Simon Gundelfinger, M.A.

Since April 2014 I am a research associate with the ERC project “The Early Islamic Empire at Work – the View from the Regions Toward the Center“. Within the project I am responsible for the province of Bilād al-Shām and work on the prosopographical and the numismatic databases that are being developed for the project.

I hold a Master degree in Islamic Studies, History, and Philosophy from Universität Hamburg. While at the beginning of my academic studies I was primarily focusing on the interaction of politics and religion in modern Arab states, I was thereby consistently confronted with modern interpretations of Islamic law. Eventually, my interest was increasingly drawn to its history and my emphasis shifted to the formative period of Islamic law, its early conceptions, and corresponding counter models. Accordingly, my main research interests are history, politics, and self-perception of the ʿAbbāsid caliphs in the 3^rd / 9^th century as well as the political philosophy of Plato and Aristotle and its impact on early Islamic conceptions.

Further, I have been involved in a number of projects on Islamic material culture, numismatics, archeology, and historical economic studies. In this context the maintenance of the Bibliography of Islamic Numismatics 2008-2013 is one of my responsibilities.

I hold professional memberships/ affiliations with the School of Abbasid Studies – معهد دراسات العصر العباسي and the C.H. Becker/Hamburgische Orient-Gesellschaft e.V.