In fact, the project ties in with a whole string of recent work by Ali and the company he founded, Soul City Arts, which criss-crosses various formats, media, venues and audiences. The Wembley painting follows hot on the heels of ‘Ramadan Streets’, which was a completely different affair and on a completely different scale. Held over ten nights during the holy month, Ali and collaborators worked to curate a night market involving food, crafts, and entertainment for Birmingham’s public.

In recent years, Ramadan has become an increasingly public festival in the West. Impromptu street markets now fill our city streets, bringing fun, colour and a certain measure of chaos to our communities. Ali’s job, part commission, part self-appointed task, was to deliver a safe, organised, and focussed version of one such market, to make the experience manageable, sustainable, but also to keep it real, authentic, and not to suck the soul out of a flowering of urban Muslim culture. In the event, people came and loved what they saw. In fact, there were around 30,000 of them.

Both these recent SCA projects, painting and night market, reflect a common, core endeavour – to place Islamic values and traditions on show within the public gaze and to represent Muslims living their faith in a positive, but also unapologetic way. And it’s this open, yet unapologetic stance that marks out how faith informs SCA’s work. They will assure you that their art isn’t threateningly Islamic. They don’t want to preach, to convert, to take over, to force values and beliefs down the throats of others, or even to be militant and aggressive. They don’t want to do any of the things the reactionary politicians, jingoists, and the right-wing media would have you believe. Yet neither will they hide away their faces, nor dilute nor compromise on their values and traditions. In fact, they want to show you that it is precisely those Islamic traditions which compel them to show kindness, charity, and hospitality, and also to stand for social and political justice. And people need not be afraid of what they stand for: many non-Muslims work regularly with SCA, finding common cause.

My own connection to SCA, which now stretches back now over years, pivots around this set of values. As a cultural historian and literary scholar, I have been studying the way in which Western culture and society have all too often sought to air-brush Islam, to sanitise and normalise Islam, to domesticate it and make it palatable precisely in the moment it seeks to connect with, embrace and include it: in other words, Muslims belong, as long as they are the right kind of Muslims. Yet, who gets to decide who that is and what that means? Studying this history reminds us to pose precisely that question, to ask what real diversity is, whom the tick-box ‘inclusivity’ agendas of today are seeking to include – and at what ‘cost’ and with what ‘losses’ so-called inclusivity policies operate.

Currently writing from my base in Naarm/ Melbourne, it’s great to know that Ali and SCA will be returning to Australia later in July 2025 with their ‘Fear of Faith’ project. It’s not the first time he has been here, having worked in the past with a range of local artists, arts organisations, and communities. But this visit marks the beginning of a new phase in SCA’s Australian legacy. We’ll be able to reveal more about the programme soon. One thing remains sure, though: as they invite audiences in, asking them to engage and collaborate, they will also ask them to let go of any lingering fear they might have. To overcome the fear of faith which so many of us, if we are honest, still carry with us.

The result was our Magic Table. Re-purposing a recording studio in Chicago and Soul City Arts’ Port Hope warehouse in the UK, we dusted off the live streaming technology we thought we had left behind with the COVID pandemic and took it to new levels. This was no functional live link-up between sterile corporate meeting spaces or university seminar rooms – and neither was it an awkward Zoom call. The ambience created and the choice of the powerfully connective topic of food – and this is my conviction – went a long way to making a qualitative shift the in the kind of conversations we had.

In the two beautifully lit spaces, immersed in ambient sound, screens and projections were used to create the captivating illusion of one long, single dining table spanning an ocean, where diners in both locations could share food and conversation as if seated together. In this virtually unified setting, two guest chefs, Munayam and Maryam Khan (no relation) recreated each other’s dishes and offered live cooking demonstrations from the end of the table. We then ate together, exchanged thoughts, feelings and stories awoken by the memories of food and cooking. Each sharing, each story told unlocked the next and paved the way to a growing intimacy, which came about despite the distance. Diners were able to show vulnerability, sharing memories of family, love, loss, and bereavement across two continents. The experience testified to the affective power of art to forge bonds and encourage sharing at the deepest level. Wherever in the world we might be.

The event’s original title, ‘Diasporic Dialogue: A Global Dining Experience’, was overwritten by the new experience we created – now the magic table was at the centre of the concept and is in the title of the short film chronicling the event.

It marks the first chapter in a sequence of events I am helping Soul City Arts to run, funded by Warwick University’s Place Based Research Fund, and designed to find innovative new ways of using their creative space to engage new audiences and do so in new ways. Further chapters will follow. I will document them here and, eventually, a longer film and a journal article will follow as we reflect critically on our work. For now, though, watch our film and join us at the magic table.

