A Shared Past For A Shared Future: European Muslims And History-Making

In honor of the life and work of Sheikh Zaki Badawi, OBE, KBE, and in recognition of his noted public contribution in championing the vital role of religious faith and values in the life of the nation, the AMSS has established the annual Zaki Badawi Memorial Lecture. The lecture series is dedicated to Dr. Badawi’s vision to foster pluralism, inter-faith dialogue, inter-cultural understanding, and social cohesion. ‘He who controls the past controls the present.’ In this third Zaki Badawi Memorial Lecture, Martin Rose argues that history is as often a polemical weapon as a dispassionate exploration of the past. It can, at worst, support entrenched positions and inhibit understanding – but it also offers solutions to difficult questions of identity and belonging in today’s Europe. Seeing both Muslim and traditional European accounts of their own history as teleological and springing from their respective cultures, he argues for a thoughtful and open-minded approach to the writing of an intercultural history that explores much more fully the role of the Muslim East as a contributor to the ‘modern’ European mind; and at the same time acknowledges the shared, inescapable and potentially creative legacy of common imperial histories for today’s Europe.