32e congrès de l'Union européenne des Arabisants et Islamisants

On behalf of the Union Européenne des Arabisants et Islamisants, we warmly welcome you to the 32nd Congress of the UEAI that convenes in Paris, 7-11 September 2026, under the overarching theme of “Knowledge Transfer: Acceptances and Rejections”. 
The conference is jointly organised by the CNRS institutes Laboratoire d’études sur les monothéismes (LEM) and Institut de recherche et d’histoire des textes (IRHT), as well as the Section des Sciences Religieuses de l’École Pratique des Hautes Études (EPHE). 

It is hosted on behalf of the UEAI, a pan-European association of scholars working in Arabic and Islamic Studies. It was established in 1962 and has become a preeminent academic network for Arabic and Islamic Studies across Europe. Currently, the organisation has more than two hundred members representing most European countries. We are happy to see that the nearly one hundred papers that were announced for our conference cover the wide range of topics that has characterized all 31 previous UEAI biennial congresses since the organization's founding.

Paris hardly needs an introduction, neither as a touristic destination nor as a centre of Arabic and Islamic studies. Suffice it to say that Paris was among the five European universities where chairs for Arabic, Hebrew and Chaldean were established in the early fourteenth century, that it was in Paris where Barthélemy d’Herbelot compiled his Bibliothèque Orientale in the seventeenth century, and that Silvestre de Sacy and his colleagues were among the founders of modern Orientalist studies at the newly set up École spéciale des langues orientales vivantes from 1795 onward. In 1873, Paris was the venue of the first large-scale International Orientalist conference ever. In our own institutes, the study of all matters Arabic and Islamic has always played a major role. The Arabist and Hebraist Georges Vajda not only founded the Arabic section of the IRHT in 1937, but was also among the founders (together with Henry Corbin) of the Centre d’études des religions du Livre in 1969/70, from which later the LEM emerged. Both were also professors at the EPHE, as were a number other renowned scholars, such as Louis Massignon or Daniel Gimaret.

Exactly fifty years after its eighth conference which took place in Aix-en-Provence in September 1976, the UEAI has returned to France. We are delighted that so many colleagues accepted our invitation and have gathered here for five days of academic and personal exchange.

Programme