This lecture will take place online at 17:00 BST

When historical texts are read, readers rely on their intellectual conditioning to understand and judge what such texts are conveying. In this experimental talk, Dr Shahzad Bashir utilises 19th-century Indian Islamic texts to suggest that anamorphism highlighted in concept-driven photography provides a useful analogy for seeing how historians’ narratives become containers for irreducibly complex worlds. Historians’ claims about the past are always equally valid and distortive, mirroring the way a two-dimensional image in a photograph captures a three-dimensional world. The analogy helps scholars appreciate historical knowledge as a particular form of truth that cannot be mapped to basic notions of objectivity, subjectivity, normativity, and so on. 

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Views expressed in this lecture and discussion are those of the presenters, not necessarily of IIS, the Ismaili community or its leadership. Promotion of this event is not an explicit endorsement of the ideas presented.