MA Islamic Studies student Waleed shares his experience as a masters student and captain of the University Challenge team at Birmingham.
What makes Birmingham’s MA Islamic Studies programme distinctive is that it sits within a department of Theology and Religion. I really wanted to pursue a postgraduate degree that studies Islam in the context of theology, rather than in Middle East studies or languages, which is where most other Islamic Studies courses at UK universities are placed. I’d studied Philosophy and Theology as an undergraduate at Oxford, so I’d heard about the focus that Islamic Studies at Birmingham places on contemporary research and modern debates. The course has certainly lived up to its reputation. The teaching is first-rate and I’ve taken fascinating modules on how to approach the study of Islam in the present day, on classical Islamic philosophy and modern Islamic psychology, and on law and ethics in current Christian and Muslim thought.
I am a long-time fan of University Challenge, so when I heard that the Students’ Union (known at Birmingham as the Guild of Students) was going to hold try-outs for the University Challenge team, of course I signed up. I was delighted to come top of the try-outs and to be appointed captain of the team. My teammates were all undergraduates from a range of degree subjects (medicine, chemical engineering, economics, and English and film) and the most rewarding aspect of the whole experience has been getting to know other students who I probably wouldn’t have met otherwise. Having been selected as the Birmingham team, we sent in an application on behalf of Birmingham and were asked to come to an audition held by the company that produces University Challenge. The audition went well and we were thrilled to be invited onto the show.
While Birmingham is one of the largest universities in the country and is ranked as one of the top 100 universities in the world, its recent performance on University Challenge does not match its profile. Birmingham hadn’t appeared on the show since 2023 and hadn’t won a match since 2021. We knew we had our work cut out for us, especially as we’d probably come up against institutions with a much stronger record on the show. This meant training would be crucial. Once we were invited onto the show, we met up twice a week in the university’s European Research Institute, which has a film studio, to practice as a team. Our reserve member Ben, who’d found out about the studio and booked the space, read our names out, while our friend Mikey acted as Amol Rajan and read out questions. Ben filmed some of the sessions and we reviewed the footage to see how we performed as a team and what we might look like on television. When the big day arrived and we sat down in the real studio to film our first-round match, we felt we’d prepared as well as we could’ve done.
Birmingham offers incredible opportunities for students, and I’ve tried to make the most of them. As well as University Challenge, I’ve taken a course on reading Modern Standard Arabic, participated in a campus fun run, and delivered a paper at a postgraduate conference. As for my academic work, the workload on the Islamic Studies MA is demanding, but the support available to students is excellent. The main library has access to an extensive collection of material related to Islamic Studies and is very quick at arranging inter-library loans of books and articles it doesn’t hold. I’ve made a lot of use of the resources at the Cadbury Research Library, which holds the university’s special collections, including one of the world’s earliest surviving fragments of the Qur’an.
I’ll return to Oxford later this year to pursue further postgraduate study of Islam, and I feel that studying for the MA Islamic Studies at Birmingham has given me some invaluable skills as a scholar. There’s a particular ‘Birmingham’ way to studying religion, which prizes an interdisciplinary approach, interfaith dialogue and keeping up to date with recent research. This distinctive way of studying religion, which produced John Hick’s theories of religious pluralism, R. S. Sugirtharajah’s postcolonial readings of the Bible and the journal of Islam and Christian-Muslim Relations, is alive and well. I hope that having been trained in this method will help prepare me for my future as a student of Islam.
MA Islamic Studies
MA Islamic Studies student at the University of Birmingham.
