NISIS is a collaboration between nine Dutch and one Belgian universities with a substantive scholarship on Islam and Muslim societies. In 2009, eight Dutch universities decided to join forces in a national research school for Islamic studies: the Netherlands Interuniversity School for Islamic Studies (NISIS), which was officially established on 1 January 2010. In 2013 Maastricht University joined the partnership, which means that NISIS now includes all Dutch universities with a substantive scholarship in Islamic studies. Since 2018, the KU Leuven joins the NISIS partnership and is therefore the first Belgian university to join the partnership. NISIS is the first successful Dutch endeavour to connect researchers and students from all disciplinary backgrounds working in the field of Islamic Studies. NISIS covers the field in its broadest dimension, by acknowledging that Islam can only be properly studied from different disciplinary angles and with a multidisciplinary sensitivity, without ignoring its doctrinal, cultural and historical specificities. Students and researchers participating in NISIS activities have disciplinary backgrounds in law, history, religious studies, theology, anthropology, sociology, political studies, media studies, security studies and philology. NISIS covers a wide range of regional expertise, as geographically, NISIS members work on the Middle East, Africa, Turkey, Iran, Indonesia, Central Asia, Russia, China and Western Europe.