I remember visiting the Jameel Gallery in London’s Victoria and Albert Museum in 2003 as a 17 year old, soon after the start of the US and UK’s invasion of Iraq. My young mind was puzzled as to how Iraq, one of the oldest continuous civilisations in human history could be bombed while Americans and Europeans wandered around marble-floored museums gazing at its cultural artifacts, fascinated by its clearly rich history.
Over time, I came to understand that the answer lies in the very institution of the museum itself, a symbol of imperial victory to this day.
When the British Museum opened in 1753, it had a collection of 71,000 items. Over the next 250 years, that collection expanded rapidly thanks to colonisation — growing so large that the museum opened several sub-branches. Today the museum’s collection totals 8 million objects, amongst them some of the most famous (and most disputed) objects, from the Elgin Marbles of Greece to the Rosetta Stone of Egypt.
Forty years later in 1793, the Louvre opened in Paris with 537 paintings, the majority of which were looted from the bourgeoisie and the church as part of the First French Revolution. It then expanded rapidly with the military campaigns of Napoleon Bonaparte. As other museums opened across Europe under the global expansion of colonialism, the precedent and means of obtaining art and objects had been firmly set: take what you can, by any means necessary.
Thus, the European institution of the museum was born. The museum, as well as national libraries in the continent’s capitals, were quickly filled with stolen artefacts from archaeological excavations, places of historical or religious significance, and rare and invaluable manuscripts taken from all over the world. It was not just a place to collect and exhibit objects; it was demonstrable evidence of power and reach. The Louvre, as far back as 1791, declared itself to be “a place for bringing together monuments of all the sciences and arts.”
The collections of objects taken from the east served a few purposes: for their European audience, they demonstrated the mysteriousness and strangeness of the ‘dark and uncivilised natives’ found in distant lands. This ‘otherness’ created from projecting ‘natives’ as subhuman, both justified imperial ambitions and provided monetary gains. Many of the private collectors would take items, including tribal masks, bones, books or artefacts back to Europe where they would be sold to the highest bidder.
Whereas books written in Arabic, Persian or Turkish, especially those relating to Islam, might have been studied for polemic purposes, many sat gathering dust in libraries as few in Europe could translate the actual content.
So, what purpose does the museum serve today?
The British Museum claims on its website that it tells the “story of human culture from its beginning to present.” An important question looms large in this context: who made the Europeans the custodians and narrators of the global human experience? There is growing awareness in recent years around the problem of weak, or in some cases, no provenance available for art and objects that sit in Western museums.
A growing number of activists, some who trace their roots to once colonised lands, have started campaigns to seek the return of looted artefacts, and in some cases these demands are at state level.
Who bestowed the privilege of not only possessing stolen objects and artefacts, but presenting them so openly, all the while knowing their ownership in many cases is disputed, likely obtained in illegal or unethical ways?
In recent news Belgium has agreed to return an ancient mask belonging to the Suku people of Congo, but labelled it as an ‘indefinite loan’, not a return.
Islamic Art in European Museums
Today the Louvre is the most visited museum in the world, known in particular for the Mona Lisa and the Venus de Milo. But if one can look beyond the large crowds in these galleries, they will come across one of the Louvre’s newest areas, ‘The Department of Islamic Art’, founded in 2003, which the Louvre claims is the world’s largest collection of Islamic art alongside that of the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art. Other notable Islamic art collections can be found at the V&A and the British Library in London, as well as in the Pergamon Museum in Berlin. Many of these collections have been rebranded as ‘Islamic’ whereas they would previously have been included among general collections of the ‘oriental’ world.
These modern collections and their attempts to consolidate over a thousand years of culture and art in a few rooms, offer an insight into how the European still views Islam and the wider ‘Muslim World’.
When Napoleon entered Egypt in 1798 in an attempt to defend French trade, he took with him armies of scholars, scientists, historians and artists. His goal was to study, systematically, the culture and mind of these ‘orientals’. The reports and papers that were produced by the French were quickly translated into other European languages, and thus the modern European field of Orientalism was born.
These studies attempted to understand not only the current natives that lived in these lands, but the traces left behind by their ‘ancestors’. The conclusions were, for the most part, the same: these dark desert nomads and poverty-stricken dwellers found in the mazes of old ancient cities were not the same people that once ruled the known world and led the fields of science and astronomy. Their civilisation had declined, and as such, they were to be treated accordingly. While classical Islamic manuscripts and antique objects found in mosques and madrassas were to be treasured and collected, these people could be discarded.
Today visitors who attend ‘Islamic Art’ galleries in European museums and assume some sort of cultural and historical connection to the objects, will be mistaken, even embarrassed, if they assume that the institutions that house these artefacts make a direct connection between them and the objects on display. The latter represent an era of magnificent prosperity and creativity, the former only war, conflict and extreme poverty. One delivered the European renaissance, the other nothing but a burden on European generosity.
Muslims and the wider world of the orient have always struggled with fair and accurate representation in the Western world. If the native was once seen through the lens of the orientalist gaze, has that now changed? Has art played a role in this change?
Let’s examine some recent examples of exhibitions funded and managed by organisations from the east that have attempted to ‘correct’ old historical misunderstandings of the Muslim world.
In 2009, the Victoria and Albert Museum partnered with Art Jameel, a private Saudi philanthropy group run by the Jameel family to launch The Jameel Prize competition. The 2021 competition was the group’s sixth successful iteration, and it awarded first prize to a Saudi artist, Ajlan Gharem. Gharem was recognised for his highly original piece which he titled ‘Paradise Has Many Gates’. Gharem’s work toured the world, but for some reason the description of the work displayed alongside it, differed in depending on the country, and it seems even the artist himself isn’t sure what his work represents.
