The symbolic power of public displays of Islamic treasures - lustrous ceramics, illuminated manuscripts, embroidered silks, carved ivories, fine carpets and intricate scientific instruments - is a powerful tool that has long been used by caliphs and sultans and more recently by art historians and museum curators alike.
In 801, when the Abbasid caliph Harun Al Rashid sent envoys from his imperial capital in Baghdad to the recently crowned Holy Roman Emperor, Charlemagne, his embassy was accompanied by a series of lavish gifts.
As well as a chess set, a carved horn of ivory, a golden tray and ewer, bolts of fine cloth, perfumes and a large ceremonial tent, the Royal Frankish Annals record that the caliph, who would later become a fabled character in One Thousand and One Nights, also sent Charlemagne a fabulous mechanical clock and an Asian elephant called Abul Abbas.
More than 100 years later, the Fatimid caliphs paraded their royal treasury publicly through the streets of Cairo as a means of not only securing their dynastic legitimacy, but also of establishing their capital as the foremost creative and political metropolis of the 10th-century Islamic world.
Five centuries after that, the exchange of lavish gifts played a role in the negotiations that led to an unprecedented alliance between King François I of France and Ottoman Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent and this belief in the persuasive power of Islamic objects is something that continues even to the present day.
The American doyen of Islamic art history, Richard Ettinghausen, who in 1975 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York curated the largest permanent exhibition of Islamic art that had ever been seen in the United States, described what he saw as the unique ambassadorial potential of ‘Muslim art’ at a 1951 symposium in Princeton on the meeting of the East and the West.
“Muslim art can also have a special significance for the Muslim world of today,” he wrote at the time. “Since this is its one cultural achievement widely accepted and admired by the West, a rededication to it can compensate the East to a certain degree for its scientific and technological retardation, something which neither the oilfields nor strategic location can achieve.
“Be that as it may, there has been and still is no better ambassador of goodwill than art. If these considerations are more widely understood, Muslim art and its study will have an important role to play in the future.”
Ettinghausen’s vocabulary may sound jarring to contemporary ears, but almost exactly 60 years later his basic premise continues to inform the thinking of his successors at the Met.
After a decade-long renovation programme, the museum’s new Islamic galleries were finally reopened in November 2011 as the rather unwieldy-sounding but geographically correct Galleries for the Art of the Arab Lands, Turkey, Iran, Central Asia and Later South Asia.
The popularity of this new suite of 15 galleries was unprecedented; in their first 14 months they attracted an average of 2,550 visitors a day and in January 2013, the collection attracted its millionth visitor. To celebrate the milestone, they were presented with a catalogue of the collections by Sheila Canby, the Patti Cadby Birch curator in charge of the Met’s department of Islamic art. Canby, one of the world’s foremost experts on Islamic arts, will be speaking at a panel discussion entitled Re-thinking Islamic Art in the New Museums during Abu Dhabi Art next Saturday.
In a recent interview with Bilal Qureshi, a journalist and producer with the US broadcaster NPR, Canby said: “After things like 9/11, after things like the destruction of ancient sites in Northern Iraq and Syria, museums serve as a place where people can come to Islam through material culture, rather than having to rely on what they are told.” In the rarefied world of Islamic art and museums, Canby’s views are far from unique, and major museums are realising the cultural and commercial value of giving their Islamic collections due prominence.
“Never before has there been such an urgent need for the great contribution of the Islamic art to world culture to be seen, appreciated and understood in the West,” explained the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, home to one of the UK’s most extensive collections of Islamic ceramics in a pre-renovation (and now outdated) brochure. In March, as a part of the British Museum’s announcement of a major new gallery dedicated to the Islamic world, the gallery’s Malaysian sponsor, Syed Mokhtar Albukhary, was similarly clear about the motives behind his funding of the museum’s latest project.
“What is happening in the world, demolishing all the Islamic heritage, non-Islamic antiquities, is a bad image,” said Albukhary, who described the new gallery as an opportunity to use Islamic art to offset the negative public images of Islam that now circulate, he believes, as a result of religious extremism.
“The British Museum ... has been building this collection – without them we would not have any history,” he added.
Venetia Porter, lead curator on the project, told reporters assembled at the launch that the new gallery was particularly important in the context of ISIL’s recent destruction of artefacts at historic sites such as Nimrud in Iraq.
“These are our shared histories. What’s been destroyed in Iraq belongs to all of us,” she said. “This new gallery we hope will enable people to look at the cultures of Islam from Spain to China in a deep and different way. The activities of Islamic State are utterly deplorable but cannot be attributed in a generalised way to people of Muslim faith. We hope that this gallery, placed right at the heart of the museum, will demonstrate how all our cultures interconnect.”
