Oxford and London April 22-28

At the end of April I traveled to the UK to attend a conference at Oxford University. There had been considerable uncertainty about whether I would be able to travel or whether the conference would have to be rescheduled due to the disruptions in airline travel caused by the eruption of the volcano in Iceland. But as it happened I was able to fly as scheduled on the morning of Thursday April 22 on the first BMI flight from Amman to Heathrow since the start of the Iceland volcano problem. The flight was uneventful and there were even a few empty seats on the plane.

I arrived in Heathrow in the early afternoon and spent that night in a hotel near the airport. The next morning, Friday April 23, I took a bus to Oxford and got settled into my room in Keble College.

Keble College. My room was towards the left.

That afternoon I went to the Ashmolean Museum and later met Nisha Keshwani, currently a graduate student in cultural anthropology at Oxford University. She had been a student at the Henry Martyn Institute in Hyderabad during the 2006-2007 academic year. That was just after I had left, so I had not met her before. That evening I met the conference participants in a local pub.

Nisha Keshwani and me

Saturday April 24 was the one-day conference on religious conversion in Late Antiquity, sponsored by the Oxford Centre for Late Antiquity. I gave my presentation about “A Christian City with a Major Muslim Shrine: Jerusalem in the Umayyad Period”. After the conference we all went to a Lebanese restaurant for dinner.

The following day, Sunday April 25, I went to the Natural History and Pitt Rivers Museums in the morning and then met Konstantin Klein, a graduate student at Oxford who is studying Jerusalem in the Fifth Century; I had first met him in 2007 when he was a student at the University of Bamberg. Later that afternoon David Singh picked me up and took me to his home in a neighboring town, where I met his wife and daughter. David, who is now employed at the Oxford Centre for Mission Studies, was a former faculty member at the Henry Martyn Institute.

David Singh and his wife

On the morning of Monday, April 26 I took a bus from Oxford to London and checked into a hotel near Paddington Station. In the afternoon, I went to the Science Museum, the Natural History Museum and the Victoria and Albert Museum, all in just over three hours. That was my most spectacular achievement in museum visiting since 2001, when I managed to see five museums in Munich within three hours. In the evening I met Rebecca Foote for dinner at an Indian restaurant near Euston Square. Rebecca has been a member of the Humayma excavations over the years, focusing her attention on the Abbasid family palace, and she is currently in London working to produce some of the volumes of the Khalili collection of Islamic art.

The next day, Tuesday April 27, I met Dino Politis, of Lot’s Cave excavation fame, at the British Museum; I had last been there in the mid-1990s. He showed me around the museum, before we went to the office of the Palestine Exploration Fund, where I browsed in the library for a while. That afternoon I went to the Institute of Ismaili Studies, near the University of London, to meet some Indian Ismaili students from the ITREB Centre in Mumbai who had been students of mine in a three-week program in 2005 at the Henry Martyn Institute. After attending a lecture at the Institute, I met four of the students, who are currently in graduate programs at the Institute and the University of London Institute of Education.

The Ismaili students and me

On Wednesday April 28, in the morning I walked around Hyde Park and St. James Park, before heading to Heathrow for my afternoon flight back to Amman. During my stay in the UK, most of the days had beautiful sunny weather, continuing my track record of only rarely experiencing rain during my stays in the UK.

Flowers in St James Park