According to the artist the title of the piece is a “reference to the eight gates to Heaven described in the Qur’an. The artwork replicates the design of a traditional mosque, but is made of the cage-like chicken wire used for border fences and detention centres.”
While the Qur’an does not explicitly name or number the gates, Gharem’s understanding is in line with the general consensus within Islamic tradition. Each gate is reserved for a believer depending on his or her level of piety. However, one must ask where does the “cage-like chicken wire” fit into these gates that lead one to paradise?
In London’s V&A Gharem’s piece was also accompanied by a few other descriptions. One read “The mosque’s material provokes anxiety, but it also renders its interior visible and open to the elements. The installation serves to demystify Islamic prayer for non-Muslims, tackling the fear of the other at the heart of Islamophobia…”
Another read:
“…mosques are at once free public spaces and (in Islamic societies) places where attendance is mandatory – even if only for social reasons. This tension is evident in the material for Paradise Has Many Gates. The chicken wire connects the installation to an architecture of control and detention, but the mosque also shares the call to prayer five times a day, welcoming Muslims and non-Muslims alike.”
Is the artist attempting to explain the suffocating social-religious norms of some Muslim socities that force people into mosques? Or is he trying to “demystify” Islam by “tackling the fear…at the heart of Islamphopiha?” If paradise has many gates, what do these gates look like and what do they lead to? Is paradise a cage? And are the adherents to this faith prisoners? Are mosques detention centres?
It is very possible Gharem had meant to convey more than one message with his piece and his message was either truncated, mistranslated or just plainly misrepresented. According to local artists in Saudi Arabia, when Gharem first exhibited his Paradise Has Many Gates piece, the description, which was originally written in 2015, was completely different.
With rising rates of Islamaphobia in the UK and Europe, one would hope that careful attention is paid to prevent such misunderstandings, as well as the accentuation of old stereotypes of Islam and its adherents that portray them as intolerant and worthy of suspicion.
In early 2020, the British Museum held an exhibition entitled Inspired by the east, how the Islamic world influenced western art. It would have been better labelled ‘Orientalist art, how the West viewed the east.’
The exhibition was anything but an exploration of cultural and artistic interactions between two willing parties. Rather, it was an audacious display and celebration of the European orientalist imagination. The works of some of the most famous orientalist artists in Europe from Jean-Leon Gerome, Antoni Fabres, Ludwig Deutsch to Frederick Arthur Bridgman were on display for all to marvel at.
It seems the British Museum had not recognised the problem with exhibiting art, which for centuries reinforced Orientalism. Instead of tackling old misconceptions, the exhibition merely celebrated Europe’s own past and current misunderstandings. Technically though, the exhibition was entitled correctly; the orient absolutely influenced Western art, not through a rich cultural exchange of ideas over centuries that crossed multiple borders, but through merely existing in the Western artist’s mind as something that could be moulded as he saw fit.
You would be forgiven for thinking that perhaps the use of orientalist art was meant to be a learning and educational experience. That, though problematic, can, if narrated carefully, re-educate and correct misunderstandings. But this was not the case. There was no commentary on the social and cultural damage that resulted from the reductionist, and often incorrect imaginations that were born the minds of these artists and realised on their canvas’.
Furthermore, the exhibition also failed to highlight that these celebrated orientalist paintings were almost always entirely conjured up in the minds of the artist and not painted through observation. Most orientalist artists, including the celebrated Jean-Leon Gerome never left his studio in Paris, but painted images of the east based entirely on racist and offensive stereotypes that were all the rage in travel literature, scientific journals and imperial propaganda outlets across Europe.
Was this really how the British Museum had intended to show Islam’s influence on Western art? And to make matters worse, the exhibition was conceived and developed in collaboration with the Islamic Arts Museum Malaysia. So if there was a question of credibility, this prestigious Malaysian institution had thrown their weight behind this project, and, for some odd reason, loaned a small collection of objects from the Islamic world that had absolutely no place in the exhibition.
Walking around this mishmash of outmoded ideas of Islam revived for a new generation proved frustrating. Where was the work of William Morris, Edward Burne-Jones and other artists from the arts and crafts movement? Where were illustrations and oil paintings from European artists that depicted rich textures, patterns, and Arabic calligraphy? What about gothic art and architecture? Glass lamps and carpets? Illuminated manuscripts and binding? What about silk and fabric embroidery? That collection, if exhibited, would have been at least a respectable start in honouring the influence Islam has had on Western art over the past millenia.
The exhibition ran for four months and received almost universal praise for its boldness to finally recognise Islam’s influence in the world of Western art. Unfortunately, even Muslim commentators and critics, missed the key issues with this exhibition, with some incorrectly identifying the period of Orientalist art as one where the “West saw Islam as less toxic, where its religious observance was something to long for.”
While most European museums dedicate a permanent space to exhibiting Islamic art today (the Louvre, Pergamon Museum, British Museum), it is not often that Muslims are given an opportunity to curate their own art and tell their own history. So it is unfortunate that with the resources available today to Muslims (Jameel Prize for example), and the floor space offered in museums, we are still stuck in old tropes. The Jameel Prize offers an unmatched opportunity to show original creative works of art inspired from within the Islamic tradition to a truly global audience, yet it since its inception, it has remained mostly about breaking ‘stereotypes’ whilst perpetuating the same stereotypes. It is rare to see artists go beyond the topic of the veil, political plight, war and religious persecution – topics that are without doubt elemental to most Muslims in the east, but only fragmentary to our wide and rich identity.
We must move forward confidently and unapologetically, pursuing a path for creativity that truly reflects the diversity of the wider Muslim Ummah, and allow ourselves the same freedom of expression that all others possess.
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