Rethinking Islam & the West: A New Narrative for the Age of Crises

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Emma Flatt is an Associate Professor at UNC. Her research has focused on mentalities and practices in the courtly societies of the Indo-Islamicate Deccani Sultanates of South India. Her doctoral thesis, which she is currently revising for publication, explored the world of the peripatetic courtier, who moved across regions and between courts in search of generous patrons and focuses on three case studies of different “knowledges” that helped a courtier attain success: letter-writing, wrestling, and astrology. These three case studies illustrate the ways in which the acquisition of expertise in a particular knowledge provided the courtiers with opportunities for self-fashioning.

The Deccan sultans left a grand architectural and artistic legacy. They commissioned palaces, mosques, gardens and tombs as well as decorative paintings and coins. Of these sultanates, the Nizam Shahs (r. 1490-1636) were particularly significant, being one of the first to emerge from the crumbling edifice of the Bahmani Empire (c. 1347-1527). Yet their rich material record remains largely unstudied in the scholarly literature, obscuring their cultural and historical importance. In addition to his retrospective, Sanders will share, for the first time, photographs of lost and forgotten Islamic heritage sights, including Syeda Khadijah’s house, Syeda Aminah’s grave, and photography from Jabal al-Nur. The history of music and dance under the Deccan Sultanates is still fragmentary at best and there is much that we do not know. In this lecture, I hope to sketch out a larger overview of the performing arts in these courtly contexts, with a central focus on the period from the 1580s to the 1660s, especially in the courts of Bijapur and Golkonda. My particular focus is on how the expressive arts were represented in Dakanī poetry and courtly painting, and how we might tentatively begin making sense of the sonic experiences embedded in these muted sources. CIS Public Talks – Alice Wilson on ‘ Defeated Revolutionaries, Lasting Legacies: the social afterlives of revolution in Dhufar, Oman‘ Subhashini Kaligotla is Assistant Professor of Indian and South Asian Art at Yale University. Her area of expertise is early medieval Deccan India, 500 – 800 CE, with specific research interests in the multisensorial experience of sacred architecture, the agency of makers and images, the intersections between visual and textual representation, landscape history and culture, and the historiography of South Asian art history.Heba Morayef is the Amnesty International’s Regional Director for the Middle East and North Africa. Before joining Amnesty International she worked for seven years on human rights in Ahmed Paul Keeler introduced the Mizan Thesis in an illustrated lecture at Cambridge University on April 27 th 2014. Keeler’s proposition was well received and he was invited to become a Visiting Fellow at the Centre of Islamic Studies, so that he could further develop his thesis. His work has culminated in two publications Rethinking Islam & The West: A New Narrative for the Age of Crises (2019), and A Life’s Journey: The Story behind a Book (2022).

Cambridge Festival 2021 – Emanuelle Degli Esposti on ‘ Charity and activism in Shiism: How grassroots are changing the face of British Shiism ‘Saussan is Senior Language Teacher at the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, Cambridge University. She has recently completed her PhD from Leeds University. Saussan is also the founder of Kalamna C.I.C, a social venture providing children’s Arabic classes in Cambridge: www.kalamna.org. CIS Public Talks – Melissa Gatter on “ Time, Power, and Aid: Book talk and discussion on displacement in Jordan, Spain, Morocco, and Bangladesh‘ Woolf Institute – Emanuelle Degli Esposti chairs a panel on ‘Becoming British Muslim – Building Identity across the divides’