Casa Árabe is hosting the presentation of the Morocco Chair at the University of Salamanca (USAL) at an event to be inaugurated by the Ambassador of the Kingdom of Morocco in Spain, Karima Benyaich, and the Rector of the University, Ricardo Rivero Ortega, with the participation of Rachid El Hour, a professor of Arab and Islamic Studies at the USAL, delegate of the Rector for relations with Morocco and director of this Chair. The event will also be attended by scholars and experts from Morocco and Spain and representatives from the Royal Academy of Morocco and National Library of Morocco.

The University of Salamanca’s Morocco Chair will be dedicated to studying, analyzing and debating Spain and Morocco as a space united by ties of history, culture and civilization, not only because of what Al-Andalus represents for both parties, as a common human heritage, but also because of all that this entails in historical, social and cultural terms. It is part of the university’s long-standing history of promoting Arab studies and relations with countries in the Mediterranean, especially Morocco.

The University of Salamanca already hosted the creation of the first chair of Arabic on the Iberian Peninsula, the “Trilingual” Chair in 1381, in which Arabic, Hebrew and Chaldean were taught, after the Council of Vienna of 1311-12, in its twenty-fourth constitution, ordering the founding of Chairs of Hebrew, Arabic and Chaldean at some of the Roman Curia’s universities. Throughout these centuries, the great economic, commercial, cultural and educational exchanges between the two sides have been evident. Basic aspects such as justice, education, teaching and language, truly show the degree of historical proximity between Spain and Morocco. This affinity in both history and culture has always been appreciated by the greatest historians and Arabists on both shores of the Mediterranean, in past and present, and is still true today due to the existence of a department of Arab and Islamic Studies at the University of Salamanca. This department is linked to many relations with various Moroccan institutions, which have taken form in a very relevant series of cultural and academic activities, within the framework of various research projects coordinated out of the University of Salamanca, which has had and continues to include an optimal presence of historians and scholars from both shores of the Mediterranean over the last 15 years.