Short CV
Prof. Dr Johannes J.G. Jansen (Amsterdam 1942) is a member of the parliament of the European Union. He was Houtsma professor for Contemporary Islamic Thought in the Department of Arabic, Persian and Turkish at the University of Utrecht (The Netherlands) from 2003 till his retirement in 2008. In 2010-2011 he was witness for the defense in the trial against the Dutch politician Geert Wilders. In Dutch he writes as ‘Hans Jansen’.
Longer version:
Johannes "Hans" J. G. Jansen (born 17 November 1942, Amsterdam) is a member of the parliament of the European Union. He is a retired scholar of contemporary Islam. Jansen is a graduate of the University of Amsterdam, his doctorate in Arabic is from the University of Leiden. He has worked in Egypt, where he was the Director of the Dutch Institute in Cairo. From 1983 he was an associate professor of Arabic and Islamic studies at Leiden University. Up to 2008, he was Professor of Modern Islamic Thought at the University of Utrecht. He is a regular newspaper columnist and frequent media commentator. He was a principal witness in the trial of Geert Wilders, during which a judge privately approached him at a dinner party and allegedly tried to convince him that Geert Wilders was guilty and hence the trial justified. As a result, the judges were substituted and a retrial was ordered.
Academic cv
Prof. Dr Johannes J.G. Jansen (Amsterdam 1942) was Houtsma professor for Contemporary Islamic Thought in the Department of Arabic, Persian and Turkish at the University of Utrecht, from 2003 till his retirement in 2008.
Dr Jansen taught Arabic and Islamic Studies at Leiden University from 1982 till May 2005. From early 1979 till the summer of 1982 he was director of the Dutch research center in Cairo, the Nederlands Instituut voor Arabische Studiën en Egyptische Archeologie. He also taught at Groningen University (1975-1978) and at Amsterdam University (1982).
He studied in Amsterdam (1960-1964), Cairo (1966-1967) and Leiden (1964-1968). He received degrees from the Theological Faculty of Amsterdam University (Biblical Hebrew and the History of Philosophy, 1961), the Amsterdam University Faculty of Arts (BA, Hebrew, Aramaic and Arabic, 1964) and the Leiden Faculty of Arts (MA, Arabic, Turkish, and History of the Middle East, 1968). He received a doctorate at Leiden in 1974.