That notion of interconnectedness is just one of the topics that is likely to be discussed next weekend during Re-thinking Islamic Art in the New Museums. Part of the Louvre Abu Dhabi Talking Art Series, the Met’s Canby will be joined on stage by Ahmed Al Shoky, general director of the Museum of Islamic Art in Cairo, which was devastated in 2014 by a terrorist bomb; Yannick Lintz, director of the department of Islamic arts at the Musée du Louvre in Paris; and Souraya Noujaim, the curator of Islamic art at Agence France Muséums, one of the bodies involved with the development of the new Louvre Abu Dhabi.
For Lintz, who took charge of the Louvre collection only after the museum’s newest department was opened in 2012, rethinking the institution’s Islamic collection is a constant and urgent challenge in the current political environment.
“In another, perhaps more neutral international context, maybe there would be a different approach to Islamic art that was more classical in terms of art history, [but] I feel responsible for the vision and transmission of the knowledge that we can have about this culture and religion,” she says. “The Near East and the problems of Syria and Iraq are all very present in the mind, so I think this has changed the vision and the position of this department.
“I think the context is really political and the project was political from the very beginning because it was the idea of the president, Jacques Chirac,” the curator explains.
Part of the responsibility felt by Lintz stems from the fact that Chirac decided to house Islamic art inside the Louvre, at the heart of an institution that many consider as a sort of temple to French culture, and not in an external museum, as is the case with Japanese and Chinese art.
The curator’s response has been to try to create a space in the heart of the museum where Islamic cultures can be understood as an integral part of the classical French tradition, a notion of European culture that is defined by the other departments within the Louvre.
“The Islamic world was not isolated from the Christian world and so, as soon we can in each situation, my challenge is to show and explain how Islamic art is part of that culture and how it is connected to the West.”
Both Lintz and Noujaim, her former colleague, insist that Louvre Abu Dhabi will attempt to adopt a perspective that is non-western, universal and eschews the very notion of traditional museum collections, placing the new museum in a very different intellectual space.
“For us the context is totally different,” insists Noujaim, an expert in Arabic epigraphy and former chair of Islamic art at the École du Louvre.
“We are not a museum of Islamic art, we are exhibiting Islamic art within a global vision and with a global approach that will address the relations, the common ground and the differences between Europe and Asia.
“We are not promoting one civilisation in comparison with another – we are studying the development of art history with the cultural and social aspects included in the most balanced and objective way that we can.”
While Noujaim is convinced that the Louvre Abu Dhabi’s approach will result in the opening of a new, universal chapter in the annals of art history, her focus, in comparison to Lintz, is avowedly aesthetic. The word politics does not appear in her curatorial vocabulary.
“In the West, Islamic objects have always been considered as arts décoratifs, but we are now starting to see through the object to its meaning, to the imagination of the artist or the craftsman, to the meaning and symbolism of motifs that have been exchanged and have travelled through countries to gain a new identity,” she explains.
“We now have the tools now, which was not always easy in the past, to place the objects in multiple contexts, but I think we have a new approach that is very emotional and aesthetic and this is something we really want to develop.
“I think we will open a new way of approaching the arts of this part of the world.”
If the debates surrounding the display of Islamic art sound like an issue for museum insiders, their impact extends far beyond the Louvre family.
As well as being an associate professor in the history of ideas at Gothenburg University and curator of contemporary global issues at the city’s Museum of World Culture, Klas Grinell is the manager of a three-year research project, Museological Framings of Islam in Europe, that is being funded by the Swedish government.
The Swede’s aim is to investigate the rhetoric used by international institutions, to inform the way museums address faith and material culture more generally and to connect discussions about Islamic art with broader discussions about the public role of religion and museums.
“We enjoy beautiful objects and we like Renaissance painting, but we don’t think that by looking at Italian Renaissance paintings that we will understand the reasons why Silvio Berlusconi acts as he does or why they constantly change governments in Italy and you could say the same for Islamic art,” he explains.
“I’m not sure if those who say they are afraid that Muslims will ruin contemporary Europe will change their minds if they see that Muslims in Iraq made fantastic pottery in the 10th century, and I’m not convinced by the rhetoric that if we display Islam we have acknowledged Islam and we will do something that is positive for Muslims.
“As an empirical researcher that is the question that I think needs to be investigated.”
While the phrasing of Grinell’s scepticism may sound glib, it stems from existing research about the way audiences experience museums and from considered analysis of the objects they contain.
“With all of these new galleries and museums in Oxford, London with the Louvre and with Qatar, many of which have been funded by money from the Middle East, there is talk on a rhetorical level of the dialogue between civilisations and this may be addressed in labels and so on, but on the level of display, the messages are not that visible to the untrained eye,” Grinell says.
