Dr. Josef (Yousef) Meri, FRAS
- Editor, Intertwined Worlds
- Academic Director, Centre for the Study of Muslim-Jewish Relations, Woolf Institute, Cambridge
- Fellow, St. Edmund’s College, Cambridge
- Visiting Fellow, Centre of Islamic Studies, Cambridge University
- Affiliated Researcher, Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, Cambridge University
I was born in Chicago to a Palestinian Muslim family and grew up mainly in the States, but I have spent almost half my life in the Middle East and Europe. My family hail from the Jerusalem area and I consider myself a Jerusalemite. I embarked on the study of Arab and Jewish themes in 1988 while I was an undergraduate at the University of California, Berkeley, the hot bed for radicalism and the free speech movement in the 1960s. Though I was far from being a radical hippy myself! While at Berkeley I studied political science for two years. During my freshman year I was fortunate to undertake the study of the languages and cultures of the Middle East. I was particularly inspired by my supervisor Prof. William Ze’ev Brinner who encouraged me to study Arabic and Hebrew together, a novel idea which, as a bright-eyed freshman, impressed me enough to take up the suggestion. During the summer of my junior year, I travelled to Jerusalem on a University of California President’s Fellowship to conduct research on Palestinian Arabic proverbs.
Berkeley remains a world-class centre for the study of Middle Eastern Studies and I was privileged to study with the leading scholars of their day looking at a wide range of subjects from medieval Islamic history, classical Islamic exegesis and Qur’anic studies to Arabic literature and the Hebrew novel. I was pleased that I was the first non-Jewish student to achieve an award for excellence in Hebrew.
During the summer of 1992, I travelled to Jerusalem to study at the Hebrew University on a year-long Fulbright Scholarship. There I studied Arabic and medieval Judaeo-Arabic (a Jewish language, essentially Arabic written in Hebrew letters) alongside Israeli postgraduate students. I also took seminars in literature. During my early research I embarked upon a study the prophet Elijah and his Islamic counterpart al-Khadir/al-Khidr in an exegetical context. A fortuitous encounter outside Tel Aviv with Norman (Noam) Stillman and his late spouse-colleague Yedida inspired me to enrol on a two-year master’s course in history at Binghamton University in 1993.
While at Binghamton I was inspired by a number of brilliant history professors there, not least my supervisor Noam with whom I read medieval Judeo-Arabic and Hebrew texts. I was appointed a junior lecturer in the Judaic Studies Department to design and teach an innovative undergraduate class in Arabic for Hebrew speakers using a book written by a French Catholic priest Fr. Yohanan Elihai whom I had the pleasure of meeting whilst in Jerusalem.
In 1995 I enrolled in the DPhil programme at Oxford University (Wolfson College) where I was greatly inspired by the humility and great erudition of my mentor Prof. Wilferd Madelung under whom I read and translated various Arabic Islamic texts and also the profound insight and forbearance of my joint-supervisor Daniel Frank with whom I read and translated medieval Hebrew and Judeo-Arabic texts and exegetical commentaries. While there I revived my earlier work on the prophet Elijah which became the basis for a number of publications, including my first book on the Cult of Saints among Muslims and Jews in Medieval Syria (Oxford, 2002). I spent most of my second year in Damascus undertaking archival and fieldwork for my thesis. Oxford also allowed me to benefit tremendously from the knowledge and expertise of colleagues in Oriental Studies and History. Ask me who I would root for in the Oxford-Cambridge Boat Race and I would be hard-pressed to tell you!
In early 1999 I took up a postdoctoral appointment at UC Berkeley where I produced a number of articles and worked on publishing my first book. In September 2002 I left Berkeley for London where I took up a visiting research fellowship for two years at the Institute of Ismaili Studies in London. There I taught on the postgraduate course and offered advanced Arabic reading courses. I am immensely proud that a number of students I taught went on to do MA and PhD degrees. During this time I produced a number of articles and edited a two-volume encyclopaedia on medieval Islamic civilization as well as an English translation and bilingual edition of a twelfth-century Arabic pilgrimage guide (English title: A Lonely Wayfarer’s Guide to Pilgrimage) which includes Jewish and Christian sites as well as the antiquities of ancient civilisations.
In 2003 I was offered a unique opportunity to work for HRH Prince Ghazi bin Muhammad at the Royal Aal al-Bayt Institute for Islamic Thought in Amman, Jordan which at the time was located at the Royal Court. There I oversaw the Great Commentaries on the Qur’an project, particularly translations of exegetical works into English. I also contributed in various capacities albeit in a minor way to the various innovative and successful interfaith (and other) projects which were the brainchild of Prince Ghazi. Both Prince Ghazi and his uncle HRH Prince El-Hassan, who is an interfaith patron of the Woolf Institute, have been at the forefront of promoting interfaith relations for years.
In June 2010 I left Amman to take up an appointment as Academic Director of the Centre for the Study of Muslim-Jewish Relations and a fellowship of St. Edmund’s College, Cambridge. This represents a unique and exciting opportunity for me to further promote the academic study of Muslim-Jewish Relations at Cambridge University and also internationally. I am particularly inspired by the energy and drive of my colleagues at the Woolf Institute. I am presently working on commissioning and publishing a thematic reader in Muslim-Jewish Relations for an undergraduate, postgraduate and general readership. We will also be launching in the second half of 2011 an exciting peer-reviewed e-journal in Muslim-Jewish Relations called Intertwined Worlds under the auspices of Wiley-Blackwell’s Religion Compass and edited by me.
My research interests include the history of the Jews under Islam, medieval Islamic history, pilgrimage and the veneration of holy persons in Islam, Judaism, and Christianity and ritual practice.
My teaching interests include the History of Muslim-Jewish Relations, the Jews of Islamic Lands, Medieval Islamic History, pilgrimage, travel literature, popular religion and ritual studies.
