Professor Suleiman is the first holder of His Majesty Sultan Qaboos Bin Said Professor for Contemporary Arabic Studies at Cambridge, Founding Director of the HRH Al Waleed Bin Talal Centre of Islamic Studies, former Head of the Department of Middle Eastern Studies and former Professorial Fellow of King’s College. He is Founding President and Provost of the Doha Institute for Graduate Studies in Qatar. He is Chair of the International Prize for Arabic Fiction, the premier prize for the novel in the Arabic speaking world, equivalent to the Booker Prize in the UK.
Commenting on this appointment, Professor Suleiman said: “This is a splendid honour and a great responsibility. The University of Jordan is a leading institution of higher education in the greater Middle East. I look forward to working with colleagues and graduate students at the University of Jordan in areas of common scholarly interests as well as to use this opportunity to forge mutually beneficial relations between Cambridge and the University of Jordan.”