Annual Conference of the British Association for Islamic Studies
Monday 18th-Tuesday 19th May 2026
10 Handyside Street, London, N1C 4DN
Provisional Programme
The British Association for Islamic Studies is delighted to be returning to the Aga Khan University's Centre for the Study of Muslims Civilisations and the Institute for Ismaili Studies, London, for its 2026 Annual Conference on 18 & 19 May 2026.
Below you will find the provisional conference programme. Please be aware that the programme is likely to change in the months leading up to our conference.
Day 1: Monday 18 May 2026
10.00 - 10.10: Words of Welcome (ACR)
Fozia Bora (University of Leeds, Chair of the British Association for Islamic Studies) and Jonas Otterbeck (ISMC).
10.10 - 11.20: Opening Keynote
Professor Ovamir Anjum (University of Toledo)
Title TBC
11.20-11.30: BRAIS Prize in the Study of Islam and the Muslim World Announcement
11:30-12:00: Refreshments
12.00-13.30: Panel Session 1
Akhbārī Knowledge and the Reconfiguration of Shiʿi Scholarship in Late Safavid Iran
Robert Gleave (University of Exeter) Safavid Akhbārī ḥadīth commentary: Muḥammad Taqī al-Majlisī’s Lawāmiʿ Ṣāhibqirānī
Majid Montazer Mahdi (Institute of Ismaili Studies) Writing the Self into Tradition: al-Ḥurr al-ʿĀmilī and the Politics of Scholarly Memory
Ali Ameri Rad (Independent Scholar) Medicine versus Hadith: The Case of Musakkin al-shujūn fī ḥukm al-firār min al-ṭāʿūn by al-Sayyid Niʿmatullāh al-Jazāʾirī
Zahra Jafari (University of Exeter) Late Safavid Akhbārī Reorientation: Shaykh Yūsuf al-Baḥrānī’s Legal Legacy
Lived Islam in Britain: Welfare, Solidarity, and Spiritual Experience
Hanan Basher (Cardiff University) Qur'anic Approaches to Spiritual Care by Muslim Chaplaincy in British Higher Education
Muhammad Nabil (SOAS) Britain's First Muslim Burial Fund: Archival Narratives of Migration, Civil Society and Welfare
Muthanna Saari (University of Sussex) Zakat and the moral economy: Ethic of care, social solidarity and the aspiration for a good life
Ruqaiah Al-Kabab (University of Salford) Young Arab Muslim Adults' Lived Spiritual Experience with Allah while studying in the UK: An integrated research methodology
Gender, Power, and Interpretation in Islamic History and Thought
Majideh Qazizadeh (University of Exeter) Women, Myth, and the Gendering of Chess in Islamicate Literature
Laila Halani (The Institute of Ismaili Studies) Female empowerment: 'Khoja' and Momin engagement with their Aga Khan III's vision as reflected in the community's Rules (1905-1950s)
Farhat Afzal (University of Cincinnati) Women, Power, and Patronage in Mughal Architecture: The Legacy of Nur Jahan
Qudsia Mirza (University of East London) Beyond Text and Tradition: Women's Interpretive Interventions in Modern Islamic Law
Transmission of Knowledge and Classifications of the Sciences Across Islamicate Cultures
Chair: Petra Schnidl (FAU Erlangen-Nuernberg)
Godefroid de Callatay (UCLouvain) The Ikhwān al-Ṣafā’s classification of the sciences: an overview of its diffusion and reception over the ages and cultures
Laura Tribuzio (UC Louvain) Marks of Power, Traces of Knowledge: Ottoman Manuscripts of the Mujmal al-Ḥikma and the Brethren of Purity
Ahmed Tahir Nur (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona) From Alexandria to Baghdad to Istanbul: Tracing an Influential Framing of Knowledge
