In honor of the life and work of Sheikh Zaki Badawi, OBE, KBE, and

in recognition of his noted public contribution in championing the

vital role of religious faith and values in the life of the nation, the AMSS

has established the annual Zaki Badawi Memorial Lecture. The lecture

series is dedicated to Dr. Badawi’s vision to foster pluralism, inter-faith

dialogue, inter-cultural understanding, and social cohesion.

‘He who controls the past controls the present.’ In this third Zaki

Badawi Memorial Lecture, Martin Rose argues that history is as often

a polemical weapon as a dispassionate exploration of the past. It can, at

worst, support entrenched positions and inhibit understanding – but it

also offers solutions to difficult questions of identity and belonging in

today’s Europe. Seeing both Muslim and traditional European accounts

of their own history as teleological and springing from their respective

cultures, he argues for a thoughtful and open-minded approach to the

writing of an intercultural history that explores much more fully the

role of the Muslim East as a contributor to the ‘modern’ European mind;

and at the same time acknowledges the shared, inescapable and potentially

creative legacy of common imperial histories for today’s Europe.