Interdisciplinary Interview Series Exploring the History of Islamic Art

The Academy for Islam in Research and Society announces a new YouTube series on Islamic Art and Theology. With this interdisciplinary interview series, the AIWG project workshop "Beauty and Islamic Theology" expands the horizon of aesthetics in Islamic art and theology. What is the nature and significance of beauty in Islamic intellectual culture and theology? To what extent did theological, philosophical, and mystical ideas inform the production and reception of Islamic material culture? Which approaches can be adopted to bridge the gap between theory and art? These and other questions will be the focus of the English interview series "Beauty and Islamic Theology", a series that explores the rich and diverse relationships between theology, art, and aesthetics in the Islamic world. The interview series concludes the one-year AIWG project workshop "Beauty and Islamic Theology", a joint research program of the Centre for Islamic Theology at the Eberhard-Karls University Tübingen and the Chair of Islamic Religious Studies at the Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nuremberg.

International scholars discussing aesthetics and theology

For this series of interviews, Dr Bilal Badat, an art historian and archaeologist based at the Centre for Islamic Theology at the University of Tübingen, conversed with distinguished international scholars of Islamic theology, history, philosophy, and anthropology, as well as the history of Islamic art. Among them are the art historians Professor Wendy Shaw from the Free University 2 of Berlin, Professor Christiane Gruber from the University of Michigan and Dr Valerie Gonzales from SOAS University of London.

The official launch date for the video series will be the Day of Architecture on 26 June 2021. In line with the theme of this day, the opening episode of the interview series will focus on Islamic architecture. Every two weeks, the interview series covers a range of topics from early Islamic rhetoric and poetics, to aesthetics in architecture and Sufism, to beauty and theology in Andalusia.

• 26 June 2021, 6 p.m., Aesthetics of Islamic Architecture (discussion partner: Prof. Samer Akkach, University of Adelaide, founding member of the Centre for Asian and Middle Eastern Architecture)

• then every fortnight on Thursdays from 6 p.m. onwards

• On the YouTube channel of the project workshop "Beauty and Islamic Theology"

The project workshop focuses on a "theology of aesthetics" within Islamic theological research in Germany. The aim is to shed light on aesthetics' nature, value, and theological significance from an interdisciplinary perspective. Dr Bilal Badat, a research assistant at the Eberhard Karls University of Tübingen, specialises in Islamic art and architecture. His research interests include Iranian and Ottoman art and architecture, Islamic calligraphy, and the manuscript culture of the Persian world.

The Academy for Islam in Research and Society (AIWG) is a university platform for research and communication on specialist Islamic-theological questions and social issues. It facilitates three supra-regional collaborations and interaction amongst researchers in Islamic-Theological Studies and neighbouring subjects and actors in Muslim civil society and other sectors of society.