Backdoor Broadcasting Company

Research Network South Asia presents:

Date:  25 Feb 2010
Win 0-02

‘Pakistan: business as usual?

A round table event with David Taylor, Umar Khan, Daniel Haines, Sarah Ansari, Humayun Ansari, Markus Daechsel

Instead of reflecting on the over-used question of whether Pakistan can ‘survive’ the present crisis, we will be posing a slightly more relaxed and historically informed question: what is really new about the present crisis, and to what extent are we dealing only with a variation on problems that have had a long established place in Pakistani history? What can we – as historians or historically informed political scientists – say about long-term trends in Pakistan’s history?

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Royal Holloway University of London Department of History

Date: 8 February 2010

Professor Humayun Ansari delivers his inaugural lecture, “The ‘Muslim World’ in British Historical Imaginations”

Humayun Ansari – The ‘Muslim World’ in British Historical Imaginations

Since 9/11, anxiety, and indeed fear, generated by the Muslim presence in the West and by what appear as threatening developments in different parts of the so-called Muslim world, has created at times almost a sense of collective panic. This lecture seeks to deepen our understanding of 21st century tensions by looking at the longer term history of the problematic encounter between Britain and the Muslim world, exploring the place (or places) that Islam, Muslims and Muslim societies have occupied over centuries in the British historical discourse and the impact that these interactions have had on shaping the British imaginary.

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Vote of the Thanks by Francis Robinson:

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Royal Holloway History Department Research Seminar Series

Date: 27 October 2009

Professor Humayun Ansari (Royal Holloway)
‘Place-making, Identity and Islam: the Struggle to Create ‘a mosque in London worthy of the tradition of Islam and worthy of the capital of the British Empire’, 1910-1944.

Post 9/11 and 7/7, the mosque, as a socially dynamic and influential multi-purpose community institution, has come under increasing scrutiny as academic and political debates surrounding identity and belonging, the radicalisation of young Muslims, struggles for power within and beyond Muslim communities and policies on integration and social cohesion reach a new pitch. For a Muslim to feel at home or for a non-Muslim to recognize a Muslim space, the presence of certain Islamic symbols is important. In Britain, the construction of mosques has been part of a process of identity formation, a process that has become concerned with non-Muslim anxieties over visible and audible Muslim presence. By exploring historically the dynamic interplay between Muslim experience and the institutions of British society with regard to the efforts for establishing a mosque in London, this paper attempts to deepen our understanding of how Muslims have sought to establish themselves as an integral part of British society, through a specific kind of place-making.

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