MENA-related Events Calendar

Dates: 23 September–3 October 2026

Venue: Pleasance Theatre, Carpenters Mews, North Road, London N7 9EF

PalArt Collective returns for the fifth edition of PalArt Festival, presenting its most ambitious season yet: eleven days of Palestinian theatre, comedy and music celebrating resilience, creativity and an unbreakable cultural spirit. Bringing together voices from across Palestine and the diaspora, the programme presents a tapestry of sharp-edged humour, vivid storytelling, bold visions of the future and contemporary music.

Organiser: The Alwaleed Centre, University of Edinburgh

Although Imam al-Haddad lived in Yemen more than three centuries ago, his writings continue to attract interest across diverse cultural and intellectual settings around the world, with his poetry studied, translated, and recited in communities from California to Jakarta. A new English translation of his original Arabic works offers contemporary readers an opportunity to engage with the thought and literary legacy of an influential and enduring spiritual and intellectual figure.

This event will feature a presentation on the new translation “Pearls from the Diwan of Imam al-Haddad,” an introduction to the Imam’s life and work and a recitation and explanation of some of his poetry.

Organiser: Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies Research Seminar Series

Islam and evolution remains one of the most contested areas in contemporary Muslim thought. One recent proposal for reconciling evolutionary science with the traditional Islamic account of human origins is Adamic exceptionalism.

This view maintains that Adam and Eve were miraculous creations and that all human lineages ultimately go back to them, thereby preserving the central theological claims associated with Adamic descent. Where Adamic exceptionalism goes further, however, is in allowing the possibility that Adam’s descendants interbred with other hominins, thereby establishing a wider genealogical connection between the Adamic line and the rest of the biological world.

A major criticism of this proposal is that the idea of such interbreeding may appear theologically unsettling, morally offensive, or conceptually strange. This seminar asks whether Islamic thought contains any classical precedent for thinking about interbreeding across different kinds of beings. It argues that classical discussions of human-jinn interbreeding, while obviously not identical to modern evolutionary questions, provide a valuable conceptual precedent for examining how Muslim theologians and jurists negotiated questions of lineage, humanity, descent, and theological identity.

In doing so, the seminar uses this classical material to assess whether Adamic exceptionalism can preserve a traditional account of Adam and Eve while remaining open to evolutionary accounts of human biological history.

"I am beginning to wonder what profit I shall get out of it all" Exploring Gertrude Bell's Journey to Arabia and Its Significance by Mark Jackson, Professor of Byzantine Archaeology at Newcastle University and co-curator of the Gertrude Bell Archive. 

2026 commemorates the centenary of the death of Gertrude Bell. Having been one of few British people to have ventured into Arabia, Bell returned from a journey to Ha'il just weeks before the outbreak of World War I. She confided in one of her diary entries that her journey was proving to be a failure. But by 1915 the value of her work had been recognised by the War Office. Indeed by 1918 the Royal Geographical Society awarded her the Founders Medal for her expeditions. Drawing on photographs and documents from the Gertrude Bell Archive at Newcastle University and the Royal Geographical Society, this lecture will introduce Gertrude Bell and explore the significance of her journey to Arabia.