“The V&A [in London] has made some interesting surveys about how their galleries are received, and they found that people spend approximately 2 minutes in their Islamic gallery, which means that the subtleties of the labels and the texts are not something that the visitor sees.”
The issue is important to Grinell because, even though museum displays may not have the power to change people’s perceptions of Islam, they can reinforce prejudices in ways that are subtle and pervasive.
“If we say that ‘Look, Islam is a beautiful tradition with wonderful objects and fine craftsmanship’ using examples that are 1,000 years old, then that plays into the same logic that says Islam is not constituted in a time or place in the way that other traditions are,” he says.
“And so the risk is that if we display medieval things and try to say that this has something to do with contemporary issues, we strengthen the impression that Islam is an unchanging tradition, and of course, that’s the very point that is made by those who say that contemporary Muslims cannot become European.”
For Grinell it is important for curators to realise that in using objects to try to counter these arguments they often rely on the very same logic.
“From a more political perspective to think that [art] museums are places where these issues could be solved is, I think, a bit naive.”
Professor Wendy Shaw, an art historian at the Free University Berlin, believes that, in part, the current situation stems from a disconnect between the way Islamic art is explored in the public sphere and the histories of Islamic art that are written by historians working in the academy.
For Shaw, it’s a difference that is driven by the pressure that is placed on museums to represent Islam, a pressure that historians working outside of the museums sector often refuse to accept in part because they argue that Islam’s diversity means that it cannot be represented in this way.
“What I find problematic is the fact that Islamic art history is still exhibited according to models that were developed in the early twentieth century and if you go into an exhibition without knowing anything about Islam, you’ll know nothing more when you come out. You’ll see a bunch of pretty things but I don’t think you’ll know anything more about Islam or related experiences of culture,” she says.
“In the early 20th century the legacy of Islamic art history has two sources. One is from collecting and those collections, say at the Victoria & Albert Museum or the carpet collection at the Berlin museums, were decorative art collections that were exotic-looking and were used for the purpose of inspiring industry. There is very little interest in culture,” Shaw explains.
“The other way of looking at Islamic art, which was developed at the 1910 exhibition of Islamic art in Munich, was to see Islamic art as a jewel, as a series of beautiful objects.”
It’s an approach that Shaw, art historian whose research examines the relationship between Islamic art, museums, colonialism and modernity, still sees at work in the display of Islamic collections such as those at the Louvre and Qatar’s Museum of Islamic Art, Doha.
“The Museum of Islamic Art in Doha glorifies the object as an art object and the Louvre takes a similar strategy,” she says.
“One of the things I find very interesting is that the Louvre feels the need to cast things typologically by material and chronologically but what’s very interesting about that collection for me is what it says about the history of collecting.
“In a sense, the more I analyse them, these objects aren’t a history of Islamic art, they are history of the West and its desire for the ‘Other’ that expressed itself through collection.”
For Shaw, this realisation has important implications for the way Islamic art is displayed in museums. Rather than using collections to represent Islam as a faith or as a series of masterpieces, the historian believes that it would be more rewarding to use the collections to explore the culture of Islam as well as the way this was also experienced by non-Muslims who lived under what she describes as ‘Islamic hegemony’.
“Why do I say that?” she asks. “They may not have been Muslim, they may have been Christian or Jewish but people shared poetry and musical practices and the intellectual history that goes with these relates to religiosity. Religion doesn’t stop in the mosque or the synagogue. If you’re talking about a pre-secular society religion pervades very basic aspects of life so I feel like that distinction is problematic because it enhances the difference between religions.”
The impact of such a change would, Shaw argues, allow museums to move beyond the linear historic model that uses maps and dynasties to take the visitor on a journey that starts with birth of Islam and ends with the collapse of the Ottoman caliphate.
“We really need to re-think the historical model because I don’t think the viewer always want to know about the early history of Islam,” Shaw says. “You can find that on the Internet and I don’t think that people are interested in that linear history any more. I think museums really need to rethink what kind of knowledge it is that they must give.”
For Shaw, living and working in Germany, the answer to the type of knowledge museums should be inparting lies in the communities and the political situation that she sees around her.
“In Berlin right now there are two very large Muslim populations. One is an earlier immigrant population that is largely Turkish and the other is more recent and they are the refugees that are coming now. What are the ways in which they will learn about their displaced identity?” Shaw asks.
“If you leave this outside the realm of public discourse they will only get limited resources through which to learn and I think the museum can be a very positive way for people to engage with these communities.”
• The panel discussion, Re-Thinking Islamic Art in the New Museums, is being held next Saturday from 5pm at Manarat Al Saadiyat during Abu Dhabi Art. To register, visit abudhabiart.ae
Nick Leech is a features writer at The National.
