A Shared Past For A Shared Future: European Muslims And History-Making
About this ebook
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.
About the author
Martin Rose has been the Director of the British Council in Canada since 2006, and is also
the Director of the British Council’s ‘Our Shared Europe’ project. He has an MA in
History and an M Phil in Modern Middle Eastern Studies, both from Oxford; and he has
had previous careers in academic publishing and international banking, during which he
travelled extensively and lived in the Middle East and Africa. He joined the British Council
in 1988 and has served in Baghdad, Rome, Brussels and Ottawa. He set up and ran the
British Council’s in-house think-tank, Counterpoint (2002-6). He can be contacted at
martin.rose@britishcouncil.
