The Arabic and Middle Eastern Studies (AMES) Lecture Series
University of Manchester
Empowering Muslim Women in History, Literature and the Arts
Lecture 10: “The Muslim Women’s Arts Foundation: Celebrating and Exploring the lives of Women”
By Ms Qaisra Sharaz, MBE, FRSA (Manchester)
Tuesday 24 May 2022, 17:00 UK time on Zoom: https://zoom.us/j/95182647227
In this lecture Qaisra will talk about her lifelong commitment to researching into Muslim women’s lives. She will share her research findings in interviewing over 100 Muslim women from 5 countries. She will share her vision, aims and passion for her latest international project, Muslim Arts and Cultural Festival with its aim to celebrate arts, connect communities, challenge Islamophobia, and break barriers between Muslims and non-Muslims with the steadfast mission to put women at the forefront, and use the slogan ‘Spread Honey Not Hate.’ The lecture will also discuss Qaisra’s latest initiative Muslim Women’s Arts Foundation, (2021) with its aim to celebrate, elevate and spotlight the achievements of Muslim women artists from around the world. She will highlight how through a 2 weeks’ arts and culture festival in 2022 the foundation provided a local (Northwest), national and international platform to showcase over 100 Muslim women’s creativity from all walks of life.
Concept of the Series: Exploring the imagination and representation of women in history and today is a fully-fledged ambition that this series of lectures would like to explore through MENA women’s work in art, literature, history, archaeology, and social sciences, along with their representation and perception in the works of non-MENA academics.
The series includes speakers from the MENA region as well as from other parts of the globe. The meeting point of these speakers is their research on the women of this region. Through their multi- and interdisciplinary distinctive, innovative, and creative approaches to their fields, they deconstruct the stereotypes of Muslim women and emphasize their diversity. This region, which comprises the Arab World and a large part of the Islamic World, is considered today as one of the hottest spots in world politics and economy, but as usual, women are the least visible participants in and yet the most affected by the consequences of political and economic crises. More positively, they are central to the waves of social change taking place in this region at a dizzying speed.
The series, which is envisaged as a platform for debate among academics, students, and the general public with interest in the broader theme of Women and Gender in MENA, started on 1 December 2021 and will run through to the end of the academic year in 2022 on the zoom platform.
The organizers of this lecture series are two women and gender specialist. Professor Zahia Smail Salhi is Chair of Modern Arabic Studies and Dr Hatoon Alfassi is visiting Senior Research Fellow of the University of Manchester, Department of Arabic and Middle Eastern Studies. Dr Alfassi was formerly a faculty at the International Affairs Department of Qatar University, and the History Department of King Saud University. Both are very happy to invite you to engage in a Women and Gender Discussion which defeats geographical boundaries and extends the opportunity to participants from everywhere in the world.