S6E7: Pointed Tips: Maghribi Script and the Arabic calligraphic tradition, with Umberto Bongianino

Join Umberto Bongianino as he walks us through one of the western Islamic world’s least appreciated artistic treasures: its calligraphy. For years, Maghribi calligraphy has been treated as amateurish, archaic, and unruly in contrast with the highly theorised conventions of Mashriqi calligraphy in the so-called centre of the Islamic world of Egypt, the Levant, and Anatolia. In this episode, Umberto challenges this view, emphasising the interaction of Maghribi calligraphy with multiple traditions specific to its geographical milieu.Maghribi calligraphy is traditionally written with a pointed tip (Ar. قلم مدبب) meaning that the line is always of equal thickness. It features distinctive curved letter forms, extended horizontals, and notation of certain Arabic letters below the main body.Umberto’s work on Maghribi calligraphy forms part of CallFront, a collaborative research project that attempts to draw attention to the calligraphic traditions of the “frontiers” of the Islamic world, amongst them Maghribi, but also sub-Saharan Africa, South East Asia, and China.Umberto Bongianino is Samir Shamma Associate Professor of Numismatics, Epigraphy, and Material Culture at the Khalili Research Centre, University of Oxford. His research focuses on Arabic epigraphy, palaeography, the aesthetic of inscribed objects, and the arts of the book in the western Islamic world. His recent monograph is titled The Manuscript Tradition of the Islamic West: Maghribī Round Scripts and the Andalusī Identity.This episode is part of our series Peripheries which seeks to push our understanding of the cultural heritage of the Islamic world away from the traditional centres that we associate with it. With a fantastic range of guests we will examine places and topics often considered peripheral to the Islamic world and understand why they are in fact of central importance to the region’s cultural heritage, from Armenia to England, from Ethiopia to West Africa.

In the city of Varamin, some 50km southwest of Tehran, lies the Shrine and Mausoleum of Emamzadeh Yahya, a site of pilgrimage and veneration for Shi’i Muslims.During the nineteenth century, all of the shrine’s luster tiles, including its mihrab, were stolen and then dispersed to museums worldwide.The focus of this podcast is the project, supported by The Barakat Trust, that has sought to reunite the disconnects that have long afflicted this site, its worshippers, and audience. The project is an online museological intervention in the form of a website that combines many aspects of the shrine, from its architectural features to ritual practices, from an urban history of the city to the stories of the shrine’s keepers and attendants.The website includes galleries that explores these aspects of the shrine through essays, films, digital interactives, and lectures. There is also a Checklist of materials in the exhibition.The website is a sizeable digital publication that is being completed as we speak and includes content in Persian, English, and French:https://khamseen-emamzadeh-yahya-varamin.hart.lsa.umich.edu/The leader of the project and guest on this month’s episode is Keelan Overton. She led a team of over 50 individuals who collaboratively contributed to the creation of this project that experimented with format, media, and technology to connect audiences in Iran and beyond to Emamzadeh Yahya and his shrine.Keelan Overton is an art historian trained at Williams College and UCLA (PhD 2011). Since 2015 she has been an independent scholar. Her first book project was the Iran-Deccan edited volume published by IUP in 2020. She then transitioned immediately into the Emamzadeh Yahya project, which she has directed and produced from her home office since 2021.This episode is part of our series Peripheries which seeks to push our understanding of the cultural heritage of the Islamic world away from the traditional centres that we associate with it. With a fantastic range of guests we will examine places and topics often considered peripheral to the Islamic world and understand why they are in fact of central importance to the region’s cultural heritage, from Armenia to England, from Ethiopia to West Africa.Reading List:Citation of the website/digital publication:The Emamzadeh Yahya at Varamin: An Online Exhibition of an Iranian Shrine, directed and edited by Keelan Overton. 33 Arches Productions. Host: Khamseen: Islamic Art History Online.Contributors and works mentioned in this podcast:Essay on Yahya b. Ali by Ahmad Khamehyar (Ritual gallery)Essay on yadegari by Nazanin Shahidi Marnani (People gallery)Essay on the shrine’s present social life by Maryam Rafeienezhad (People gallery)Essay on the shrine’s chronological history by Keelan Overton and Hossein Nakhaei (Building gallery)Films by Hamid Abhari: City Tour (Varamin gallery) and Site Tour (Building gallery)Oral history with Mohammad Amini on Moharram ceremonies (Varamin gallery)Catalog entries by Jabbar Rahmani (Checklist, no. 5, 48, 49)Catalog entries by Heshmat Kafili (Checklist, no. 14, 16, 21)Photo Timeline of the shrine’s physical evolution (Building gallery)Essay on the site’s 1980s preservation by Zahra KhademiEssay on the scientific analysis of the tomb’s luster tiles (now published, in the Luster gallery, by Trinitat Pradell, Judit Molera, Moujan Matin, and Keelan OvertonFilm on the Godard Archive of architectural photography with Alejandra Tafur Manrique and Martina Massullo (Museum gallery)Film on luster tiles in the Victoria and Albert Museum with Fuchsia Hart (Luster gallery)Film on luster tiles in the Museum of Islamic Art in Doha with Nicoletta Fazio (Museum gallery)Essay on the site’s 1980s preservation by Zahra Khademi (People gallery)

