In early March 2013, Laudan Nooshin travelled to Amsterdam to take part in a conference entitled ‘Islam and Popular Arts’. The conference was funded by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) and convened by Karin van Nieuwkerk (Radboud University, Nijmegen) whose best known books are: A Trade like Any Other: Female Singers and Dancers in Egypt (1995) and Muslim Rap, Halal Soaps, and Revolutionary Theater: Artistic Developments in the Muslim World (2011).

The conference brought together invited scholars working on music, theatre, dance and visual arts in a range of Islamic countries, from Ghana and Morocco in the west to Indonesia in the east. A number of papers examined the impact of the political events following the 2011 ‘Arab Spring’ on performing and visual arts, and many of the speakers discussed the emergence of new forms of Islamic artistic expression over recent decades. Laudan’s paper was entitled ‘Discourses of Religiosity in Post-1998 Iranian Popular Music’, and the other UK delegate was Professor Martin Stokes from King’s College London, talking about ‘Islam, Popular Culture and Aesthetics’.

The conference was held in a beautiful converted boathouse right on the canals.