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Tehmina Kazi reading and Muslim LGBT activism

As the final event of the Queering Islam events series for 2015-2016, Tehmina Kazi, the Director of British Muslims for Secular Democracy, visited us at the University of Leicester to do a reading of her story ‘The Tulip Asylum’, a story about homosexuality in contemporary Iran. Below you can find an excerpt of her reading and […]

Queering Islam # 2: Rusi Jaspal public talk recording

Prof Rusi Jaspal (De Montfort University) gave a great public talk on the social psychology of gay and bisexual Muslims last week as part of the series Queering Islam. You can find the video recording below, also available through YouTube. The talk explored the findings of various studies that set out to examine aspects of […]

Samar Habib lecture and Q&A recording now available

Last week, Dr Samar Habib delivered the opening lecture of the new Queering Islam events series, hosted by Dr Alberto Fernández Carbajal (Leverhulme Fellow, School of English), with a talk entitled ‘States of Being: Narratives of Queer Muslim Diasporas in Contemporary Scholarship’. Here you can find footage of the lecture and the ensuing Q&A. As Dr Habib intimates […]

BBC Radio Leicester: Alberto Fernández Carbajal and Samar Habib interview

On the morning of 25 November 2015, I headed out to the BBC Radio Leicester studio for an interview with Ed Stagg, who hosted me and Dr Samar Habib across the airwaves. He asked us about the context for my research project Queer Diasporas: Islam, Homosexuality and a Micropolitics of Dissent, about the use of […]

Queering Islam: a new events series

It’s been a little while since my last post on the films of Shamim Sarif. I’ve been busy organising the Postcolonial Studies Association’s first ever Convention, held on campus at the University of Leicester and at College Court, the University’s state-of-the-art conference centre. The special topic of the convention was Diasporas, and we had top-notch plenary […]

Impossible Desires: the Novels and Films of Shamim Sarif

As part of my Queer Diasporas project, I’ve been researching the work of the still not too widely known British novelist and filmmaker Shamim Sarif, whose existence I’ve been alerted to by my kind colleague at the University of Leicester, Emma Parker. A British citizen of Indian Muslim heritage, Sarif’s family migrated first to South Africa and then to […]

Hanif Kureishi: the Assemblage of a Native Informant

Hanif Kureishi: the Assemblage of a Native Informant

There are few writers alive in Britain today who can elicit such polarised, or at best highly qualified, responses as Hanif Kureishi (except, perhaps, his fellow writer and friend Salman Rushdie). When I attended an event on Muslim writing last year, I was surprised by the critical tone that some Muslim cultural practitioners took on prominent […]

How can we talk about Islam after terrorism?

Due to the terrorist attacks that took place in Paris on 11 January, Islam and Muslims are once again at the centre of public attention. The tragic event was followed by an almost unanimous public repulsion in the ‘West’ of the fatal violence that Islamist extremists brought to the workers of the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo. The discourse that […]

Islam: Religion or Politics?

Islam: Religion or Politics?

Lately, I have been reading the work of Timothy Fitzgerald (University of Stirling, UK), a leading scholar of religion, particularly his thought-provoking book Discourse on Civility and Barbarity: A Critical History of Religion and Related Categories (Oxford University Press, 2007), pictured below. In this book, Fitzgerald argues that the western world (i.e. Europe and America) has created the […]

British premiere of Abdellah Taïa’s Salvation Army

Back in September, I attended the first British screening of Salvation Army (2013), the début film of Moroccan author (and now filmmaker) Abdellah Taïa, screened exclusively as part of Safar: The Festival of Popular Arab Cinema at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, in London. This was an exciting first-time experience on many counts: this was the first public screening […]

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