Razieh Mousavi (FAU Erlangen-Nuernberg) Unity in Diversity: Numbers and the Synthesis of Knowledge in a Safavid Classification of Sciences
Beyond Historiography: Alternative Sources for Early and Medieval Islamic History
Leone Pecorini Goodall (Leiden University) Identifying and investigating maternal kinship ties in Umayyad and Alid panegyric
Aliya Abdulkadir Ali (University of Cambridge) Imagining and Erasing: Women’s Political Roles in Early Islamic Genealogical and Narrative Traditions
Aslisho Qurboniev (Institute of Ismaili Studies) Using Fatimid ‘propaganda’ as a historical source
Clement Salah (University of Oxford) Manuscripts and Mālikī Scholarship: The Kairouan Collection as an Alternative Source for Early Islamic History
East African Muslim sojourners in colonial Britain: Archaeology, anthropology and the (counter) archive of Bradford's 1904 Somali Village
13.30-14.30: Lunch
14.30-16.00: Panel Session 2
Ijtihād, Ethics, and Islamic Legal Theory Across Time
Muhammad Al-Marakeby (Max Planck Institute, Hamburg/The Indonesian International Islamic University) Islamic Ethics and Complicity in Times of War: Beyond the Legal Paradigm
Ali-Reza Bhojani (University of Birmingham) Ijtihād and plurality: theorising difference from theology to law and ethics
John Burden (University of Chicago) After Ijtihād: Imām al-Ḥaramayn al-Juwaynī and the Emergence of the Qāʿida Fiqhiyya
Alexandre Caeiro (Hamad Bin Khalifa University) Social Critique in Modern Hadith Commentary: A Study of the Doha Sharia Judge Aḥmad b. Ḥajar Āl Būṭāmī al-Bin‘alī’s 1981 Kabā’ir Text
Al-Bukhārī: Islam’s Foremost Traditionist
Belal Alabbas (Cambridge Muslim College/University of Bristol), Jon Hoover (University of Nottingham) and Omar Anchassi (University of Bern) will discuss Dr Alabbas’s new book ‘Al-Bukhārī: The Life, Theology and Legal Thought of Islam’s Foremost Traditionist’.
Infrastructures of Care, Charity and Constraint: Islamic Authority from the Humanitarian Sphere to the Household
Emma Tomalin (University of Leeds) Beyond Tangibles: Muslim Local Faith Actors and the Intangible Work of Post-Conflict Development in Mindanao
Sandra Pertek (University of Birmingham) Developing Islamic ethico-legal framework toward women’s protection in forced displacement
Muhammad Nabil (SOAS) British Muslim Charities: Contemporary Manifestations of Canons and Traditions
Muhammad Faisal Khalil (University of Oxford) Fractal Sovereignty and Rent Registers in the Muslim Household: Clerical Fief-holders from Marriage to Death
Transregional Sufism: Ontology, Ritual, and Reform from the 13th Century to the Present
Sepideh Afrashteh (Ryukoku University) The Ontology of the Human Being in Rūmī’s Mathnawī in Light of Ibn ʿArabī’s Metaphysical Thought
Fitzroy Morrissey (University of Oxford) Ibn ʿArabī’s treatment of samāʿ in al-Futūḥāt al-makkiyyah
Mykhaylo Yakubovych (University of Freiburg) A Long Journey of Sufi Invocation: The Legacy of Sayyid Yaḥyā al-Bākūwī in 19th-Century Tatar Prayers from Western Ukraine
Sheridan Polinsky (Tubingen University) Apocalypticism in Contemporary Indonesia: The Rise and Fall of Muhammad Efendi Sa'ad and the Tareket al-Mu'min
New Approaches to Shiʿi Hadith
Zarangez Karimova (Institute of Ismaili Studies) Conceptualizing Taqiyya in Safavid Hadith Commentary: An Inquiry into Fayḍ Kāshānī's Hermeneutics
