Date: June 18, 2017 – 2:00 Pm

Venue: Rudolf Steiner House, 35 Park Rd, Marylebone, London NW1, UK

Organizer: The Ahmed Family – C/O Muhammadi Trust

The Muhammadi Trust, a charitable endowment with its center in Great Britain is devoted to the dissemination of authentic knowledge concerning Islam. Through publications, seminars, conferences and other mediums it hopes to contribute its share in making possible deeper studies of Islam.

• Chair: Dr Leonard Lewisohn

Dr. Leonard Lewisohn is Senior Lecturer in Persian and Iran Heritage Foundation Fellow in Classical Persian and Sufi Literature at the Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies of the University of Exeter. He currently teaches Islamic Studies, Sufism, the history of Iran, as well as courses on Persian texts and Persian poetry in translation. He specializes in translation of Persian Sufi poetic and prose texts. He is the author of Beyond Faith and Infidelity: The Sufi Poetry and Teachings of Mahmud Shabistari and editor of three volumes on The Heritage of Sufism; the Mawlana Rumi Review; and The Philosophy of Ecstasy: Rumi and the Sufi Tradition, among other publications. He was previously a Research Associate in Esotericism in Islam at the Department of Academic Research and Publications of the Institute of Ismaili Studies (London) from 1999-2005.

• Professor Andrew Newman

– Challenges and Responses: The Text as a Source on Early Shi’i Debates on Doctrine and Practice

Prof. Newman is Personal Chair of Islamic Studies and Persian at the University of Edinburgh. He holds a BA in History, summa cum laude, from Dartmouth College, USA, and an MA and PhD in Islamic Studies from the University of California, Los Angeles, USA. He joined the University of Edinburgh in 1996, having been a Research Fellow at both the Wellcome Unit for the History of Medicine, Oxford and Green College, Oxford, whilst researching topics in the history of Islamic medicine. His research topics include the history of Twelver Shi’ism; the history of Islamic law; hadith studies; the evolution of the legal bases of Islamic medical theory and practice; the history of Iran; classical, medieval and modern Middle Eastern history and culture; and Persian language and literature. He has published books and articles on early Twelver Shi’i history and thought and on Shi’ism in Safavid Iran.

• Gulamabbas Lakha

– Imām ʿAlī’s (as) Psychology of Forgiveness: A Meeting Point between Science and Religion

Gulamabbas Murtaza Lakha is undertaking a doctorate in psychiatry at Oxford University, researching how Islamic psychology can be applied to the growing challenge of depression in the UK Muslim population. This includes cognitive therapies founded upon ʾakhlāq teachings and mindfulness techniques based on dhikr practices. His previous research includes the neuroscience of dhikr; Islamic teachings for anxiety and depression; and early Arabic commentaries on al-Saḥīfa al-Sajjādiyya. His interests in the multi-disciplinary dimensions of Islamic psychology led to master’s degrees spanning psychology and neuroscience, theology, Islamic history and Arabic from Oxford and the Islamic College in London. He is a financial economist by profession, having graduated in Economics & Econometrics, was awarded the Chartered Financial Analyst designation, and manages an investment firm he founded twelve years ago.

Source: The Muhammadi Trust