Steffen Wippel is a Senior Research Fellow at the Zentrum Moderner Orient (ZMO), Berlin. In parallel, he worked at the Department for the Economy and Social Geography of the Arab World at the University of Leipzig from 2008 to 2011. His main research interests are issues of economic and more recently urban development in North Africa and the Gulf region. He is (co-)editor of several publications as well as of a series of working papers and a book series on Middle Eastern economics. Among his books is Regionalizing Oman: Political, Economic and Social Dynamics (ed., Springer 2013). Katrin Bromber received her PhD in African Linguistics from the University of Leipzig, Germany and her habilitation degree in African Studies from the University of Vienna, Austria. She is currently working on the social history of sports in Ethiopia and the Gulf states. Katrin Bromber is a senior researcher and research group leader at the Zentrum Moderner Orient (ZMO) in Berlin. Her books include Sports Across Asia. Politics, Cultures, and Identities (2013), which she co-edited with Birgit Krawietz and Joseph Maguire. Christian Steiner holds a PhD in geography from the University of Mainz and a habilitation from the Goethe Universitÿt, Frankfurt am Main, Germany. His research interests focus on the intersection of philosophy of science, economic geography, political economy and tourism. He worked as a Lecturer at the University of Mainz, headed a UNWTO and ILO study of the impact of the global economic crisis on the tourism industry and was invited as Visiting Professor to the University of Frankfurt. Currently, Christian Steiner is Visiting Professor at the Department of Geography at the University of Osnabrÿck, Germany. Among his publications is Tourismuskrisen und organisationales Lernen. Akteursstrategien in der Hotelwirtschaft der Arabischen Welt. Eine Pragmatische Geographie (Transcript, 2009). Birgit Krawietz is Professor of Islamic Studies at the Freie Universitÿt Berlin. She earned her PhD in Islamic studies from the University of Freiburg and her habilitation degree at the University of Tÿbingen, Germany. She has published on Islamic medical ethics, legal theory and, lately also, sports in the Islamic world. Her overall research interests are normative Islam and cultural history. Recently, she co-edited, with Katrin Bromber and Joseph Maguire, Sport Across Asia (Routledge, 2013), and, with Georges Tamer, Islamic Theology, Philosophy and Law: Debating Ibn Taymiyya and Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya (de Gruyter, 2013).