I studied Religion and Anthropology with a particular focus on religious minorities, political movements and material religion in the Middle East at the Philipps University of Marburg and Leipzig University. In April 2023, I defended my PhD thesis at the Institute for Religious Studies, Leipzig University. 

Throughout my PhD I worked on narratives around sacred places in Sinjar (Iraq) and Dersim (Turkey) in the aftermaths of genocide. My studies included extensive courses in Arabic, Persian and Turkish as well as long-term fieldwork periods in Iraq, Turkey, Iran and Lebanon. In Egypt, I taught at the Cairo Institute for Liberal Arts and Sciences (CILAS) about Religion in Kurdistan. My dissertation, named “Landscapes of Resistance – Narratives Around Sacred Places in Sinjar (Iraq) and the IS Genocide Against Yezidis” was published by De Gruyter Brill in 2024. At the Orient-Institute Beirut I have been working on a paper about religion and secularity within the Druze community and on dynamics around sacred places in Lebanon in the context of the recent large-scale Israeli attacks on the country.
 

Current Research Project:

The project seeks to develop a broad analysis of the dynamics around Lebanese religious cultural heritage in times of continuous war and crisis. The recent escalations of the Israeli attacks have led to the damage and destruction of several well-known shrines, mosques and churches in the South of the country as well as in the Beqaa Valley and several other areas. Against the backdrop of these events I work on three interrelated fields:

1. What is at stake? Which role did these sacred places play within the social and cultural fabric of Lebanon? What has been lost as a consequence of the Israeli aggression?

2. How do political actors engage with these places? In which ways do Lebanese parties and organisations integrate them in political discourses as material markers and symbols of identity? How do Israeli politicians and right-wing activists evoke them in their constructions of history and claims to Lebanese territory?

3. Who rebuilds or repairs these shrines and which paradigms provide the framework for these works?

Throughout the Middle East, the role of religious sites within political actors’ constructions of history and land claims is a rich and highly relevant field of research. Particularly in Lebanon, where comparatively little has been done to preserve architectural heritage, shrines are often seen as the material remains of an authentic past that reflects rights to land ownership. In such imaginaries, sacred places are shaped as unambiguous expressions of communal identities apparent in the architectural forms employed in their reconstruction and renovation. However, throughout Lebanon we find examples of how these places – in fact “ambiguous sanctuaries” (Leila Prager) – are today sites of complex arrangements of sharing and co-usage centered around their perceived healing powers. These dynamics, while charged with political tensions themselves, provide an alternative image less easily integrated into ethno-religious and nationalist ideologies. My project seeks to analyse in several examples how larger narratives around identity and land claims in the peripheral regions of Lebanon play out in the dynamics around sacred places – and how forms of worship persist and change in these veritable landscapes of war.