“Spotlight on...” New Doctoral Researcher Dima Abu Alkheir

What is your main motivation to address the topic of your PhD?

I have always been interested in historical paradoxes. To me, Jordan presents a striking example, exercising custodianship over Jerusalem’s holy places without territorial sovereignty over the city. At the same time, Jerusalem remains a site of contestation over who has the authority to protect, administer and symbolically represent the holy places. This tension is what motivates my interest in how religious legitimacy is constructed and maintained over time.

What are you looking most forward to during your PhD studies?

Engaging directly with sermons and fatwa manuscripts, Waqf (Islamic religious endowments) publications, and Institutional documentation is central to my project. I am particularly looking forward to tracing how custodianship is constructed, emphasised, or muted across domestic, pan-Islamic, and international audiences.

What would you like the impact of your project to be?

My project examines Hashemite custodianship of Jerusalem as a long-term strategy of religious legitimacy. I look at how Jordan produces religious authority, maintains moral leadership, and differentiates its claim from rival projects of guardianship over the city. By situating custodianship in its proper historical context, I aim to move beyond simplified or purely political explanations and show how religious legitimacy is expressed through practices, symbols, and institutions. Ultimately, I hope that my project will contribute to the historiography of modern Jordan and to broader discussion of state-managed religious legitimacy under contested sovereignty.

Reading or writing:

A well-written argument always starts with careful reading.

Paperback book or eBook:

Ideas simply stick better when I read on paper 😊