Projects
The Barakat Trust has funded a unique collection of research and projects over the last 30 years, which needs to be collated and archived. We are currently trying to fundraise to develop a digital collection and educational pack to make this research available to the public.
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A selection of the archaeology projects The Barakat Trust has funded and supported
A selection of the conversation projects The Barakat Trust has funded and supported
A selection of the education and engagement projects The Barakat Trust has funded and supported
A selection of the publication projects The Barakat Trust has funded and supported
A selection of the scholarships and research projects The Barakat Trust has funded and supported
Recent Projects
Ask The Expert: May al-Ibrashy
This month, May Al-Ibrashy is our selected expert. Dr. May Al-Ibrashy is a conservation architect who undertakes projects to preserve the architectural and cultural heritage of Egypt, especially Cairo. She focuses on working with local communities and ensuring that they are an integral part of any heritage preservation project. She [...]
Post-Conflict Urban Recovery of Historic Cities: A Capacity Building Workshop for Aleppo
Between January 13-18, 2020, the Urban Recovery Platform at the Beirut Urban Lab, the American University of Beirut, conducted a capacity building workshop funded by the Barakat Trust and the Ford Foundation. The workshop focused on post-conflict urban recovery and took the city of Aleppo in Syria as [...]
Documenting Historic Commercial Buildings in Bulaq – Cairo
As a first stage towards preserving a valuable neighbourhood of historic Cairo, a team of four art historians and two conservation architects will survey and assess the conservation state of historic commercial buildings in the area of Bulaq, Cairo, the city's historic river port. Bulaq is a largely overlooked quarter [...]
Creswell’s Cairo photographs: a project to enhance the Creswell photographic archive at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London
Grantee: Omniya Abdel Barr Date: 2016 The Barakat Trust funded the “Creswell’s Cairo Photographs” project with a senior visiting scholarship in 2016-2017. The project focused on enhancing the Creswell photographic archive of Cairo at the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A). The work is allowing this important photographic collection to be [...]
Religious and Biogeographic Identity in Qarakhanid Communities
Religious and Biogeographic Identity in Qarakhanid Communities Samarkand, Uzbekistan, 2016. Grantee: Elissa Bullion About the project: Elissa Bullion received funds from the Trust to conduct human data collection in Samarkand, Uzbekistan on medieval human osteological materials. The overarching aim of the project was to collect demographic and morphological skeletal data [...]
Reframing the Alhambra: Architecture, Poetry, Textiles and Court Ceremonial
The Nasrid builders of the Alhambra - the best-preserved medieval Muslim palatial city - were so exacting that some of their work could not be fully explained until the invention of fractal geometry. Their design principles have been obscured, however, by the loss of all archival material. This book resolves [...]
Magic and Divination in Malay Illustrated Manuscripts
This book offers an integrated study of the texts and images of illustrated Malay manuscripts on magic and divination from private and public collections in Malaysia, the UK and Indonesia. Containing some of the rare examples of Malay painting, these manuscripts provide direct evidence for the intercultural connections between the [...]
Perspectives on Early Islamic Art in Jerusalem
Lawrence Nees is the current H.Fletcher Brown Chair of Humanities holder at the University of Delaware. He received a grant from the Trust to help publish his book Perspectives on Early Islamic Art in Jerusalem which was released in 2016. His book is a very detailed yet also user friendly [...]
Abbasid painting of the Caliphal Palace of Samarra, Iraq
Fatma Dahmani is a Barakat Trust postdoctoral fellow. Her original project was focused solely on the Abbasid painting of the Caliphal Palace of Samarra and the extent to which it is an original piece. After having conducted further research into the broader city more things caught her eye. This included [...]
San Giovanni dei Lebbrosi
During 2014 to 2015 a team led by Mr. Agudo and Mr Mandala performed an excavation of San Giovanni dei Lebbrosi, one of the earliest Norman churches in Sicily. They were funded by the Barakat Trust (2015) and the Spanish Ministry of Culture (2014-2015) The church is in Palermo [...]
Crusader Landscapes in the Medieval Levant: The Archaeology and History of the Latin East
Crusader Landscapes in the Medieval Levant is a collection of scholarly essays addressing a number of aspects of the archaeology and history of settlement in the crusader states established in the Middle East during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, collectively known as the Latin East, and on their influence on the [...]
The Women Who Built the Ottoman World Female : Patronage and the Architectural Legacy of Gulnus Sultan
At the beginning of the eighteenth century, the Ottoman Empire remained the grandest and most powerful of Middle Eastern empires. One hitherto overlooked aspect of the Empire's remarkable cultural legacy was the role of powerful women - often the head of the harem, or wives or mothers of sultans. These [...]