As part of SLARG’s Research Week, this day programme brings together artistic practices, scholarship, and community-based engagement rooted in Islamic knowledges. Ruth Razan Loos and Joud Toamah, SLARG researchers, have collaborated to design a programme that highlights intersections of migration, belonging, care, and ecological and cultural resilience through multiple creative formats. Open to all.

Programme

Lecture-Performance
Murmurations and Migrations: Learning from the Avian Wisdom of Farid al-Din Attar
Through the lens of Farid al-Din Attar’s 12th-century Persian epic poem The Conference of the Birds, this lecture-performance - led by Wendy Miriam Kural Shaw -rethinks migration, belonging, and collective action in the contemporary world. Using poetic and philosophical frameworks, participants are invited to consider the dialectics of engagement, care, and transcendence in both human and nonhuman communities. Shaw served as professor in departments of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures, Media Studies, and Art History in the United States, Turkey, Switzerland and Germany. She examines Islamic discourses of perception as a source for decolonized expression. Liberated from the disciplinary mandate of universities she continues to explore the interface between culture and religion. She currently writes and illustrates short and long footnoted fiction and verse.

Live Perso-Arabic Calligraphy
Experience the precision and beauty of Islamic calligraphy with Tamim SahibZada, master calligrapher, miniaturist, and book illuminator. Tamim refined his calligraphy skills under the guidance of master calligraphers such as Master Taheri (Kabul) and Master Mohammad Amin (Peshawar). He was one of the first lecturers and student mentors at the Turquoise Mountain Institute where he developed the student curriculum for miniature art, book illustration, colour design, tapestry design, geometric and Islamic design among others.

Devotional Performance
The Kairo Girls’ School is a women-led collective preserving Indigenous and oral Islamic traditions of sharing sacred Islamic knowledge, storytelling, and practicing traditional crafts in service of healing. They offer a live performance guided by improvisistance—a practice combining improvisation and resistance to remain truthfully present. Using voice, electronics, and natural acoustics, they engage audiences in a living archive of dhikr and explore forms of remembrance.

Screening
Shahana Rajani presents Four Acts of Recovery, a video installation following a displaced fisherfolk family from Mul Creek in the Indus Delta. Combining environmental, cultural, and mystical Islamic perspectives, the work highlights sacred landscape practices and community rituals that reconnect people to their threatened environments. Shahana is an interdisciplinary artist and researcher exploring ecological and social practices in Pakistan through visual representation, landscapes, and infrastructure, often working in community-based collaborative contexts.

Throughout the day
A table with books and zines will be available for viewing, connecting the ideas and practices presented in the sessions to printed and visual media.

*Image: Leaf inscribed with a Qur’anic verse from Surat al-Isra’ (“The Night Journey,” Q.17:80), Turkey, 19th century. The inscription reads: “And say, ‘O my Lord, make me enter a rightful entrance and make me exit a rightful exit, and grant me from Your Own a power, favoured [by You].’”*