Dr. Joas Wagemakers

Associate Professor
Islam and Arabic
Lecturer/Researcher
Religious Studies
j.wagemakers@uu.nl

I'm an associate professor of Islamic and Arabic Studies at Utrecht University and the director of the Netherlands Interuniversity School for Islamic Studies (NISIS). I'm interested in the intellectual history of contemporary Islam in the modern Arab world, with a focus on political thinking among Islamists. I always make use of Arabic primary (and secondary) sources and am also committed to translating some of these into English so as to make them available to a broader audience. I try to contextualise ideology by placing it in the broader political and socio-economic history in which ideas are produced, transformed and adopted and I often try to look for links with early-Islamic history to help explain modern debates.
My research has concentrated on Salafism and particularly Salafi ideology; the Muslim Brotherhood; citizenship, women's rights and Shiites' rights in Saudi Arabia; and Hamas. Geographically, my interests lie in the modern Arab world, mostly in Jordan, Saudi Arabia and the Palestinian territories, although I also spend time reading international Jihadi-Salafi discourse.
Apart from the usual forthcoming publications here and there, I am currently working on a book about Hamas.