Qurʾānic manuscripts. He initially worked on these topics as a Research Fellow in the French-German project Paleocoran at BBAW from 2016 to 2017 and later through his own project, Irankoran, funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) and hosted at BBAW from 2017 to 2020. From October 2020 to March 2024, Aghaei was a Research Associate at the Institute of Islamic Theology at Paderborn University, where he engaged in teaching and research in Hadith studies. Since April 2024, he has been a Research Associate in the “Islam and Digitality” project at Humboldt University in Berlin.

Project description:

Digitization and Transformation: The Impact of Modern Databases on the Perception of Hadith Corpora

The digitization of hadith collections and related genres—including biographical dictionaries, historiographies, chronicles, legal treatises, and Quran commentaries—has significantly enhanced access to hadith material. However, this shift also alters the perception of hadith, which has been shaped over centuries of historical development. This project examines databases such as al-Maktaba al-Shāmila and Jawāmiʿ al-Kalim to explore how their structure, search functionalities, settings, digitized content, and user interfaces shape users’ access to and engagement with hadith. Furthermore, it investigates how these databases establish a sense of authority and authenticity by presenting the material in isolation from its historical context and original sources.

Christoph Günther currently holds a Heisenberg position for Islamic Studies at the Department of Religious Studies / Universität Erfurt. Trained in Islamic Studies, History, and Arabic, his research and teaching touch upon issues of religion and digital media, visual culture, as well as social change and the role of religio-political actors therein. His current research focuses on the ways in which contemporary Muslim preachers design their audiovisual mediations and how Muslim practitioners engage with such videos and images in the course of their daily religious and media practices. He is the author of Entrepreneurs of Identity: The Islamic State’s Symbolic Repertoire (Berghahn Books, 2022) and co-editor of Jihadi Audiovisuality and its Entanglements: Meanings, Aesthetics, Appropriations (Edinburgh University Press, 2020) and Disentangling Jihad, Political Violence and Media (Edinburgh University Press, 2023).

Project description:

Aesthetics of Digital Mediations

In the sub-project at the University of Erfurt, Jasmin Eder and Christoph Günther investigate how Muslim content creators use digital media—such as podcasts, images, and videos on social platforms—to express particular interpretations of how Islam should be practiced, understood, and communicated. We connect this to examining the perspectives of Islamic theology students on these media and content creators, exploring the significance of this content for their own religious expression.

Jasmin Eder is a PhD candidate and Research Assistant at the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Erfurt. She studied Religious Studies, Arabic and Islamic Studies in Leipzig from 2015 to 2023. During her studies, she focused on contemporary receptions of religions, including religious influences in the American jogging movement, religious beliefs in (neo-)pagan children’s and young adult literature and media representations of religions.

Project description:

Aesthetics of Digital Mediations

In the sub-project at the University of Erfurt, Jasmin Eder and Christoph Günther investigate how Muslim content creators use digital media—such as podcasts, images, and videos on social platforms—to express particular interpretations of how Islam should be practiced, understood, and communicated. We connect this to examining the perspectives of Islamic theology students on these media and content creators, exploring the significance of this content for their own religious expression.

Magnus-Benedict Mohandas Piwko is studying Religious Studies and History at the University of Erfurt. He also works as a research assistant at the Chair of Islamic Studies and the Chair of West Asian History. After graduating from high school, he did a UNESCO voluntary service for the Goethe Institute in Serbia. He is particularly interested in the cultural history, sociology of religion and popular culture of Eastern and South-Eastern Europe and the Caucasus.