Albrecht Fuess is a Professor of Islamic Studies at the Center for Near and Middle Eastern Studies (CNMS) at the Philipps-University Marburg. He specialises in the Social, Political and Economic History of the Middle East (13th-16th centuries) and the contemporary Muslim presence in Europe. Stefan Weninger is a Professor of Semitic Studies at the CNMS at the University of Marburg. He specialises in Comparative Semitic Linguistics in a very broad sense, Semitic Epigraphy, Classical Arabic language and literature and the study of Old Ethiopic language and literature.