Ismailis of China: history, culture and tradition
In China’s Xinjiang region, a small Ismaili community sustains its faith through ritual and story. IIS hosts a lecture on the Ismaili Tajiks of this community. The hybrid event takes place on Wednesday 16 September at the Aga Khan Centre, London, and online. Dr Amier Saidula will explore how rituals, oral traditions and vernacular knowledge sustain religious heritage and identity.
Register to attend

Annual Graduate Conference 2026
IIS will host its Annual Graduate Conference on Monday 28 September at the Aga Khan Centre in London and online. This year’s theme, “Muslim Lives in Transition: Continuity and Change in Contemporary Times”, explores how Muslim lives are shaped by both continuity and change.
Register now

Fatimid Sicily: History, Memory, and Legacy
How is the Islamic past imagined in contemporary Palermo, Sicily?
The Institute of Ismaili Studies (IIS) hosts a two-day conference on Fatimid rule in Sicily. The event runs Monday 19 and Tuesday 20 October at the Aga Khan Centre, London, and online. A parallel exhibition, Islamic Traces, follows Palermo residents of different faiths and none as they search for the city’s Islamic past. Through architecture, landscape, language and the arts, they bring their imagined pasts to life in the present.
Register to attend

Abstract: My presentation explores the intellectual, social, and political landscape of Sicily under the Arab Fāṭimid rule (909–965) and their Kalbid allies (948–1053). Building on research from my edited volume Muslim Sicily: Encounters and Legacy, it further examines Sicily’s connections with al-Andalus, Qayrawān, and Cairo. The talk highlights the dynamic nature of Christian–Muslim relations within a broader context of interaction among diverse ethnic and religious communities over several centuries. Drawing on recently published Arabic and Coptic texts, it also considers Fāṭimid state policies and Sicily’s role as a key player in the medieval Mediterranean.

Register at:
https://universityofexeter.zoom.us/meeting/register/TBJgbYt6Rk2rVXgQvpdvvA?lt_utm_source=lt_admin_share_link#/registration

ONLINE Webinar “From Hidden Rooms to City Streets: Shia Rituals, Student Activism, and Public Space in Italy” by Minoo Mirshahvalad (University of Copenhagen), NYU-Roma Tre Permanent Global Seminar, 4 March 2026, 18:00 CET

This paper examines how Shia Muslims – particularly Iranian students – navigated and reshaped Italian urban spaces between the early 2010s and 2018. It explores how a marginal religious minority negotiates its right to urban presence through evolving practices of visibility, how students act as cultural mediators, and how Italian urban spaces both limit conventional forms of public religiosity, but also open space for creative and locally adapted modes of ritual expression.
Information and registration: https://tinyurl.com/4hc974ka

See

https://curis.ku.dk/ws/portalfiles/portal/450132916/Research_Seminar_-_Shia_diaspora.pdf

for further information.

https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-031-55877-1

See also Human Rights Watch

Pope Francis to Visit Bahrain – a center of human repression and one-family rule

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