On the periphery of Alexandria in the surrounding countryside is the Lake Maryut region, a vast expanse of flat agricultural land that used to be Lake Maryut, now just 18% of its earlier size. The lake separated the city of Alexandria from the rest of the country further south. Yet despite the shrinking of the lake and integration of the rural hinterland with the city during the 20th century the countryside and the cultural heritage that it contains remains under appreciated in Alexandria, as well as in Cairo and further afield. In this episode, Ismael Awad discusses his recent Barakat funded project that surveyed, documented, and photographed the shrines of the Lake Mayrut region and explains their importance to the cultural heritage of Egypt generally and Alexandria specifically.Ismael Awad is a geographer, cartographer, and GIS research specialist at the Centre d’Études Alexandrines. He completed his PhD in 2020 at Université Lyon 2 where his thesis was titled “The Western Margin of the Nile Delta: Geographical Information Systems on the Antique Settlements of the Maryut Region”. This episode is part of our series Peripheries which seeks to push our understanding of the cultural heritage of the Islamic world away from the traditional centres that we associate with it. With a fantastic range of guests we will examine places and topics often considered peripheral to the Islamic world and understand why they are in fact of central importance to the region’s cultural heritage, from Armenia to England, from Ethiopia to West Africa.

This month’s podcast takes us to the far south-west of the Islamic world, to the Inner Nigel Delta in Mali where stands the Great Mosque of Djenné in all its magnificence. Join Michelle Apotsos as she discusses the story of this vibrant place of worship built solely out of mud and wood at the centre of a town with deep historical links south to the Atlantic coast and north across the Sahara desert to the Maghreb. In the annual tradition of renovation and reconstruction, the Great Mosque offers a model of architectural renewal alongside an understanding of heritage not as a stagnant object needing to be frozen time but a living tradition.Michelle Apotsos is a Professor of Art and Architectural History at Williams College, specializing in architecture and Afro-Islamic creative production. Her current projects focus on the growth of large-scale congregational masajid on the continent and alternative contemporary religious spatial technologies and ecologies.This episode is part of our series Peripheries which seeks to push our understanding of the cultural heritage of the Islamic world away from the traditional centres that we associate with it. With a fantastic range of guests we will examine places and topics often considered peripheral to the Islamic world and understand why they are in fact of central importance to the region’s cultural heritage, from Armenia to England, from Ethiopia to West Africa.

