Barakat

Barakat The Barakat Trust, a UK charity, supports the study of the Islamic World's cultural heritage. The Barakat Trust, (UK charity reg no: (1136842).)

focuses on the education, preservation and conservation of Islamic culture & heritage.

https://youtu.be/i6J5vHrs7ighttps://open.spotify.com/episode/4YPEaDTkKhkht6vBZ6CjFA?si=5a22ac6ab97141f6This month's podc...
08/10/2026

https://youtu.be/i6J5vHrs7ig
https://open.spotify.com/episode/4YPEaDTkKhkht6vBZ6CjFA?si=5a22ac6ab97141f6

This month's podcast with Nicolò Pini is about his focus on Sicily's rural history through archaeology. Listen to the episode now to understand how much can be revealed by excavations like Nicolò's.

Nicolò's 2025 dig at Terravecchia di Caltavuturo was funded by The Barakat Trust in 2024 as an A3 grant.

Thank you to Nicolò for taking part in the podcast and providing these photos of his team on their dig.

Panggah Ardiyansyah's A2 ProjectPangah's current project, funded by The Barakat Trust, looks at Sendang Duwur, one of th...
05/10/2026

Panggah Ardiyansyah's A2 Project

Pangah's current project, funded by The Barakat Trust, looks at Sendang Duwur, one of the earliest mosques in Java. It expands the focus on the site away from the buildings in isolation and instead examines the surrounding environmental features such as hills and the ocean. This shift in scale, from building to landscape, allows for a more integrated understanding of sacred space as something produced in a specific local environment rather than restricted to a specific site.

By analysing this relationship between building and environment, the project seeks to reconstruct Sendang Duwur as a sacred landscape in which new religious identities were produced. Building on his fieldwork, Panggah presented his findings at the EuroSEAS Conference in Madrid, Spain at the beginning of September.

1 - Panggah used a mobile application, RealityScan, to create a 3D representation of the architecture at Sendang Duwur. Photo by Dian Rahmayani.
2 - Panggah scanned one of the water jars located in front of Sendang Duwur mosque. Photo by Dian Rahmayani.
3 - Panggah examined the hagiographic manuscript about Sunan Sendang with the current site guardian of Sendang Duwur, R. Achmad Fakhruddin. Photo by Dian Rahmayani.
4 - Panggah surveyed Pesarean Mbah Artip, one of the older sites in the Sendang Duwur landscape. Photo by Dian Rahmayani
5 - Panggah attended the EuroSEAS conference 2026 in Madrid, where he co-convened a roundtable on heritage beyond the Anthropocene. Photo by Ashley Thompson.

2026 Grantee: Panggah ArdiyansyahMapping Sendang Duwur, a 16th-c. Islamic Site in Java, IndonesiaPanggah recently comple...
05/10/2026

2026 Grantee: Panggah Ardiyansyah

Mapping Sendang Duwur, a 16th-c. Islamic Site in Java, Indonesia

Panggah recently completed his PhD in the History of Art and Archaeology at SOAS University of London. His thesis explored the notion of karamat, a Javanese/Malay word for sacred site or object to understand early Islamic art and architecture in Java and Sumatra as the islands' religious landscapes transformed. He is currently a research associate at the Digital Humanities Institute, University of Sheffield, where his work lies at the intersections of imperial history, museum collections, and digital mediation of art and culture.

See the next post for more details about his project...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i6J5vHrs7ighttps://open.spotify.com/episode/4YPEaDTkKhkht6vBZ6CjFA?si=f433dd664adc4466Ea...
01/10/2026

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i6J5vHrs7ig
https://open.spotify.com/episode/4YPEaDTkKhkht6vBZ6CjFA?si=f433dd664adc4466

Earlier in the summer we reported on the completion of Nicolò Pini’s project “Living in Late Antique rural Sicily, between Byzantium and Islam” which was supported by The Barakat Trust in 2024.
Now, we are delighted to welcome Nicolò on to the podcast where he discusses in more detail the context of his dig and the importance of tracking developments in rural areas to uncover Sicily’s medieval past.
Nicolò’s dig took place at Terravecchia di Caltavuturo on the top of a hill to the east of Palermo, the island’s capital. He shows how the results of his team’s excavations could contribute to a richer understanding of how populations lived under Islamic rule and beyond.

Nicolò’s project and team, with support from The Barakat Trust, has been able to kick start an effort to return to rural archaeology on the Mediterranean’s largest island where results from other similar sites and future excavations can contribute to the bigger picture of how Sicily’s landscape and population changed under Islamic rule and after the return of the Normans.
The team were able to produce a 3D scan of the project which you can explore here: https://skfb.ly/pznAY

Nicolò Pini is a classical archaeologist by training who has spent the past decade working at the chronological and cultural margins of the discipline — in the Late Antique and Early Islamic Near East. He received his PhD in 2017 from the University of Cologne with a thesis on Arab settlements in Late Antique and early Islamic periods. He has since held postdoctoral positions at universities in Brussels and Bonn.

This episode is part of our series Peripheries which seeks to push our understanding of the cultural heritage of the Islamic world away from the traditional centres that we associate with it. With a fantastic range of guests we will examine places and topics often considered peripheral to the Islamic world and understand why they are in fact of central importance to the region’s cultural heritage, from Armenia to England, from Ethiopia to West Africa.

https://www.eventbrite.com/e/2002208882666/Come and join The Barakat Trust on the first of three tours this autumn where...
29/09/2026

https://www.eventbrite.com/e/2002208882666/

Come and join The Barakat Trust on the first of three tours this autumn where we take you Behind the Scenes of significant cultural institutions around London.
This event will lead us to Christie's one of the world's leading auction houses. We will be guided around the Islamic Art Sale Collection by the Chairman, Middle East and Africa, Ridha Moumni.
Members of The Barakat Trust join for free. Non-members pay £10.

