Research projects

AlterUmma was a five-year interdisciplinary project investigating the transformation of Shia Islam in the Middle East and Europe since the 1950s. It used research in key archives, intellectual and oral history, ethnographic research and cultural studies approaches to examine the formation of modern Shia communal identities and the role Shia clerical authorities and their transnational networks have played in religio-political mobilisation. The project focused on Iran, Iraq and significant but unexplored diasporic links to Syria, Kuwait, Lebanon, Turkey and Britain. The project produced foundational scholarship on transnational clerical authority, clergy - state relations and ritual practices of Shia Muslims in Europe and the Middle East - and generated comparative work on Shia Islam beyond its Middle Eastern centres.

Karbala in London investigated the religious and political networks operating between Britain and the Middle East within contemporary Shia Islam. The project capitalised on London's standing — particularly the Borough of Brent — as a global hub of transnational Shia Islam since the 1980s, where Iraqi clerical leaders established European headquarters and where Shia Muslim communities of various backgrounds perform Ashura commemorations on a massive scale. Through ethnographic fieldwork in mosques, husseiniyas and ritual gatherings, the project mapped how diaspora ritual practice, clerical authority and political contestation flow across borders, and how London's Shia Muslim public sphere both shapes and is shaped by Karbala, Najaf and Qom.

This collaborative study traced the Muslim presence in Ireland from its earliest recorded resident in Cork (1784) through the enormous growth of the 1990s 'Celtic Tiger' decades. The project mapped Ireland's mosque associations and Islamic institutions across Twelver Shia, Ismaili, Ahmadi, Barelvi, Salafi and ethno-national communities — illustrating the ethno-cultural and sectarian diversification of Islamic organisation in a small, peripheral European context. Published by Edinburgh University Press in 2015, the projects book is the standard reference on the field and foregrounds how rapid demographic change and an absence of older institutional infrastructure has shaped a distinctively Irish Muslim public life.