Principal investigator Prof. Dr. Henning Sievert

Henning Sievert is a cultural historian of the Middle East who has paid special attention to ambivalent attitudes of the Ottomans towards their Austrian and Iranian opponents and neighbors since the eighteenth century. In the wake of colonialism, Arab Islamists developed an ambivalent attitude towards “the West” that became an integral part of their self-definitions. Sievert has studied one of its latest manifestations, the so-called Islamic State in Syria and Iraq, which justifies its hostility toward non-Muslim religions with a peculiar reinterpretation of Islamic tradition.