THE HAGUE, 26/02/09 - Education Minister Ronald Plasterk is making 2.5 million euros available for an Interuniversity Research School for Islamic Studies (ISIS). Eight of the nine Dutch universities are involved with the project.

Plasterk is supporting ISIS for the next five years with a subsidy of 0.5 million euros per year. "This research school is expected to make a powerful contribution to academic research and education in the study of Islam. (...) This research is (...) important for the integration debate" and "politically important" due to the presence in the Lower House of "parties that find Islam intrinsically undemocratic."

ISIS is a reincarnation of the Institute for the Study of Islam in the Modern World (ISIM) in Leiden, in which the universities of Amsterdam (UvA), Leiden, Nijmegen and Utrecht carried out joint research. This institute was set up in 1998, but was dissolved on 1 January due to lack of money.

Like ISIM, ISIS will "encourage research into contemporary social, political, cultural and intellectual developments among Muslims." Unlike ISIM, ISIS will however "also pay attention to the history of Islam," Plasterk stated.

Participants in ISIS, as well as the four universities that were in involved in ISIM, also include the University of Tilburg, Erasmus University Rotterdam, the Free University (VU) of Amsterdam and the University of Groningen. Apart from the three technical universities, only Maastricht is not participating among the general universities.

According to Plasterk, ISIS will be advised by foreign Islam specialists. Who these are is not yet known, but the minister said that academics from Indonesia, Saudi Arabia and Malaysia had pressed for the continuation of the research into Islam.