Stephen Burge (Institute of Ismaili Studies) Fasting in al-Kulaynī’s Furūʿ al-Kāfī: A Structural Analysis
Hasan Al-Khoee (Institute of Ismaili Studies) The Traditions of the Imams as Historiographical Correctives in Early Shiʿi Literature
George Warner (Institute of Ismaili Studies) ‘Our Speech Is Difficult’: Conceptualising the Speech of ʿAlī in Early Commentaries on Nahj al-balāgha
16.00-16.30: Refreshments
16.30-18.00: Panel Session 3
Beyond Boundaries: Examining Cross-Communal Interactions in Early and Medieval Islam
Kyle Longworth (Leiden University) Does Class Transcend Community? The Economic Backgrounds of Muslim and Non-Muslim Administrators during the Umayyad Caliphate (ca. 661–750)
Adam Ramadhan (Leiden University) Congregational Prayer and Communal Boundaries in the Early Imāmī Community
Yi-Chia Chang (University of Edinburgh) Crossing Communal Knowledge Boundaries: The Transmission and Reception of Yaḥyā b. Sallām al-Baṣrī’s Tafsīr in the Early Islamic West
Clara Pitocchi (University of Oxford) Legal Confusion or Legal Pluralism? A Draft Inheritance Query to Muslim Jurists from the Cairo Geniza
Islam, Knowledge, and Narrative in Contemporary Culture
Silke Ackermann (Oxford University, History of Science Museum) What do we mean by "Islamic Science" in Museums?
Jonas Otterbeck (Aga Khan University, ISMC) Cubism is Divine: Rasheed Araeen's universalism and rebuttal of Eurocentric art history
Laura Peh (Cinnamon Art Publishing) Muslim Representation in Children's Picture Books: Identity and Islamophobia
Sameena Eidoo (University of Toronto) Muslim Narrative Power: From Pop Culture Stories to Systems Change
Reconfiguring “Reality”, Authority, and Political Theology in Contemporary Muslim Thought: Fiqh al-Wāqiʿ, Post-Salafism, and the Politics of Islamic Renewal
Besnik Sinani (Tubingen University) Post-Salafism: Religious Revisionism and Political Transformation in Contemporary Muslim Thought
Rezart Beka (Hamad Bin Khalifa University) Theorizing Reality in Contemporary Islamic Thought: The Case of Scholars of Fiqh al-Wāqiʿ
Ermin Sinanovic (Shenandoah University) Embedded Islamism: Evidence from Southeast Asia
Towards a “Barbados-to-Bengal” Complex? Rethinking the Scales of Global Islam through Latin America and the Caribbean
This roundtable proposes a “Barbados-to-Bengal Complex” as both an extension and critique of Shahab Ahmed’s “Balkans-to-Bengal Complex.” Ahmed mapped a vast post-Mongol, Afro-Eurasian zone—stretching from Southeast Europe through Anatolia, Iran, Central Asia, and the Indian subcontinent—held together by shared concepts, Sufi-inflected practices, circulating texts, and entangled histories. While his formulation, which foregrounded the movement of people, ideas, texts, and devotional forms, challenged Eurocentric divisions and disciplinary silos, its geographic concentration inadvertently reinforced the marginalization of histories and contemporary formations beyond Afro-Eurasia. Specifically, this roundtable discusses an agenda for theorizing global Islam in ways that are not merely geographically expanded but conceptually re-scaled. It positions the Americas as integral, rather than peripheral, to understanding Islamic belonging, circulation, and religious formation in a globalised world.
