Welcome to the UK-wide celebration of Muslim cultures
To explore the programme of events, please click on the map to find regional listings.
The Festival of Muslim Cultures began in January 2006 and continues into autumn 2007. We have been working with arts and educational institutions across the UK to promote the mainstreaming of Muslim cultures within UK everyday life. The Festival was created out of the need to encourage a better understanding between Muslims and non Muslims (as a two-way process), to promote respect for Muslim cultures and to demonstrate how culture creates the pathways that connect us all together.
The programme launched with a visit by the Festival’s Patron, the Prince of Wales, to the exhibition “Palace and Mosque” in Sheffield and since then there have been more than 100 events that have ranged from a Somali community day in Cardiff at the National Museum of Wales to a late-night Prom with Radio Tarifa (from Spain) and Dimi Mint Abba (from Mauritania) in the Royal Albert Hall and from a home-grown play in Nottingham about the Kashmir earthquake to the exhibition “Beyond the Palace Walls” at the Royal Museum Edinburgh of Islamic art from the Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg.
Major events are being planned for 2007 and will be announced as they are confirmed. At the end of the Festival we want to establish a Foundation that will support our long-term commitment to promoting Muslim cultures through arts collaborations and build on the extensive network of local, national and international partners that Festival has created.
The Festival’s organisation
The organisation running the Festival is a charity and is non-political, non-sectarian and non-ideological. Its aims are to create spaces for creativity, build cultural bridges and promote expression through the arts by Muslims from all over the world for people all over the UK. It is intended that this work will continue beyond the end of the Festival.
The Chair of the Trustees is Raficq Abdulla MBE (lawyer, interpreter of Rumi and Attar, broadcaster and writer)
The Festival Director is Isabel Carlisle (former Deputy Head of Exhibitions at the Royal Academy of Arts in London and a former art critic for The Times).
For more information on the people involved in the Festival, go to the Who’s Who page.
Hamra Abbas in front of her work Please do not touch, stay out and enjoy the show. See events page for details. Photograph by Vipul Sangoi, Raindesign
Isabel Carlisle, Director of the Festival of Muslim Cultures, receives a British Honours 2006 award from Prince Michael of
Kent at the House of Lords for services to the Muslim community.