October 7, 2024, marks one year since Hamas launched its terror attack against Israel. We asked scholars at Freie Universität Berlin who teach and conduct research on the region and the conflict in the Middle East for their perspectives. What is their professional view of the situation? How has their work and their discipline changed over the past year? This series will be a recurring feature in campus.leben for the foreseeable future.

A commentary by Arabic studies expert Professor Beatrice Gründler

In addition to the global repercussions and the loss of thousands of lives, October 7 has claimed another victim: the value we used to place on interregional academic collaboration. This is something that affects researchers on both sides of the conflict, particularly when it comes to those working with Hebrew and Arabic – two languages that are intimately connected.

I am a professor of Arabic studies at the Seminar for Semitic and Arabic Studies at Freie Universität Berlin, where I am principal investigator of the research project “Kalīla and Dimna – AnonymClassic/ALC.” The project is a comprehensive study of Kalīla and Dimna – a book of wisdom in fable form that has been passed down for centuries in more than forty languages. In our work, we focus on Syrian, Arabic, Hebrew, Latin, Greek, and Modern Persian translations of the text, with the Hebrew version serving as a bridge between the Middle East and Europe. This version was composed in an “arabicized” form of Hebrew, while early fragments of the work are composed in Judeo-Arabic and written in Hebrew script. Both languages are Semitic languages and they continued to mutually influence each other throughout the pre-modern era.

Our team is as diverse as our research, with members and partners from across North Africa, the Near and Middle East, including Israel, and the Palestinian territories. Reciprocal academic collaboration is a valuable commodity, especially in times of conflict. However, many of my colleagues are under a lot of strain. They are worried about friends and family members and find themselves confronted with negative public opinion and stereotypes in their daily lives. 

In 2023 we joined forces with the Spanish Embassy to stage one of the episodes from Kalīla and Dimna in the form of a multilingual theatrical production in the Mendelssohn Remise. Not only did we perform to a full house, we received a standing ovation. I doubt that this would have been possible in the current climate, even though today, more than ever, it is necessary to distinguish between political conflict and culture and to maximize the potential of culture to promote mutual understanding.

About the author
Beatrice Gründler is Professor of Arabic language and literature at Freie Universität Berlin. She was awarded the Leibniz Prize in 2017 for her studies on the diversity of voices in Arabic poetry and culture.