Participants:
Kholoud Al-Ajarma (University of Edinburgh)
Ken Chitwood (Universität Bayreuth)
Mark Lindley-Highfield of Ballumbie Castle (University of the Highlands and Islands, Inverness)
Negotiating Muslimness: Gender, Law, Media, and Power in Global Context
Leif Stenberg (Aga Khan University ISMC) Spaces of Muslimness and Political Connections: Female Footballers in Saudi Arabia
Gianluca Parolin (Aga Khan University, ISMC) Nitṭallaʾ? Redefining Agency in Divorce on Egyptian Screens: Intersections of Gender and Class in Islamic Law and the Humanities
Glen Moran (University of Hertfordshire) From the Minbar to the Media: The Transformation of Islamic Authority in the YouTube Age
Sumeera Hassan (University of Helsinki) Scripturalist Micro-Authority Online: Clip Culture and the Negotiation of Kinship Ethics in the Finnish-Pakistani Diaspora
Day 2: Tuesday 16 May
10.00-11.30: Panel Session 4
Law, Authority, and Reform in the Late Ottoman Empire
Hamdi Çilingir (Sakarya University) and Şerife Eroğlu Memiş (Ankara Hacı Bayram Veli University) Between State Interest and Waqf Interest: The Council of State (Şûrâ-yı Devlet) and Ottoman Interventions in Waqfs, 1868–1908
Manar Eissa (Marmara University) Reassessing Interpolation in al-Shaʿrānī’s al-Ṭabaqāt al-Kubrā
Ismail Noyan (Simon Fraser University) Towards a More Connected History of the Mecelle: Islamic Law, Codification, and Transimperial Networks Beyond Istanbul
Bilal Taşkın (Istanbul Medeniyet University) Layers of Reality in Late Ottoman Thought: Ismā‘īl al-Galanbawī’s Theory of Nefs al-Amr
From Creed to Currency: Islamic Legal and Ethical Reasoning Across Time and Space
Camelia Garchi (Ez-zitouna University) Shari'ah Compliance or Islamic Moral Economy? Operationalising Ibn Ashur's Maqasid via sustainability
Kadir Gombeyaz (Kocaeli University) The First (?) Commentary on al-Fiqh al-Akbar Written in Mamluk Egypt: Ahmad b. Sayf al-Din b. Fakhr al-Din al-Nasafi and His Sharh al-Fiqh al-Akbar
Mashal Saif (Clemson University) Technology and Legal Transformations: Fatwas in the Digital Age
Syed Muhammad Bilal Zaidi (LUMS) When "Principal" Loses Meaning: Ribā, Fiat Money, and the Ethics of Obligation
Between Tradition and Nation in East and Southeast Asian Islam
Adele Cozzani (University of Naples) Islamic education in China during the Ming-Qing era: an introduction to Jingtang Jiaoyu, the Chinese Islamic educational system
Trang Nguyen Quynh (VNU University of Social Sciences and Humanities) The Philosophy of “Purification” in Shiʿa Theology and Its Localization through the Roja Ritual of the Cham Bani Community in Vietnam
Irfan Sarhindi (University of Oxford) Between Pancasila and Caliphate: Muslim Students Making Sense of Political Standpoints in Indonesia's Post-Digital Education
Tingting Zhong (University of St Andrews) A Mainland Hui Muslim on the Periphery: Naming "Self" and "Other" in Ma Jianfu's Zaichang de Xinyang
Islam in Contemporary Europe: Faith, Migration, and Governance
Aytan Bashirova (University of Helsinki) What Physicists cannot Explain is already in the Qur'an!' From Doubt to Pride in a Young Finnish Muslim's Faith
Martin Eidrup (University of Gothenburg) and Goran Larsson (University of Gothenburg) Regulating Islam Through Democracy Criteria: A Comparison of Swedish and Belgian Legislation 2015-2025
Egdunas Racius (Vytautas Magnus University) and Katarzyna Gorak-Sosnowska (Warsaw School of Economics) Migration of Central and Eastern European convert Muslims to the MENA region: between religious obligation (of hijra) and utility
Daniel Vékony (Corvinus University of Budapest) Rejecting “bad Muslims”: The selective nature of Central European migration policies and image construction of Muslims in the context regular and irregular migration
Islam, Authority, and Society in the Contemporary Gulf
Fatima Elhag (University of Oxford) Family Law in the Gulf: Gender Dynamics, Litigants' Strategies, and Socio-Legal Analysis of Qatar's Judicial Rulings
Danny Tan (United Arab Emirates University) I am what I wear (or not): The complexities of meanings of Emirati national dress
Philippe Thalmann (University of Cambridge) Prophetic Landscapes: Salafi lives in post-oil Saudi Arabia
Daniel Miller (University of Oxford) "Occupying the Holy Lands of Islam": Intra-Wahhabi Contestation over Non-Muslim Intervention in the Gulf War
11:30-12:00: Refreshments
12.00-13.30: Panel Session 5
Muslim Women at the Intersection of Theology and the State
Whitney Buchanan (University of Edinburgh) Progressive Muslimah Leaders' Engagement with Political Muslim Advocacy in the United States and Germany
Anika Kabani (University of Oxford) Islam as Explanation, Secularity as Requirement: The predicament of Muslim women asylum seekers in the U.S.
