Profile

Pooyan Tamimi Arab is Associate Professor of Secular and Religious Studies. He combines disciplines such as religious studies, art history, anthropology, and sociology with political philosophy to better understand secular-religious dynamics. Tamimi Arab is the author of Amplifying Islam in the European Soundscape: Religious Pluralism and Secularism in the Netherlands (2017) and Why Do Religious Forms Matter? Reflections on Materialism, Toleration, and Public Reason (2022); and co-editor of Spinoza's Theological-Political Treatise (1670-2020): Commemorating a Long Forgotten Masterpiece (2021), and co-editor of the Routledge Handbook of Material Religion (2024). 

He is currently the principal investigator of the Vidi project Iran's Secular Shift: A Mixed Methods Approach to Nonreligion and Atheism in an Islamic Republic (2025-2030). One of the subprojects is carried out with GAMAAN - The Group for Analyzing and Measuring Attitudes in Iran. Their latest publication is a survey-based analysis of secularization, diversity, and dissidence in Iranian society, published by the French think tank Fondapol. 

Tamimi Arab is a member of the Young Academy of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences.