​A German writer, translator, and literary critic, born in 1967 in Cologne, he has a background in Arabic and Islamic Studies and Comparative Literature. From 2001 until the closure of the magazine in 2016, he served as the editor-in-chief of Art/Thought – Fikrun wa Fann. As a translator, he introduced some of the most prominent Arab poets to the German audience, including Ibn Arabi, Adonis, Mahmoud Darwish, Badr Shakir al-Sayyab, and others. His most recent publications include Jenseits des Westens. Für einen neuen Kosmopolitismus (Beyond the Conceptions of the West. For a New Kind of Cosmopolitanism) (2018), and 1001 Books. The Literatures of the Orient (2019).

A Moroccan writer and translator, he graduated in German Language and Literature from Sidi Mohamed Ben Abdellah University in Fez and from the École normale supérieure in Rabat. Since 1997, he has been a qualified secondary school teacher at the Ibn Al Khatib High School in Tangier.