Zahiye Kundos
Postdoctoral Fellow
Aufenthalt
Oktober 2026 – März 2027
Forschungsthema
»Beginnings. God and Mothers in Modern Palestinian Literature«
Projektbeschreibung
The proposed study, Beginnings: God and Mothers in Modern Palestinian Literature, strives to open a critical space for thinking about the role of the divine in modern Palestinian prose narrations. Besides the figure of God, the transcendental beginning, the analysis focuses on the literary formation of mothers, the embodied beginning on earth. I argue that these two figures are entangled in their presence and absence from the stories’ landscapes, vocabulary, and spatiotemporal structures. The project seeks to demonstrate how, on the surface, the Palestinian canon reflects major concerns with earthly needs (e.g., returning to the land and reclaiming material belongings); and how, nevertheless, it contains theological preoccupations concerning the beginnings with God and mothers. Among the writers included in this inquiry are Samira Azzam, Ghassan Kanafani, Emile Habibi, Anton Shammas, Elias Khoury, Neomi Shahab Nay, and Isabella Hammad.
Wissenschaftliches Profil
Zahiye Kundos is a scholar of modern Arabic studies. She specializes in Arabic literature, Islamic reformism, and Arab intellectual history. Kundos teaches at the Barenboim Said Academy and the Institute for the Study of the Culture and Religion of Islam at Goethe University. More recently, she was a Research Associate at the Leibniz Institute for Jewish History and Culture – Simon Dubnow (2023-2026). Kundos was a Visiting Professor at Ludwig-Maximilians University in Munich (2025), a Research Associate and lecturer at Tel Aviv University (2018-2020), and at Sapir Academic College (2016-2024). She has received fellowships from the Minerva Foundation (2021-2023), Forum Transregionale Studien (2020), the School of Cultural Studies (2017-2020), and Minerva Humanities Center (2014-2018) at Tel Aviv University. She wrote her dissertation under the supervision of Prof. Israel Gershoni (2018). Her book Experiencing Islam in Modernity: From Muhammad ʿAbduh to Naguib Mahfouz is forthcoming at Mohr Siebeck Publishing House.
Veröffentlichungen (Auswahl)
- »The Complex of Beginnings in Palestinian Literature«, in: Palestinian Studies Journal 148, (2026), S. 229-236.
- »Sittna Hagar and the Sacred House«, in: Al-Zman, (2026).
- »Amina and the Breaking of the Secular Silence, Revisiting the Cairo Trilogy by Naguib Mahfouz«, in: Political Theology 25, 6 (2024), S. 636-650.
- »Beginnings, Belongings, and Political Anxieties«, in: Political Theology 24, 7 (2024), S. 774–784.
- »Toward a Second Rise of Islamic Madanīyyah ›Civilization‹: al Afghānī and ʿAbduh in ‘al-ʿUrwah al-Wuthqā lā ʾinfiṣām laha’« in: Maha al-Kaisy-Friemuth, Reza Hajatpour, Muhammed Abdel-Rahem (Hg.), Rationalität in der Islamischen Theologie, Berlin: De Gruyter 2022, S. 31-49.
Forschungskontext
Zahiye ist auf Einladung von Yossef Schwartz, Professor für Geschichte und Wissenschaftsphilosophie an der Universität Tel Aviv, und dem LOEWE-Zentrum »Dynamiken des Religiösen: Ambivalente Beziehungen zwischen Judentum, Christentum und Islam in historischen und zeitgenössischen Konstellationen« Fellow am Forschungskolleg Humanwissenschaften der Goethe-Universität Frankfurt.
