We explored the ways in which Muslim contributions to literature, arts, science, and architecture have influenced and become foundational to Western humanistic and scientific expressions. Our goal was to draw scholarly and public attention to the many ways in which Muslim and Western humanities co-exist in dialogue with one another.

The conference features two keynote lectures; the debut of a play based on a highly influential twelfth-century Arabic philosophical novel; a trip to the Minneapolis Institute of Arts; and sessions on Islamic literature, science, architecture, art history, and digital technologies.

These sessions looked closely at the concept of the humanities within Islamic contexts and the epistemologies at the heart of Muslim contributions to the arts and sciences. The conference also explored shared cultural spaces through the influence of Islamic architecture in the United States, art and aesthetics, and contemporary uses of digital technologies for humanistic and artistic purposes.

Following the conference, we held a workshop of faculty and community partners to develop a national program on Islamic humanities that similarly focuses on "shared" and "crossed" cultural space, building bridges between Muslims and non-Muslims both within the United States and in the broader global context.

"Bridging Cultures: Islam and the West," a 30-minute television program based on interviews with several Shared Cultural Spaces speakers, is available is available here.

This is an archival website for the Shared Cultural Spaces conference on Islam and the West in the Arts and Sciences, which took place in 2011.