100 Jahre Seminar für Nahoststudien in Basel

In 2019, the Basel Institute for Middle Eastern Studies will celebrate its centennial, but the preoccupation of some Basel (and Swiss) scholars with topics of Islamic and Oriental studies dates back to the 16th century. This paper first looks at specialists with a Basel background before the institute was founded in 1919 (Hieronymus Harder, Johann Ludwig Frey, Albert Socin, Adam Mez, Wilhelm Sarasin-His). It then presents an outline of the last hundred years of institutional Middle Eastern studies in Basel, and finishes with some reflections on the recent developments of a discipline which has undergone major changes since the 1980s in the wake of the debate on "Orientalism".