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Annual Conference of the British Association for Islamic Studies
On Monday, 18 May 2026, members of the ERC Synergy Project MOSAIC participated in the Annual Conference of the British Association for Islamic Studies (BRAIS) in London, held at the Institute for the Study of Muslim Civilisations (the Aga Khan University) and The Institute for Ismaili Studies. The MOSAIC panel “Transmission of Knowledge and Classifications of the Sciences Across Islamicate Cultures,” which was organized by Ahmed Tahir Nur (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona) and chaired by Petra G. Schmidl (FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg), brought together contributions exploring the organization, classification, and transmission of knowledge across Islamicate intellectual traditions.
Godefroid de Callataÿ (UCLouvain) opened the session with a study of the Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ’s (10th century) classification of the sciences, highlighting its long-term diffusion and reception through the aid of visualizations produced by the project’s digital tool M-Classi. Laura Tribuzio (UCLouvain) followed with an analysis of the Mujmal al-ḥikma (13th century), an anonymous Persian translation of the Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ’s Rasāʾil, focusing on the identification of manuscripts that once belonged to the library of Bayezid II in early sixteenth-century Istanbul. Ahmed Tahir Nur (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona) concluded the panel by tracing the development of a fourfold classification of knowledge from its Aristotelian origins to its systematic deployment in Taşköprüzade’s Miftāḥ al-saʿāda (16th century).
The panel provided an important platform for the MOSAIC team to present key aspects of their research to a wide international audience. It also offered valuable opportunities to exchange ideas with scholars from a range of institutions across the United Kingdom and beyond. The lively discussions that followed the presentations reflected a strong interest in the questions and themes addressed by the project.
The conference also featured the announcement of the winners of the annual BRAIS Prize in the Study of Islam and the Muslim World. Razieh S. Mousavi, a MOSAIC postdoctoral researcher at FAU Erlangen–Nürnberg, was awarded the 2025 Prize for her dissertation, completed at Humboldt University of Berlin, entitled Al-Farghānī’s Elements of Astronomy (c. 860 CE): An Interplay of Meaning and Form at the Intersection of Astronomical and Medical Tradition.
