The Anawati Chair is carried out with a network of Egyptian, French, European and Arab partners. Each contributes a specific competence to the project, hosting, training, selection, scientific supervision, evaluation, publication or dissemination. The following pages present each partner, its nature and mandate, and the precise role it plays in the project.
About
Established in Cairo in 1946 under the League of Arab States to collect, catalogue, preserve and make accessible the Arabic manuscript heritage. Attached to ALECSO from the early 1970s, it has been based in Cairo continuously since 1991. It runs cataloguing, conservation, restoration and digitization program, trains specialists across the Arab world, and already cooperates with IDEO on the cataloguing and digitization of manuscript collections.
About
A non-profit foundation working to spread knowledge and culture among Arabic speakers. It began with translation, as a bridge to the thought of others, and has built one of the largest Arabic digital libraries, re-editing and preserving the major works of modern Arabic heritage. Alongside print, it publishes valuable works in Arabic or translated into Arabic in electronic form and makes them freely available on its website — including in formats accessible to blind and visually impaired readers.
About
Founded in 1880 and placed under the authority of the French ministry responsible for higher education, the Ifao studies the cultures that have succeeded one another in Egypt from prehistory to the modern period. Its editorial division operates as a full publishing house on site in Cairo, editing, layout, printing and distribution — issuing some twenty to twenty-five scholarly works and five journals each year in Egyptology, papyrology, Coptic and Arabic-Islamic studies. It is committed to open access.
About
Created by the Grand Imam of al-Azhar as an international centre serving two purposes at once: vigilance in relation to Islamic extremism, and the dissemination of a moderate reading of Islam throughout the world. It monitors extremist discourse in several languages and produces analyses and counter-discourse aimed at international audiences.
About
A centre created by the Grand Imam of al-Azhar to provide language courses to the best students of al-Azhar. Under the Anawati Chair the Centre has also been equipped with accessible reading technology for its blind and visually impaired students.
About
Founded in 1967, the DCC is the international volunteering service of the Church in France and the country’s leading international volunteering association. Approved by the French State to send volunteers under the Volontariat de solidarité internationale (VSI) scheme, it recruits, trains and supports some 400 to 500 volunteers each year across more than 40 countries, in every field of development.
About
An association set up in 2005 at the initiative of the diocese of Strasbourg and the Dominicans of the Province of France, in keeping with the city’s European vocation. It works to promote the place of religions in the European public arena and to contribute to dialogue among them on social questions, through conferences, workshops, seminars and study visits. In 2025 it merged with the Centre d’étude et d’action sociale d’Alsace, and now works along four axes: Europe, democracy, religions and society.
About
The IFE is the forum for cultural, technical and scientific cooperation between France and Egypt; its action falls within the framework of the Franco-Egyptian cultural, technical and scientific cooperation agreement of 1968. With more than 150 permanent staff and some 250 teachers across its sites, it works in language teaching, cultural and artistic programming, academic and scientific exchange, and cooperation with Egyptian institutions and civil society.
About
IDEO’s own scientific journal, founded in 1954 by the Dominicans of the Institute. It publishes one thematic volume a year, together with articles in Islamic studies and text editions, in French, English and Arabic. Open to any scholar, it carries chiefly the work of IDEO’s research team and of researchers cooperating with the Institute. It has been published by the Ifao since 2015 and is freely available on
About
A portal of electronic resources in the humanities and social sciences, bringing together journals, books, research blogs and academic event announcements on a single infrastructure built on open-access principles. It is used by scholarly publishers across Europe and beyond to make their output freely readable online.
About
Launched in 2014 by the Federation of European Catholic Universities and coordinated by the Université catholique de Lyon, PLURIEL brings together more than 230 researchers and some 17 research groups across 27 countries. It aims to foster links between researchers working on Islam and on Christian-Muslim dialogue in relation to Eastern Christians, and to encourage interaction between academics and social actors, across disciplinary, linguistic and national boundaries.