I soon learned that many of my interlocutors had lived experiences of being studied, analysed, and reported on, only to be left behind by researchers, who quite swiftly moved to the next project without sharing any benefits and insights gained from the collaborative work in a clear and mutually equitable manner. Yet many of the community leaders, activists, artists, and curators I met in fact feared something even more than this exploitation. As they wondered about working with me, they asked themselves what, in partnering with a white academic from a Russel Group university, they would be expected to say, to do, and to participate in? What agenda, visible or otherwise, might they be asked to serve? And what of their voices, representation, agency, and identity – and their relations to and standing within their own communities? So even as these relationships developed and deepened, many questions remained for my collaborators: what was going to be the cost, to them, of building alliances and working together? What might they lose of themselves in their partnerships, friendships, and kinship with me?

In most cases, the drive to be transparent, to remain open to criticism, and to share concerns and even vulnerabilities has seen us through this period. In some cases, the passage of time and the opportunity to show demonstrable results and also longstanding commitment and resilience have all helped engender trust. In the interests of maintaining that transparency, though, I’m compelled to acknowledge the direct impact my community relationships have had upon my writing. In combing through German history and culture, reading literature, scholarship, travel writing, political writing, and examining visual culture such as photography and illustration, I am asking precisely the same questions as my collaborators: how does the embrace sought after, the affinities explored, and the kinships established in the cultural works of German speakers colour their representation of Islam? What cultural specificity do Muslims lose when represented within these new relations with the West?

So much criticism dedicated to this field, from Edward Said’s seminal Orientalism (1978) with its famously self-confessed gaps on German culture, to the conceptually nuanced responses it has produced by scholars of German over the last four decades, have focussed on the various ways in which European culture externalised the so-called Orient, rendering it ‘other’, related to Europe only by embodying all that Europe was not, transforming it into both a locus of desired exoticism or a feared and degenerate enemy. My work, folding in and working through the questions asked by my British Muslims contemporaries, inverts this paradigm and seeks out friendships, bonds, kinships and even family connections between Muslims and Germans in all manner of contexts.
Yet in so doing, it seeks to retain a critical edge. For instance, when in G.E Lessing’s famous play Nathan der Weise (‘Nathan the Wise’) (1789), which plays out in Jerusalem during the Crusades, an affection develops between the character of Recha, the adopted daughter of the play’s wise, eponymous Jew, and a Knight Templar captured by the Muslim forces of Sultan Saladin, their young love cannot be allowed to blossom. A late reveal in the drama shows Recha and the Christian von Stauffen to be twin siblings, joint offspring of a Christian mother and a Muslim father, who is no other than Saladin’s own brother. Learning that the Sultan had previously spared von Stauffen on account of a perceived yet unspoken facial 'similarity' to his late brother, audiences might reflect on series of critical questions: do we only embrace members of other faiths when they resemble us? If we think of our collectives as ‘familial’, what happens to those who do not fit into the family, be it organised around bloodlines or other characteristics? And, ultimately, how inclusive are our inclusive models of humanity?

The play, usually celebrated as a model of tolerance and harmony, also brings to light various of the problematic gaps in Western universal thinking. The very act of including a particular other within our relationships and communities can, by default, lead us to exclude others – at the denouement of Lessing’s play, the Jew Nathan remains external to the newly disclosed ‘family’ – or lead us to accept more insidious models of belonging which only permit the inclusion of that which has been assimilated, domesticated, and begun to resemble more closely a set of normative characteristics – to resemble, that is, ourselves. The concept of critical similarity (Bhatti and Kimmich, 2015), which underpins many of the kinships I examine in my book, can describe both a nuanced attempt to recognise resemblance whilst preserving distinctiveness (‘we are alike, though we also differ as we relate’), though also a problematic pull towards similitude that threatens that distinctiveness (‘we must be more alike in order to relate’). Thinking critically about similarity, about how closely we have to resemble or align with those we work or ally with, culturally, ideologically, and politically, remains a question of burning relevance today. I hope my book will go some way to provoking thought in this area.

Once again, I’m fortunate. Fortunate not only to be funded to write that book, but also to be able to acknowledge and reinvest critical questions asked by my off-campus partners within my own work. It has given the book a new internal coherence and, I feel, a renewed external relevance. The traditional demarcations of contemporary politics continue to be broken down and redrawn, left and right, progressive and conservative, national and global. Many of us find ourselves stepping away from older affiliations and into new alliances, often forged around our views on the tortuous and highly polarising crises in Gaza, Sudan and elsewhere. Within these shifting contexts, retaining critical awareness of what we and our allies stand to gain as we group and regroup, though also what keeps us mutually distinctive and, by implication, what we all stand to lose, would appear to be a more than valuable insight.