Georges Tamer


Georges Nicolas Tamer holds the Chair of Oriental Philology and Islamic Studies at the Friedrich-Alexander-University Erlangen-Nuremberg. Until September 2012, he was professor of Arabic and Islamic studies and the holder of the M.S. Sofia Chair in Arabic Studies at the Ohio State University in Columbus, Ohio. A scholar of religion, philosophy, and Arabic and Islamic literature and culture, his fields of specialization include Qur'anic studies, Arabic philosophy, Christian- and Judeo-Arabic thought, and Islam in modernity. He has previously taught at the Freie Universität Berlin, the University of Erlangen-Nürnberg, and the Central European University.

Education and scholarly activity

Infected by polio as an infant in Lebanon, Tamer was unable to attend elementary school and relied on autodidactic learning and private tutoring. After attending high school in Lebanon for one year, Tamer moved to Germany where he studied philosophy, sociology and theology in Frankfurt inter alios with Jürgen Habermas. He obtained his MA in Philosophy from the Freie Universität Berlin in 1995 and was granted a Ph.D. in Philosophy in 2000. He completed his habilitation in Islamic Studies at the University of Erlangen-Nürnberg in 2007.
Tamer is a highly productive researcher throughout Europe, the United States, and the Middle East, having taken part in a number of research bodies and :wikt:colloquium|colloquia attached to institutes of higher education. These include the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton and the Working Group on Modernity and Islam at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin. He has planned and hosted interdisciplinary conferences on Maimonides, humor in Arabic culture, migration in Germany, and, most recently, on the influential Muslim thinker al-Ghazali.
A member of the Antiochian Orthodox Church, Tamer founded a parish in Berlin. He has participated in several ecumenical activities and interfaith dialogue groups in Germany.

Selected publications

Books