Fatimah Aidara (Independent Researcher) Rābiʿah Reimagined: Divine Love and Poetic Longing in Contemporary Expressions of Tasawwuf
Thulfekar Ali (University of Glasgow) Which Eve, Which Women? Creation Narratives and the Making of Women’s Status in Islamic Thought
Islam in Conversation: Textual, Theological, and Religious Boundaries
Marina Pyrovolaki (Aristotle University of Thessaloniki) Jesus as Word and Spirit in the Qur'an: Reframing Christology after Nicaea
Martin Whittingham (Centre for Muslim-Christian Studies Oxford and Regent's Park College, Oxford) Muḥammad ʿAbduh and Rashīd Riḍā on the Bible
Yasmin Ilkhani (AKU ISMC) The Inversion of Death Pollution in a Contemporary Zoroastrian Cemetery in Yazd, Iran
Ivana Panzeca (University of Palermo) Reading Avicenna in Persian: translations and commentaries on the Kitāb al-Išārāt wa-l-tanbīhāt
From Page to World: Materiality and Meaning in Arabic Manuscripts
Sarah Bowen Savant, Mathew Barber, Lorenz Nigst, Masoumeh Seydi, and Peter Verkinderen (AKU-ISMC): KITAB-Transform – Transforming the Story of the Arabic Book, 700–1800
Xena Amro (Northwestern University) Office Literature: The Rise of the Literary Risālah
Jonas Burkhard (Yale University) The Many Lives of the Most Popular Arabic Manuscript World Map: Ibn al-Wardī's (d. 1457) Kharīdat al-ʿAjāʾib wa-Farīdat al-Gharāʾib
Ahmad Arif Zulkefli (International Islamic University Malaysia) The Importance of Codicological Evidence in African Islamic Manuscript Traditions: A Case Study of Taqyīd fī Bayān Wazn al-Aʿmāl by Aḥmad ibn Mubārak al-Sijilmāsī (d. 1156/1743)
Islam, Secularism, and Political Authority
Umar Shareef (Georgetown University) Revisiting the Islamic Secular
Yahaya Halidu (The University of Texas at Austin) Islam, Modernity & The Crises of Secular Ideologies in Ghana
Dietrich Reetz (Leibniz Zentrum Moderner Orient) Religious Governance and Socialist Ideals: Barkatullah's Pamphlet on "Islam and Socialist Body-Politic" in 1919
Aneeq Ejaz (University of Texas at Austin) Sacralized Words, Enshrined Body: Pakistan's Founding Father between Scriptural Religion and Sacred Kingship
Prophethood, Polemic, and Metaphysics in Sunni Kalām
Navid Chizari (Ibn Haldun University) The Rational Necessity of Prophethood in Classical Muslim Thought
Ramon Harvey (Cambridge Muslim College) The Jagged Reed Pen Cuts Sharply: On al-Māturīdī's Lampoons of al-Kaʿbī
Robbie Hoque (University of London) Cognitive Psychology and a Taymiyyan framework for a theory of divine mind.
