Over the centuries, religions have adopted all sorts of ideas and customs from each other. Yusuf Çelik (1986), assistant professor of Digital Humanities and Islam at VU University Amsterdam, investigates exactly how these cross-pollinations came about. Using AI, he peruses and analyses millions of pages of historical texts –work that would otherwise take researchers many years to complete. For his research, he is receiving the Heineken Young Scientists Award for Humanities 2026.
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