About the keynote speaker: Raficq Abdulla, MA (Oxon.), MBE - Writer, Lawyer and Poet.
Raficq Abdulla can rightly be described as a modern day Renaissance man. He is a Visiting Fellow of the Faculty of Business and Law at Kingston University. He is also a writer, lecturer, public speaker, and broadcaster on topics ranging from art to poetry to Islamic law to Islam, identity, spirituality & the sacred.
Raficq has been an adviser on legal and governance matters to Boards ranging from corporate for profit organizations, charities and UK’s National Health Service. He sits on the Board of the Muslim Law (Shariah) Council in the UK as an English lawyer, and has advised the Muslim College in London and the Imams and Mosques Council.
In 1999, Raficq was awarded an MBE (Member of the British Empire) by the Queen for his interfaith work between Muslims, Jews and Christians. He has given talks on BBC World Service and has published books of poetry based on the Muslim mystics Rumi and Attar including Words of Paradise: Selected poems of Rumi and The Conference of the Birds: Selected Sufi Poetry of Farid ud-Din Attar, and his reflections on the sonnets of Shakespeare entitled Reflecting Mercury: Dreaming Shakespeare's Sonnets was published in 2016.
