Wed 06 May
|Parish Church
Diana Darke
Islamesque and Churchgoing: How Islamic Architecture and Muslim Craftsmen Shaped Europe’s Churches
Time & Location
06 May 2026, 20:00
Parish Church, High St, Chalfont Saint Giles HP8 4QF, UK
About the event
Diana Darke is a Middle East cultural historian with special focus on Syria. Diana will be talking about Islamesque and Churchgoing: How Islamic Architecture and Muslim Craftsmen Shaped Europe’s Churches.
She holds degrees in Arabic from Oxford University and in Islamic Art and Architecture from SOAS, London, and has spent over 40 years living and working in the region, for both government and commercial sectors. Among her publications are the bestsellers My House in Damascus: An Inside View of the Syrian Crisis and The Ottomans: A Cultural Legacy.
Her book Stealing from the Saracens: How Islamic Architecture shaped Europe received three Book of the Year 2020 awards. Its sister volume, Islamesque, has been selected by Daunts as a History and Current Affairs Book of the Year 2024. She is a Non-resident Scholar at Washington DC’s Middle East Institute, a respected Middle East think-tank.