In April 2023, I defended my PhD thesis at the Institute for Religious Studies, Leipzig University (Germany). In Leipzig and at the Philipps University of Marburg, I studied Religion and Anthropology with a particular focus on religious minorities and political movements in the Middle East. This included extensive courses in Arabic, Persian and Turkish as well as long-term fieldwork periods in the region. While also working for several refugee rights organisations in Germany, I taught at the Cairo Institute for Liberal Arts and Sciences (CILAS) and worked for an NGO in Akkar, Lebanon. Since 2013, I developed a profound interest in the relations between Middle Eastern minorities’ struggles for self-determination, religious non-conformity as well as local imaginaries and memories associated with sacred places and the landscape at large. My dissertation, named “Landscapes of Resistance – Narratives Around Sacred Places in Sinjar (Iraq) and the IS Genocide Against Yezidis” will be published by De Gruyter Brill in 2024.

Project description:

My post-doc project at the OIB takes up several ideas and observations from my previous encounters with Yezidis, Kurdish Alevis and Yaresan in Kurdistan to test them in the context of the Druze religio-political sphere in Lebanon. Bringing together a focus on material religion and theoretical approaches taken from various disciplines, I am particularly interested in how (what is emically understood as) religion continuously takes shape right in front of our eyes, while it is always projected into the past as supposed stable identities and beliefs. I particularly focus on how experiences of violence simultaneously take place within local landscapes and collective memory, and how such experiences are associated with religious imaginaries. In an attempt to understand relations and similarities between various Middle Eastern religious minorities I am now doing fiedwork in various Druze-populated areas of Lebanon. Here, I seek to unearth layers and entanglements of conflicts, construction of identity and the appearance of political organisations with what is understood as the Druze religious tradition.