Having studied Islamic Studies, Chinese, and Spanish at the Universities of Cologne, Germany, and Mashhad, Iran, I served as a member of the editorial committee of the Enzyklopädie des Märchens, a research and publishing institution at the Academy of Sciences in Göttingen, between 1986 and 2015. From 1992 to the end of 2018, I served as an adjunct professor of Islamic Studies at the Georg-August-University in Göttingen, Germany. In 2016-2018, I conducted a research project that resulted in the publication of my book 101 Middle Eastern Tales and Their Impact on Western Oral Tradition (2020). As of 2019, I am enjoying my retirement.

I have been a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies at Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana, in 2002; a visiting professor at the National Museum for Ethnology in Osaka, Japan, in 2003; and a scholar in residence at Shangri-La, the Doris Duke Foundation for Islamic Art in Honolulu, Hawaii, in 2012.

My main research interest is the narrative culture of the Muslim Middle East and North Africa. My PhD dissertation (1981) is a typology of Persian folktales, and my Habilitation ("second book"; 1992) is a study of jocular tales in pre-Mongol Arabic literature. Over the years, I devoted most of my energy to exploring Persian popular literature in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the history of the Thousand and One Nights, and the impact of Middle Eastern narratives, both in the region and internationally.