With a PhD in Philosophy and Letters from the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid (UAM) and an undergraduate degree in Political Science from the UNED, Planet Contreras has been a professor at the UAM’s Department of Arab Studies since October 2006. She has been a Board Member in the Directorate General of Religious Affairs (2004-2006) and a professor at the University of Alicante from 1997 to 2004. She has been a member researcher with the UAM’s International Mediterranean Studies Workshop since it was created and has coordinated and managed several research and development projects for the CYCIT. Included amongst her lines of work are North African migrations to Spain, with an emphasis on the impact upon the origin and destination societies, the status of Islam in today’s Spain and political processes in the Maghreb region.

Saida Chermiti is the educational coordinator at Casa Árabe’s Arabic Language Center. She has a university degree in Arabic Language and Literature from the School of Philology and Human Sciences at the Université du Centre (Sousse, Tunisia, 1999) and a Master’s degree in Teaching Spanish as a Foreign Language (E/LE) from the University of Alcalá de Henares (2005). She coordinates the language teaching programs at Casa Árabe’s Arabic Language Center. Her career has revolved around teaching the Arabic language to both private individuals and professionals at companies in a wide range of industries, including pharmaceuticals, engineering and foreign trade. Saida is also a translator of Arabic into Spanish, and vice versa. She has been an Arabic teacher at the Arabic Language Center since 2009, as well.

With a university degree in Business Management and Administration from the European University of Damascus, Nadia Jallad has worked in Syria as a project director within several international oil companies, and as a teacher and trainer of adults and children for the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF). Since she arrived in Spain in 2011, she has received training on teaching foreign languages, having specialized in teaching Arabic for business. As a result, she has taught courses on the Levantine dialect and standard Arabic at various academies and at the non-governmental organization Asilim (Association for the Linguistic Integration of Immigrants in Madrid), where she has been a member of the Executive Board since the year 2012 and is responsible for the Arabic teaching programs. Since 2015, she has given Arabic language classes to children and Levantine dialect classes at Casa Árabe’s Arabic Language Center and is fully dedicated to teaching Arabic as a foreign language and translation.

With a university degree in Arabic Philology and in Translation and Interpreting (specializing in Arabic and English) from the University of Granada, he also has a Master’s degree in Arab and Hebrew Culture: Past and Present, and a Master’s degree in Obligatory Secondary Education and Language Education (Spanish and Arabic) from the University of Granada. Since 2013, he has been a professor at the Official Language School in Ceuta, where he trains teachers of Arabic, Darija (Moroccan Arabic) and Spanish as a Foreign Language (ELE). At this institution, he has also been the head of the ELE Teaching Department since 2014. He has also organized, coordinated and taught several courses on teaching Darija at institutions of a local and state nature in the Autonomous City of Ceuta. He has participated in creating the work Biblioteca de al-Ándalus (Library of Al-Andalus), published by the Ibn Tufayl Foundation of Arab Studies (Almería) and collaborated on a study about the linguistic landscape in Ceuta, carried out by the Institute of Studies on Ceuta, the results of which were published in a work titled Los usos lingüísticos de Ceuta: el español, el árabe y el beréber (The Linguistic Customs of Ceuta: Spanish, Arabic and Berber). 

With a university degree in Catalan Philology from the University of Valencia and in Arabic Philology from the University of Alicante, after completing her university studies, she continued her education in the city of Cairo, where she resided for several years. She later completed her training in other cities, including Damascus and Beirut. As a researcher, she cooperated on the encyclopedic work Biblioteca de al-Ándalus, though since 2009 her career has been more closely linked to education, as she began a new stage as an Arabic teacher at the Official Language School in Ceuta. In 2013, she was named head of the Arabic Department at that school, a position she has held until the present. She has also worked as the secretary of the Spanish Society of Arab Studies (2011-2015).