MENA-related Events Calendar

Dr Idriss Jebari (Trinity College Dublin) speaking as part of the Middle East Centre Seminar series. The event will be chaired by Professor Michael Willis (St Antony's College). All welcome, no booking necessary.

London Palestine Film Festival (@lpffofficial) returns Nov 13th–27th. This year's programme features UK premieres, Oscar-nominated titles, archival footage and retrospective screenings, creating a vital space to showcase the richness and complexities of Palestinian life. Including Muayad Alayan’s newly released Conversation with the Sea, and don’t miss our screening in tribute to Mohammed Bakri +Q&A at Rio Cinema and Riverside Studios. Check out the full programme and book your tickets now to explore Palestinian culture and resistance through cinema. 

Join Caabu for an in-person book launch with Eamonn Gearon, who will be discussing his book, The Arab Bureau: The Story of Britain's Most Ingenious Intelligence Unit, on British intelligence organisation operating in the Middle East during the First World War.

To RSVP, please email Joseph Willits (willitsj@caabu.org). The book can be purchased here.

When: Monday 16 November 2026, 18:00.

Where: Boardroom, The Arab British Centre, 1 Gough Square, London, EC4A 3DE. How to find us here.

The Arab Bureau is not another book about Lawrence of Arabia. Rather, it is a ground-breaking study offers a comprehensive reassessment of a pivotal yet often misunderstood British intelligence organisation operating in the Middle East during the First World War. Drawing on extensive archival research and newly discovered materials, it moves beyond popular Lawrence narratives to examine the Arab Bureau’s collective innovations in intelligence-gathering and propaganda. Among the most significant of these discoveries is a 200-page Arabic-language text, the longest piece of British-sponsored propaganda from any theatre of the war, which Gearon has translated into English for the first time.

But the Arab Bureau’s story does not end with its disbanding, in 1920. Eamonn distils his findings into seven novel yet enduring principles – his Seven Pillars of Intelligence Wisdom – which demonstrate how lessons the Arab Bureau developed for operating across cultural and linguistic divides remain as relevant to intelligence and policy communities today as they were a century ago.

Organiser: SOAS Middle East Institute

Speakers: Madawi Al-Rasheed (Fellow of the British Academy); Maryam Aldossari (Associate Professor in Organisation Studies, Royal Holloway, University of London)

Chair: Adam Hanieh (Director, SOAS Middle East Institute)

The Quest for Democracy in Saudi Arabia brings together scholars and activists to examine the possibilities and challenges of democratic change in Saudi Arabia.

The book challenges the idea that demands for political participation, accountability and rights are somehow absent from Saudi society, and instead places these struggles within their longer political, social and historical context.

The launch will provide an opportunity to reflect on these questions at a particularly important moment: what democracy might mean in the Saudi context, the forces that continue to constrain political change, and the role of social movements, women, activists and wider civil society in imagining and pushing for different political futures.

Organiser: Leading historians and lawyers examine Britain’s rule and crimes in Palestine, the case for an apology and what justice could mean today.

In September 2025, fourteen Palestinian petitioners submitted a 400-page legal petition to the UK Government setting out evidence that Britain acted unlawfully in Palestine during the three decades it governed the territory, from the Balfour Declaration of 1917 to the end of the Mandate in 1948.

Drafted by a team of lawyers and historians including Ben Emmerson KC, Danny Friedman KC, Professor Avi Shlaim, Professor John Quigley and Dr Victor Kattan, the petition calls on the Government to acknowledge Britain’s conduct and to apologise for it.

In the month of the Balfour Declaration’s 109th anniversary, three of the petition’s authors come to Trinity College to set out the petition's case and to take questions from the audience.

The event is free and open to all. 

In November, Ars Inquirendi convenes over thirty scholars from around the world to answer two questions: In the era of large language models, what can we now discover about the pre-print past that we could not before, and what would justify believing it? Join us at St Edmund Hall, Oxford, and online, 20–22 November, to explore the rapid advances in what models can do and how scholars use them. 

Of particular interest to Islamic and Middle Eastern studies: on Friday 20 November, Sarah Bowen Savant (Aga Khan University) traces work references across the OpenITI corpus, and David Owen (Harvard) takes the Saharan manuscript archive as a stress test for confabulation and palaeography (13:00–16:15 GMT); later that day Karen Pinto (Colorado Boulder) presents “Digital Odysseys with Islamicate Maps”, and Badr and Abdulaziz Al-Harbi ask how to evaluate the source fidelity of AI-generated Islamic knowledge (16:30–18:30 GMT)