Andreas Kaplony is Chair of Arabic and Islamic Studies at the Institute of Near and Middle Eastern Studies, LMU Munich (www.naher-osten.lmu.de). He has published widely on Arab-Islamic history, including Umayyad-Byzantine diplomacy (1996), Muslim, Jewish and Christian pre-crusade conceptions of the Ḥaram of Jerusalem (2002), pre-Mongol Arabic and Persian geography and cartography of Central Asia (2008) and 13th century Arabic business letters from the Red Sea (2014). He serves as a managing director of the Arabic Papyrology Database and the Archive of Arabic Talk shows.