Pieter Coppens new member of the KNAW The Young Academy 

Pieter Coppens is a researcher and lecturer in Islamic sciences at the Centre for Islamic Theology (CIT) at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. His research focuses on the history of Qur'anic exegesis and the history of Sufism. In 2018 he received a VENI grant for his project on the genesis, growth and development of Salafi Quranic exegesis since the 19th century. Islamic intellectual history - How have communities formed over the centuries around the sacred source texts of Islam? Coppens studies Islamic intellectual history. He is currently working on a monograph on the rise of Salafist hermeneutics at the beginning of the twentieth century. In it he describes a reorientation towards stricter rules of interpretation of the most important Islamic sources: the Qur'an and the Sunna. He shows how the rapid advance of education and readily available books led to a narrowing and hardening of religious discourse.