By focusing on the tanker terminals of the Arabian Peninsula since the 1930 and the subsequent burgeoning of tankerships plying the trade between the Peninsula and the rest of the world, Prof. Khalili illuminates the radical transformations the tanker trade has anticipated. These include early automated workplaces; terminals far enough from port-city centres to isolate them from public scrutiny; and disciplining of workers aboard tankships. Further the shift in ownership structures and financing of tanker trades over the last one-hundred years either foreshadows or dramatically illuminates the transformations in financial capital itself. Finally much of lex petrolea, the legal and arbitral corpus that sets the parameter of extraction and circulation of oil, itself provides the ground on which late capitalist legal property regimes are founded. Professor Yasir Suleiman was the founding Director of the Centre of Islamic Studies, His Majesty Sultan Qaboos Bin Sa’id Professor of Modern Arabic Studies, and a Fellow of King’s College, Cambridge. His research covers the cultural politics of the Middle East with special focus on identity, conflict, diaspora studies and modernisation in so far as these issues relate to language, modern Arabic literature, translation and memory. He also conducts research in Arabic grammatical theory and the Arabic intellectual tradition in the pre-modern period. Professor Suleiman is Chair of the Panel of Judges, British-Kuwaiti Friendship Society Book Prize in Middle Eastern Studies. In 2013 Professor Suleiman was elected as Chairman of the International Prize of Arabic Fiction (IPAF) popularly known in the Arabic-speaking world as the ‘Arabic Booker’. He serves as Trustee on the Boards of the following organisations: Arab-British Chamber Charitable Foundation, Banipal Trust for Arab Literature and is Trustee of the Gulf Research Centre-Cambridge. He is also Board Member of the Islamic Manuscript Association, Chair of the Centre for the Study of the International Relations of the Middle East and North Africa (CIRMENA), Cambridge and Member of the Advisory Board of Our Shared Future, a joint project of the British Council, USA and Carnegie Foundation. He is a member of the editorial boards of a number of journals and book series. In October 2013 Professor Suleiman was made Ambassador of the University of Sarajevo for his outstanding contribution to promoting the University internationally.

Accessing the histories of artists’ lives is rare in South Asian art. This talk explores how the figure of Gangaram Tambat as an artist and person emerges through his drawings and the texts and publications of the British artists and colonial bureaucrats who employed him in the Deccan in the 1790s. It will also meditate on the potential of archives to uncover histories of lesser-known artists, but also consider the gaps in our understanding that will always remain. The lecture will focus on the patterns of governance of Islam in post-communist Eastern Europe, which are found to differ from those common in Western Europe. Governance of Islam in Eastern Europe, and particularly in countries with autochthonous Muslim populations, is arguably permeated by ‘churchification of Islam’. Churchification here is understood as a state-pursued policy strategy in governing of religious plurality, whereby the national legislation pertaining to governance of religions, including Islam, foresees institutional and structural churchification of registered religious collectivities along the lines of the (once) dominant (national) Christian Churches. Research findings reveal that leading Muslim religious organizations in countries under research have accepted the state-set rules of the game and have been (willingly) turning themselves into church-like institutions (national Muslim Churches), reminiscent particularly of Orthodox Churches. Karen Ruffle is Associate Professor of South Asian Islam in the Departments of Historical Studies and Study of Religion at the University of Toronto. Her research focuses on devotional texts, ritual practice, and Shiʿi material practices in South Asia. Her books include Everyday Shiʿism in South Asia (2021) and Gender, Sainthood, and Everyday Practice in South Asian Shi’ism (2011). Her current projects include a monograph titled, Building the City of Haider: Kingship, Urban Space, and Shiʿi Ritual in Qutb Shahi Hyderabad and a large-scale study of South Asian Shiʿi material culture and sensorial practices titled, Barakah Bodies: Shiʿi Materiality, the Sensorium, and Ritual in India and Pakistan. From Konkan to Coromandel – Prof. Sarah Fee & Rajarshi Sengupta on “ Cloth that Changed the World: Histories and Contemporaneity of Kalamkari Making’‘CIS Public Talks – Alice Wilson on ‘ Defeated Revolutionaries, Lasting Legacies: the social afterlives of revolution in Dhufar, Oman‘ Ahmed Paul Keeler was born in 1942 and christened Paul Godfrey. He was brought up during the 1940s and 50s in a conservative, upper middle-class, Anglo-Catholic family. On leaving school he became deeply involved in the cultural movements of the 1960s.

According to Keeler, the crisis of the Islamic world and indeed of all humanity over the past 200 years is a product of the mistakes and wrongdoings of the modern Western world, not the Muslims; it is a result of the unlimited expansion of modern culture which has shattered all the traditional worlds from China and India to Christian Europe and indigenous America. He argues that the Islamic and other traditional civilisations have not fallen behind, but rather that the modern West has crossed a line that had never been crossed before. It has broken a balance taken by traditional cultures to hold the secret of natural stability and social harmony, and replaced it with the idea of unlimited “progress”. The progress of the modern world has come at the expense of immense human suffering and the constant threat of social and natural calamities. It has opened a pandora’s box, out of which emerged weapons of mass destruction, pollution, deforestation, increasing intensity of natural disasters, global warming, superbugs, the collapse of the family, the disappearance of childhood, an epidemic of addictions of all kinds, loneliness, and mental illnesses, terrorism, financial crises and more. The feeling that this path is taking us to a disaster grows every day. A path on which we race, ever faster. Take part in an enlightening event of discovery and excitement featuring Professor Abdullah Alkadi’s latest book, The Way of the Prophets. Experience and learn more about the route that connects multiple civilisations through time, and marvel at the breathtaking images captured by world-renowned photographer Peter Sanders.From Konkan to Coromandel – Holly Shaffer on “ Gangaram Tambat: A Deccan Artist and a British Archive’‘ CIS Public Talks – Nadia Kamel discusses her book –‘ Al_Mawloudah’ with Prof. Khaled Fahmy and Dr. Hussam Ahmed style>