This month’s podcast episode takes us through Uzbekistan along the route that The Barakat Trust took on our trip to the country in November 2025. We begin in Tashkent before moving to Samarkand and finishing in Bukhara, exploring a number of architectural sites, crafts and traditions along the way. In our discussion we ask how the richness of Uzbekistan’s cultural heritage came to be considered on the periphery of the Persianate world.Our guest is Fuchsia Hart is The Sarikhani Curator for the Iranian Collection at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. She has written for the publications like The Guardian and the Oxford Review of Books, and spoke or lectured at institutions like The Wallace Collection, SOAS, and the Royal Asiatic Society. In 2025, Fuchsia completed her DPhil in Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Oxford with a thesis exploring Fath ‘Ali Shah Qajar’s patronage of the major shrines of Iran and Iraq.This episode is part of our series Peripheries which seeks to push our understanding of the cultural heritage of the Islamic world away from the traditional centres that we associate with it. With a fantastic range of guests we will examine places and topics often considered peripheral to the Islamic world and understand why they are in fact of central importance to the region’s cultural heritage, from Armenia to England, from Ethiopia to West Africa.

This month’s podcast episode takes us to Ethiopia, specifically the rock-cut church of Wuqro Cherqos in Tigray where a tantalisingly cryptic piece of carved stone can tell us a whole story of interconnection up and down the Red Sea. This is a journey of merchants, artistic ideas, and political power in a place where you may not have expected it.Our guest is Mikael Muehlbauer, Lecturer in the Discipline Art History and Archaeology at Columbia University. He is a specialist in the architecture of Medieval Ethiopia and Egypt, with a broad interest in interfaith exchanges and historical memory. He received his PhD from Columbia University. He is the author of the 2023 book "Bastions of the Cross: Medieval Rock-Cut Cruciform Churches of Tigray, Ethiopia" as well as an upcoming book "Inventing late antiquity in Fatimid Egypt,". This episode is part of our series Peripheries which seeks to push our understanding of the cultural heritage of the Islamic world away from the traditional centres that we associate with it. With a fantastic range of guests we will examine places and topics often considered peripheral to the Islamic world and understand why they are in fact of central importance to the region’s cultural heritage, from Armenia to England, from Ethiopia to West Africa.

In this new podcast episode, the first in our series on Peripheries, we discuss the place of Armenian architects in the towns and cities of eastern Anatolia in the late Ottoman empire. Our guest is Alyson Wharton-Durgaryan, Honorary Senior Fellow at the University of Lincoln, where she has taught for ten years in the School of Humanities and Heritage. In 2026, she’ll take up a new two-year fellowship at the University of Oxford. Her research looks at the roles of Armenian architects hailing from the Ottoman Empire, who were key to formulating the image of the modern state in the 19th and early 20th centuries.Peripheries seeks to push our understanding of the cultural heritage of the Islamic world away from the traditional centres that we associate with it. With a fantastic range of guests we will examine places and topics often considered peripheral to the Islamic world and understand why they are in fact of central importance to the region’s cultural heritage, from Armenia to England, from Ethiopia to West Africa.

Join us in this episode as we discuss the exciting finds from the Bedale hoard in North Yorkshire, England. In 2012 a group of amateur metal detectors discovered a hoard of late 9th century Viking silver in Bedale. The items found were ingots, necklaces, arm-bands, and a sword pommel. What makes this particular collection peculiar is that when the silver used to make the items was scientifically analysed it was discovered that it was from the Islamic world. Listen to the podcast to discover how this silver travelled so far and ended up in northern England.Dr. Jane Kershaw is Gad Rausing Associate Professor of Viking Age Archaeology at the University of Oxford.

Join curator Carine Juvin as she discusses the fascinating topic of her new exhibition at the Louvre: The Mamluks. Listen as she goes beyond the usual discussion of war and plunder, and dives into the rich world of Mamluk culture and society: from how the sovereignty of slave-soldiers changed monumental architecture, to what that world was like for women, and from how the Mamluks affected European art, to how Mongol nobles learnt to thrive in Cairo.

Join Juan De Lara as he takes us on a tour through the colourful history of Arabia's Qaryat al Faw; a fascinating gem in the desert rich with treasure-laden tombs, frescoes of Egyptian goddesses, statues of Greek demigods, and marvellous inscriptions. Listen in as Juan discusses the wonders of the Incense Routes, the brilliance of the famed Nabataeans, and the importance of this site for understanding - and appreciating - the dawn of Islamic art.