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News from the Centre

Many thanks to all of the participants for our ‘AfterLives of Urban Muslim Asia‘ workshop, held yesterday (23rd May) at Darwin College, Cambridge. Some fascinating papers and great discussions.

We have three new videos for you on our videos and podcasts’ page; Public talks from Melissa Gatter and from Sadek Hamid – and the first in our new season of ‘From Konkan to Coromandel’ with Holly Shaffer.

The Centre of Islamic Studies is seeking to appoint a Research and Outreach Associate, to begin in October 2023. The post is a three-year, fixed-term position. Apply online

We are pleased to announce the publication of the book The AccidentalPalace: The Making of Yıldız in Nineteenth-Century Istanbul by our Visiting fellow Dr Deniz Turker.

This book tells the story of Yıldız Palace in Istanbul, the last and largest imperial residential complex of the Ottoman Empire. Today, the palace is physically fragmented and has been all but erased from Istanbul’s urban memory. At its peak, however, Yıldız was a global city in miniature and the center of the empire’s vast bureaucratic apparatus.

Drawn from archival research conducted in Yıldız’s imperial library, The Accidental Palace provides important insights into a decisive moment in the palace’s architectural and landscape history and demonstrates how Yıldız was inextricably tied to ideas of sovereignty, visibility, taste, and self-fashioning. It will appeal to specialists in the art, architecture, politics, and culture of nineteenth-century Turkey and the Ottoman Empire.

You can find The Accidental Palace: The Making of Yıldız in Nineteenth-Century Istanbul on the Penn State University Press web site at this URL: https://www.psupress.org/books/titles/978-0-271-09391-8.html

Take 30% off with code NR23 when you order through psupress.org

If you want to look back over the past year’s varied events then all of the 2020-21 CIS event videos are available on our ‘videos and podcasts’ page.

About the Centre

The Centre of Islamic Studies at the University of Cambridge is a research and outreach centre that aims to promote a constructive and critical understanding of the role of Islam and Muslims in wider society. One important focus of our work is Muslims in the UK and Europe, although we are also interested in Islam and Muslim communities in other parts of the world. We aspire, through rigorous research and dynamic public outreach, to disseminate knowledge and facilitate informed discussion between academics, policy-makers, the media, business and the public with an interest in Islam in the contemporary world.

The Centre of Islamic Studies is part of the University of Cambridge and is supported by a generous donation from Alwaleed Philanthropies.

News from the Centre

8 Dec 2022
On 8th December Alwaleed Philanthropies “Global” will launch a mew global initiative to spearhead cross-cultural understanding: • Alwaleed Cultural Network, a newly established global network, will promote tolerance and understanding between different cultures, religions and beliefs. • The inaugural ceremony will be held at Al Diriyah, Al-Turaif District on 08 December 2022, hosted Guest of Honour, His Highness Prince Badr bin Abdullah bin Mohammed bin Farhan Al-Saud, Minister of Culture, and over 100 guests. • Eight globally renowned educational and cultural institutions across North America, Europe, North Africa and Asia will gather to improve cross-cultural understanding in Saudi Arabia this December. • The Alwaleed Cultural Network patrons of the academic, arts, and culture ecosystem include the Alwaleed Islamic Studies Program at Harvard University (USA), University of Cambridge (UK), Georgetown University (USA), University of Edinburgh (UK), American University in Cairo (Egypt), American University of Beirut (Lebanon), Oxford University Museums (UK), and Pergamon Museum, Berlin (Germany).

23 Nov 2022
Our Acting Director, Dr Paul Anderson will be in conversation with Hina Khalid (23rd Nov) discussing what The Transcendental Interlocutor means and can mean in conversation with Amira Mittermaier’s recent article ‘Beyond the Human Horizon’ (2021) and Seyyd Hossein Nasr’s ‘The Interior Life in Islam’ (1978). For more details see our events page.

18 Nov 2022
We are pleased to note that Visiting Fellow Dr Hisham A. Hellyer has once again been named as one of the “The Muslim 500: the World’s 500 Most Influential Muslims” list in its latest 2023 edition. A ‘who’s who’ of Muslim communities worldwide, the list was launched by Georgetown University (USA) and the Royal Islamic Strategic Studies Centre (RISSC) (Jordan), and has included Dr Hellyer in its ‘Scholars’ section for six years running. The collection includes 500 names worldwide in a variety of sections, including lists of scholars, politicians, religious affairs officials, business elites, and cultural figures. https://themuslim500.com/profiles/hisham-hellyer/

16 Nov 2022
Our next Public Talk will be Visiting Fellow, Monika Lindbekk on ‘Islamic judicial politics: Adjudicating Islamic Family Law in Egypt’. Thursday 24 Nov at 5.15 – see our events page for more details

12 Aug 2022
On this anniversary of the partition of India one of our research associates, Dr Vivek Gupta, has written a popular piece in the Art Newspaper with a colleague, Dr Aparna Kumar, Lecturer at UCL, for a series they are running on the anniversary of the India-Pakistan partition. https://www.theartnewspaper.com/2022/08/12/how-partition-divided-a-sufi-manuscript-between-india-and-pakistanand-continues-to-plague-the-regions-heritage

24 June 2022
Our Acting Director, Dr Paul Anderson, will talk this afternoon at the Cambridge University Arab Society on his research – ‘A New Silk Road? Mercantile Connections Across Asia’ The talk will take place at the Faculty of Asian & Middle Eastern Studies at 3pm in room 10. For more details: https://www.facebook.com/events/781081829723270?ref=newsfeed

21 June 2022
We cordially invite you to a new exhibition in Cambridge – the first solo show of Aman Aheer, titled ‘Man is Not a Bird’, at Saint Peter’s Church, Cambridge, opening from 2 July to 11 July 2022, curated by Eleanor Stephenson with commentary by the Centre’s Taushif Kara. This exhibition will showcase site-specific installations and paintings by Aman Aheer. Aheer has chosen to explore another facet of British street food culture – fried chicken. Aheer has meticulously excavated and preserved … to rebuild and recontextualise the chicken as an installation in a space once used for worship. Details here: https://teamup.com/event/show/id/S1P6yCrmEHmchC2vHVvCiiNSosRvQr

17 June 2022
The latest in our joint-sponsored ‘From Konkan to Coromandel’ series – Arthur Millner talking about ‘A Cosmopolitan yet Local Tradition: Glazed Tiles in the Deccani Sultanates’ – is now available on our videos-and-podcasts page.

9 June 2022
Our Research Associate, Dr Taushif Kara, has been quoted by NBC news on the recent tensions between India and the Gulf – https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/india-rushes-contain-outrage-insulting-prophet-muhammad-remarks-rcna32726

22 Apr 2022
Great to see that our Teaching Associate, Yomna Helmy has just had her new paper “Maqāṣid al-Sharī‘a From Islamic Modernism to Theorizing Authoritarianism” published in the special issue of the American Journal of Islam and Society. It’s available on this link: https://www.ajis.org/index.php/ajiss/article/view/2934