Festival of Muslim Cultures

Welcome to the UK-wide celebration of Muslim cultures

Based on cultural traditions and the changing face of contemporary British communities, the Festival of Muslim Cultures joins young people from Muslim and non-Muslim backgrounds together through the creation of innovative, high quality cultural activities.

This summer, for instance, the Festival helped to bring two excellent puppet companies to the Dynamics07 International Puppet in Birmingham, including Cengiz Ozek Shadow Theatre from Turkey which showed "The Garbage Monster" (below).

The Festival’s work

If you would like to receive a listing of the events that took place during the Festival year in 2006, please send us an . 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 120 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.

We are now working on a number of long-term projects which stay true to our commitment to promoting Muslim cultures through arts collaborations and build on the extensive network of local, national and international partners that Festival has created. These include a three-year national programme that connects young Muslims to their local cultural institutions; a UK Muslim cookbook; an exhibition of the Ottoman architect Sinan; and a project for schools around the 1000-year old story “The Animals’ Lawsuit against Humanity”. Details of these projects, and how you can get involved, will be published in due course.

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.

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.