The program draws on the international expertise of scholars in and outside of Germany and is embedded in university and extra-university research institutions in Berlin. It builds upon the previous work of the Working Group Modernity and Islam, supports and rests upon the following interconnected research fields:

• Perspectives on the Qur'an: Negotiating Different Views of a Shared History - directed by Angelika Neuwirth (Seminar for Arabic Studies, Free University Berlin) and Stefan Wild (Institute for Islamic Studies, Bonn University) - situates the foundational text of Islam within the religious landscape of Late Antiquity and combines a historicization of its genesis with its reception and perception in Europe and the Middle East.

• Travelling Traditions: Comparative Perspectives on Near Eastern Literatures – directed by Friederike Pannewick (Centre for Middle Eastern Studies, Philipps-University Marburg) and Samah Selim (Aix-en-Provence) - reassesses literary entanglements and processes of canonization between Europe and the Middle East.

• Cities Compared: Cosmopolitanism in the Mediterranean and Adjacent Regions - directed by Ulrike Freitag and Nora Lafi (both Centre for Modern Oriental Studies, Berlin) - contributes to the debate on cosmopolitanism and civil society from the historical experience of conviviality and socio-cultural, ethnic, and religious differences in the cities around the Mediterranean.

• Islamic Discourse Contested: Middle Eastern and European Perspectives – directed by Gudrun Krämer (Institute for Islamic Studies, Free University Berlin) - analyzes modern Middle Eastern thought and discourses in the framework of theories of multiple or reflexive modernities.

• Tradition and the Critique of Modernity: Secularism, Fundamentalism and Religion from Middle Eastern Perspectives – directed by Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin (Ben Gurion University, Beer Sheva) -  is a special forum which will accompany the four research groups. The idea is to rethink key concepts of Modernity like secularity, tradition, or religion in the context of the experiences, interpretations, and critiques of Jews, Arabs, and Muslims in the Middle East and in Europe.

The program explores Modernity as a historical space and conceptual frame – not as a particular national or European realm, but as a reflexive modernity, as an uneven, polyphonic, and democratic terrain in which ideas and discourses (no less armies) circulated and were assimilated, contested, reshaped, and redeployed in a variety of ways in Europe as well as in the Middle East. The program puts forward three programmatic ideas:

1. support for research that demonstrates the infinitely rich and complex historical legacies between Europe and the Middle East,
2. a re-examination of genealogical notions of 'mythical beginnings', 'origins', and 'purity' in relation to culture and society, and
3. an attempt to contribute to the rethinking of key concepts of a common Modernity in light of today’s perspective on cultural, social, and political entanglements; entanglements that supersede rigid identity discourses, national, cultural, or regional canons, and epistemologies established in the world of the nineteenth century.

The program creates a platform that rests upon the idea of "learning communities" (Wolf Lepenies) and the principle of 'research with, rather than research on'. It allows for the invitation of post-doctoral researchers from the Middle East and the organization of summer academies and workshops that strengthen and modify existing research groups and contexts in Germany, hopefully beyond academic circles.