Yossef Rapoport & Tawfiq Da'adali

Educational Resources on the history of the Omari Mosque, Gaza

Yossef Rapoport is a historian of the social, cultural, and legal aspects of life in the Islamic, Arabic-speaking Middle East in its Middle Ages, from about 1000 to 1500 AD. He is Professor in Islamic History at Queen Mary's University London. Dr. Tawfiq Da’adli is an art historian and archaeologist of medieval Palestine who teaches in the Department of Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem.

This project will create accessible educational resources on Gaza’s Omari Mosque, from its origins as a Crusader cathedral to the present, placing its architectural development within the context of Gaza’s political and social history. While the destroyed mosque symbolises the erasure of Gaza’s history, the project will encourage public knowledge of, and academic research into, Gaza’s Islamic buildings, alongside enhanced specialised heritage capacity in the UK and Palestine. Working with Gazan researchers and refugees, it aims to preserve memory of the mosque, help protect it from further destruction by bringing its history to global audiences, and assist plans for reconstruction.