Events
3rd October 2018 to 5th October 2018
An international conference that examines one of the most intriguing periods in the history of Shi'i Islam and brings together some of the leading scholars in the field.
21st May 2018 to 21st May 2018
This talk will highlight two key dynamics within Sufism today that emerged in developing an introductory text to Sufism and then a volume on contemporary Sufism.
Fatimid Rejection of ghuluww. Outlines of the Kitāb al-Kashf attributed to Jaʿfar b. Mansūr al-Yaman
8th May 2018 to 8th May 2018
This lecture will present some ambiguous passages of the text in which traces of early Shi‘i ideas can still be detected despite their Fatimid rewriting.
7th April 2018 to 7th April 2018
Join us for the live webcast of the proceedings of the Graduation of the Secondary Teacher Education Programme 2018, which will take place at The Ismaili Centre, London here.
11th December 2017 to 11th December 2017
The round table brings together five scholars* of the Qur’an and early Islamic documents on the occasion of the publication of Asma Hilali’s The Sanaa Palimpsest. The Transmission of the Qur’an in the first centuries AH (Oxford University Press in association with the Institute of Ismaili Studies, 2017).
8th November 2017 to 8th November 2017
This lecture focuses on the Arabic adaptation of the influential treatise On the Immortality of the Soul by the Greek Neoplatonism philosopher Plotinus (d. 270) and its impact on Arabic-Islamic Philosophy.
12th October 2017 to 13th October 2017
Before the Printed Word:
Texts, Scribes and Transmission is a Symposium on the manuscript collections housed at the Institute of Ismaili Studies.
9th October 2017 to 9th October 2017
The Arabic scholarship of Ignazio Lomellini is largely unknown, even to Arabists and historians studying the Society of Jesus (Jesuits). In 1622 this Italian priest produced a translation of the Qur’an with accompanying commentary that has remained unstudied in a Genoan library for almost two centuries.
15th June 2017 to 15th June 2017
Approaches to the plurality of religions vary from exclusivist monism to all-inclusive universalism. Mark Sedgwick will examine these approaches from a historical perspective. He will discuss perennialism, an approach that in the West has its origins in the Renaissance concept of the prisca theologia, an ancient universal revelation. Sedgwick will follow the development of perennialism alongside other approaches such as Deism and Pantheism during the Enlightenment, through the nineteenth-century, to the modern perennialism of René Guénon and Aldous Huxley and thence into contemporary Traditonalism, in and beyond Islam. He will close with a comparison between these forms of perennialism and contemporary universalism.
31st May 2017 to 31st May 2017
Prof. Taylor will explicate the notion of primary and secondary causality as it appears in various forms in philosophical thinkers of the Greek, Arabic and Latin traditions, including Plotinus, Proclus, the Plotiniana Arabica, the Kalām fī maḥḍ al-khayr (Latin: Liber de causis), al-Fārābī, Ibn Sīnā, Ibn Rushd and Thomas Aquinas.