The Cleveringa Lecture Now Available Online
Like every year, our institute organized the Cleveringa lecture to commemorate the courageous speech held by professor Rudolph Cleveringa on the 26th of November in 1940.
(For more information about Cleveringa click here (Dutch) or here (English)).
This year the speech was held in the evening of the 27th of November by Professor Petra Sijpesteijn of Leiden University. Her speech was introduced by a talk by H.E. Laurens Westhoff, Ambassador of the Netherlands in Cairo. I thank both for their very inspiring words.
During the same day, we organized an international colloquium on the theme "Informal Requests for Help and Mediation". The aim of the presentations was to investigate how informal requests have contributed to social cohesion of the early Islamic society. In total eight papers on this topic were read and discussed in a serious, but convivial atmosphere.
I thank the Netherlands Embassy for making the organization of this yearly event possible through their generous support, as well as the participants in the colloquium (half of whom had come from abroad). I would also like to thank Ahram Beverages for generously sponsoring the reception on the roof terrace of our institute, which took place after professor Sijpesteijn’s lecture.
Rudolf de Jong
Director of the Netherlands-Flemish Institute in Cairo
After God: Informal Requests in Arabic papyri
A written version of Professor Dr Sijpesteijn's lecture is now available.
