What are the similarities and differences we find between ancient and contemporary forms of belonging? Since the turn of the millennium, the oil-rich Gulf city states have emerged as global nodes of finance, migration, architecture, education and culture in a hyper-mediatized world. In her talk, Rania Maktabi reflects on meanings of citizenship and what ‘sustainability’ implies in a transnational context. Her main focus is how education and architecture represent fundamental venues for moulding new forms of global Muslim identities – both religious and secular – which are exclusive and inclusive in intricate ways.

The talk is part of the Joint Lecture Series, a joint initiative of AKU-ISMC and the Aga Khan Trust for Culture’s Education Programme; the Aga Khan Agency for Habitat and the Aga Khan Museum are also organizing partners this year. This event is presented by AKU-ISMC’s Governance Programme.

The event is online and you will need to register here

Speaker

Rania Maktabi is a political scientist (University of Oslo, 1992) of the Middle East, with particular interests in citizenship and the relationship between religion, law and politics. She has done fieldwork in Lebanon, Syria, Egypt, Morocco, Kuwait and Qatar. She was researcher in residence at Georgetown University-Qatar, Center for International and Regional Studies, in Doha in 2020. Her recent publications include: Female Citizenship in Kuwait and Qatar: Globalization and Pressures for Reform in Two Rentier States (Nidaba, 2016); Doha: City State with Global Ambitions [in Norwegian] (Universitetsforlaget, 2018), Woman and Citizenship in Routledge Handbook on Women in the Middle East (forthcoming).

Moderator

Gianluca Parolin is a comparative lawyer working on constitutional design, State-Islam relations, citizenship, shifting semiotics of law, and images of law in popular culture. He holds a PhD in Public Law from the University of Turin, and is Professor of Law at the Aga Khan University in London, where he also leads the Governance Programme. From 2008 to 2015 he taught constitutional law at Cairo University and the American University in Cairo. He is the author of Citizenship in the Arab World (Amsterdam University Press, 2009), and is currently writing a new book on the law’s imaginaire in Egyptian television drama.

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