Davide Ravazzoni (University of Groningen) What Equals the Thing in the Souls: Ibn Taymiyya on Desire and Just Price in Commercial Exchange
13.30-14.30: Lunch
14.30-16.00: Panel Session 6
Theology at the Limits of Reason: From Post-Classical Debates to AI
Amir Mohammad Emami (University of Exeter) Beyond Conception: Mīrzā Mahdī Iṣfahānī’s Critique of Conceptualising God in Islamic Philosophical Theology
Azad Raouf Qazaz (KU Leuven) Zeroness (al-ṣifrāniyya) beyond Oneness (al-waḥdāniyya): A New Metaphor for Divine Transcendence
Aulia Rakhmat (Universitas Islam Internasional Indonesia) Post-Classical Opposition to Philosophy in the Balkan-to-Bengal-to-Malay Complex
Sofia Tsourlaki (SOAS) Islamic Liberation Theology in the Digital Age: Critical Reasoning, and AI-Mediated Religious Engagement.
Hermeneutics in Motion: Ethics, Mysticism, and Moral Consciousness in the Qurʾān
Sheam Abdul Aziz Khan (Cardiff University) Before the Pen Touches the Page: The Qur'an as Read by its Translators - A Study of Contextual Determinants in the Hermeneutics of Qur'anic Translation
Shabnaz Khan (Institute of Ismaili Studies) Between Text and Practice: Testimonial Inequality, Qurʾānic Verse 2:282, and It's Legal Application in Pakistan
Elhadj BenMoussa (University of East London) Gaza as a Hermeneutical Horizon: How Lived Suffering Reopens Qur’anic Meaning, Ethics, and Moral Consciousness
Abdud Dayyan Mohammad Younus (University of Birmingham) Mystical Ways of Knowing and Hermeneutical Coherence in Tafsīr al-Mahāʾimī
Exploring Qurʾānic Meaning: Stylistic and Theological Perspectives
Saf Chowdhury (Cambridge Muslim College) Balancing Revelation and Application: An Analysis of Shaykh ʿAlī al-Qaradāghī’s Fiqh al-Mīzān
Amina Inloes (The Islamic College) Meteors in the Qur'an
Muhammad Faisal Khalil (University of Oxford) Sūrat al-Baqarah: Redactional Layering or Prophetic Dramaturgy? An Apocalyptic-Stage Stylometric Adjudication
Saeid Sobhani (Islamic college of London) The Glorification of All Beings in the Qurʾān: A Theological and Philosophical Study of Tasbīḥ
Authority, Community, and Visibiltiy in Shiʿi and Alevi Contexts
Suhraiya Jivraj (University of Kent/Institute of Ismaili Studies) Negotiating Coloniality: Law, Power and Ismaili Religious Practice in British Tanganyika
Carlos Mendez (University of Edinburgh) The Growing Mediated Visibility of Shi`ism and the (Co)Construction of a Renewed Shi`i Publicness
Hossein Mousavi (Royal Holloway, University of London) Were Shi’i Clerics Eurocentric in the 1920s? A Hermeneutic Challenge to the Definition of Eurocentrism in the Social Sciences
Ufuk Erol (Leibniz Institute of European History) Producing Religious Authority: Sayyid Families, Genealogies and the Making of Alevi Religious Leadership
British Muslim Experiences of Inclusion, Exclusion, and Solidarity
Tasnim Idriss (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam) Islamophobia on Social Media in the UK: Discursive Dynamics and Muslim Responses on X during the 2023 Gaza War
Iman Dawood (London School of Economics & Political Science) Forging 'Unity' in Times of Peril: British Muslim Activism in the Era of Far-Right Politics
Muhammed Tajri (Al-Mahdi Institute) The Practitioners' Predicament – Challenges in Caring for Clients on the Shia-LGB Nexus
Muhammad Abbasi (Royal Holloway University of London) Legal Status of Unregistered Muslim Marriages (Nikāḥ) under English law
16.00-16.30: Refreshments
16.30-18.00: Closing Keynote Panel
Title TBC