Introducing Behind the ScenesThis autumn The Barakat Trust is delighted to present a short series of tours at a number o...
29/09/2026

Introducing Behind the Scenes

This autumn The Barakat Trust is delighted to present a short series of tours at a number of London's prominent cultural institutions: Christie's, the Royal Asiatic Society, and Factum Arte.

Guests will be able to explore behind the scenes in the collections and studios of these institutions and show around by the experts who run them.

To register visit the respective pages for each tour on Eventbrite.
Christie's: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/2002208882666
RAS: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/2002210223677
Factum Arte: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/2002210315953

2026 Grantee: Damla ÖzakayBuilding, Inscribing, Inhabiting Along the Iris River Valley: Amasea/Amasya at the Crossroads ...
14/09/2026

2026 Grantee: Damla Özakay
Building, Inscribing, Inhabiting Along the Iris River Valley: Amasea/Amasya at the Crossroads of Turco-Mongol, Persianate, and Italianate Traditions

Damla Özakay is a scholar of Islamic art and architecture with a focus on architectural production and city-building practices in medieval Anatolia (1100-1500) and their transregional connections with Greater Iran, the Levant, and the Black Sea region. Through the study of religious, infrastructural, and funerary architecture, her research investigates how artistic patronage, urban identity formation, and memory-making intersected with broader cultural, political, and environmental processes. With support from The Barakat Trust, Damla will receive a postdoctoral scholarship (B2) to complete her research at the Khalili Research Centre, Oxford.

She received her PhD from Harvard University’s joint degree program in Middle Eastern Studies and History of Art and Architecture. Her dissertation “Centralizing the Local: The Architecture of Death, Hospitality, Devotion, and Water in Amasya, c. 1209-1510” offers a long-term analysis of Amasya’s vivid and experimental architectural scene. It expands the discussion of how locality and transregionality worked together in the making of urban images in Anatolia during this period.

Despite its provincialisation in scholarship, Amasya remained a key administrative, commercial, religious, and cultural hub from its incorporation into the Ilkhanid Empire in 1256, and later into the Ottoman domains in the fifteenth century. Damla’s project reframes the city as a site for power formation, idiom making, and cultural exchange, highlighting the crucial role of cities beyond imperial capitals. Through the study of architecture, the project traces how local actors adapted transregional and local visual idioms and urban environment to articulate urban prestige, civic attachment, and claims to centrality in a period of political fragmentation.

Photo 2: Amasya today. Photo credit: Barış Yalçınkaya
Photo 3: Albert Gabriel (1883-1972) © Ministère de la Culture (France), Fonds Albert Gabriel INHA, Médiathèque du patrimoine et de la photographie

Examples of Kalamkari, Qalamkār and Chintz shared by Sara Noori, 2026 grantee and subject of our previous post.
07/09/2026

Examples of Kalamkari, Qalamkār and Chintz shared by Sara Noori, 2026 grantee and subject of our previous post.

2026 Grantee: Sara NooriThe Art and History of Qalamkār in Iran and India: Origins, Techniques, Colour, and Cultural Sig...
07/09/2026

2026 Grantee: Sara Noori
The Art and History of Qalamkār in Iran and India: Origins, Techniques, Colour, and Cultural Significance as a Living Heritage

Sara Noori is a PhD candidate in Art History at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich (LMU), Germany. Her research focuses on textile history, natural dyes, Islamic art, and transcultural exchanges between Iran, India, and Europe. She holds an MA in Textile Design and Sustainability from IED, Italy, and an MA in Carpet Studies (Raw Materials and Dyeing) from the University of Yazd, Iran.

Sara’s research examines one of the most significant cross-cultural artistic exchanges in the history of textiles. The art of painted and printed cloth—known as Qalamkār, Kalamkari, and Chintz—is a traditional craft with a 3,000-year history rooted in ancient South Asian and Persianate textile traditions. The term itself derives from the Persian qalam (pen) and kar (craftsmanship). In India, this tradition evolved into two distinct branches: Masulipatnam (utilizing block-printing and Persianate-Mughal motifs) and Srikalahasti (focused on hand-painted narrative temple cloths). As these fabrics entered European trade networks, they became known as Chintz or Sits.

Rather than seeking a single point of origin, this project traces the dynamic trajectory of these textiles as they moved across Iran, India, and Europe. Grounded in an object-based methodology, the study analyses historical artefacts preserved in major international collections—such as the Victoria and Albert Museum, the British Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Museum of Islamic Art in Berlin.
Ultimately, this project demonstrates that Kalamkari, Qalamkār and Chintz should not be viewed as static local crafts, but rather as dynamic, transregional phenomena in global art history.

New podcast episode: S6E8: The Arts and England's Early Relations with the Islamic World, with Jerry BrottonA remarkable...
03/09/2026

New podcast episode: S6E8: The Arts and England's Early Relations with the Islamic World, with Jerry Brotton

A remarkable portrait, now kept in Birmingham, was produced to commemorate the arrival of al-Annuri (second). Meanwhile, one of Elizabeth I’s most famous portraits, the Rainbow Portrait (first), depicts her in fine clothing made of materials sourced from the Islamic world and beyond.

Muslim characters also began to appear into English theatre that was performed in London at the time, culminating in Othello, the most famous example and still taught in schools today. But Othello followed a much richer tradition of depicting Muslim characters in plays during the late 16th century, many of which aren’t nearly as famous.

Listen to our most recent podcast episode to find out more about this fascinating period:
https://open.spotify.com/episode/057WA4HDgE1sYSof2SGBv6?si=8da820dcaf154fda
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qZHO8WEgZFo

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