In this first ever podcast from LUCIS, hosts Yasmin Ismail & Sara Bolghiran explore what it means to imagine Muslim futures. Over 6 episodes we explore questions around what it means to imagine, the politics of imagination and what it would mean to engage with Muslims from the perspective of futures.

In this first ever podcast from LUCIS, hosts Yasmin Ismail & Sara Bolghiran explore what it means to imagine Muslim futures. Over 6 episodes we explore questions around what it means to imagine, the politics of imagination and what it would mean to engage with Muslims from the perspective of futures.

We seek to challenge the binary discourses around Muslims whereby Muslims are often only seen to act in response to extremist imaginaries, or in relation to notions of belonging and integration.  To imagine then, is to be able to push back against these dominant visions Muslims are made to live inside of and an invitation to step into a world where Muslims have always been imagining in various ways, the futures that they want to be part of.

For many Muslims, this future can mean so many different things, many are minorities within a minority, trying to envisage a future within the wider community, for others, minorities in non-Muslim countries, imagining a future is a political act, an act of resistance, or a moment of liberation, and in all of this, imagination is at the center.

Through art and technology, music, literature and the arts, (all rich repositories for futural imagining) and alongside different writers, activists and artists, we discuss what it means for Muslims to imagine a future, how different spaces shape the imagination of futures in different communities and who is shaping Muslim futures.

We would like to thank the following guests for their contributions on the podcast:

• Hassan Hasaa’Ree Ali  
• James McGrail
• Sumayya Vally
• Anusheh Zia
• Ouassima Laabich

We would like to give a special thanks to Raymond Chanda for the sound editing.

We would also like to thank LUCIS for funding this initiative.

About the hosts

Dr. Yasmin Ismail is a researcher and project manager on the Project One Amongst Zeroes; Towards and Anthropology of Everyday AI in Islam, based at the Institute for Cultural Anthropology and Development Sociology at Leiden University. Here, she focuses on outreach and innovative ways of research dissemination. Prior to this she completed her PhD in Social and Cultural Anthropology at Freie Universität Berlin, where she explored linguistic shifts into English, in Quranic schools in the UK, Zambia and South Africa. Yasmin has always had an overactive imagination, and her love of Sci-Fi particularly Muslim sci-fi has shaped her interest in thinking of futures. She also sees in this a way for Muslims like herself who live in minority contexts to be free to ask where and what next, rather than to always be tasked with explaining the where froms and why heres.  

Sara Bolghiran is a PhD Candidate in Philosophy of Religion at Leiden University’s Centre for the Study of Religion and Society. She is mainly interested in the decoloniality of Islamic Studies, particularly pertaining to the study of Muslims in Europe. To that end, she is currently taking the Islamic idea of beauty (jamal/husn) as starting point to reconceptualize Muslim subjectivity, studying how diasporic Muslims in the Benelux are see(k)ing, aspiring to and actively pursuing beauty in their divine engagement and spiritual development. Anchoring the connection between the beautiful and the ethical in this process, she is also interested in how these aspirations and actions to "beautify" self, soul, and community, are used to create socio-ethical imaginaries about the future.