Research at ISMC concentrates on issues critical to all contemporary societies. In particular, it focuses on issues that remain relatively unexplored within Muslim contexts. The Institute brings together scholars from around the world through its workshops, conferences and fellowships programme.
The Institute concentrates on two interconnected research themes:
The Construction of Knowledge about Muslim Societies and Cultures: Building on contemporary work in the sociology of knowledge, historiography, education theory and other fields, the Institute seeks to examine the ways that knowledge about Muslim cultures and societies is created, negotiated and legitimized, and the diverse effects of this knowledge in social, political and educational realms.
Understanding the Processes of Change in Muslim Societies and Cultures: This research area addresses questions pertaining to processes of change and new forms of socio-economic, political and cultural practice in Muslim-majority societies and in Western countries with Muslim populations.
Governance for the Public Good in Muslim Contexts: This programme aims to critically assess current thinking on governance in relation to Muslim contexts. It seeks to explore the deeply rooted religious and cultural sensitivities prevalent in matters of governance. By generating outputs accessible to wider audiences, the project is committed to encouraging healthy and informed debate among scholars and the public alike.
KITAB: The KITAB project is a pioneering digital initiative that is providing new cultural insights from over 6,000 Arabic texts from the pre-modern Islamic world, from 750AD to 1500AD). Led by AKU-ISMC’s Dr Sarah Bowen Savant, the project recently received substantial funding from the European Research Council.
The grant will support the hiring of a technical lead, who will develop data visualisations and analytics spanning the entire corpus of work under the project, as well as seven research staff who will expand on the existing team’s work to explore how Islamic heritage was shaped and filtered during the period.
Muslim Civilisations Abstracts: This project aims to widen knowledge among scholars worldwide on researches conducted on Muslim civilisations globally. The information on these publications is provided in the form of short reviews (abstracts).
