Founded in the wake of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, the NYU Center for Dialogues soon emerged as a forum for important academic and policy discussions aimed at narrowing the divide between the Muslim world and the West. Like many of its sister institutions, and reflecting the dominant paradigm of the times, the Center’s work mainly addressed political issues and their intellectual underpinnings. Those years, under the Bush administration, saw a dangerous polarization of the United States’s relationship with the Muslim world. The Center, however, advocated for a relationship based on mutual respect and understanding, even as expressions like “the global war on terror” and “Islamofascism” held sway in public discourse. We hoped for better days ahead.
Better days finally arrived with the election of President Barack Obama, who has made it a goal of his administration to bridge the gap between the U.S. and the Muslim world. In this new climate of understanding, it was finally possible to seriously consider cultural exchange as a positive means of changing perceptions and bringing people together. Nevertheless, the Center never ceased to recognize that — despite the real power of culture — it is only one of many necessary steps towards overcoming tensions rooted in hard political grievances.
Circumstances often determine meaning, and the conference chronicled in this report is a case in point. Under different circumstances — despite the participation of eminent figures from academia, public policy, and the arts — it could have been an exercise in wishful thinking. Fortunately, circumstances were incredibly favorable; on the eve of the conference, President Obama delivered a speech in Cairo, Egypt, calling for a “new beginning” in the relationship between the U.S. and the Muslim world.
For the next two days, scholars, artists, writers, cultural practitioners, entrepreneurs, and policy makers from Egypt, India, Iran, Kuwait, Malaysia, Morocco, Pakistan, Tunisia, Turkey, and Uzbekistan met with their counterparts from the United States and Europe. With newfound passion borne out of the circumstances, but with no less clarity and brilliance, they debated what to do in the field of culture to bridge the gap between the two sides.
This report reflects their discussions and delivers their findings. I urge those in the new administration, but also in Congress, the academic community, philanthropic foundations, and the corporate sector — indeed, anyone who is serious about making Obama’s “new beginning” a reality — to take to heart the ideas articulated in this report, and particularly its conclusions and recommendations.
I have many people to thank, starting with Karen Hopkins, President of the Brooklyn Academy of Music, and Vishakha Desai, President of The Asia Society, my partners in the Muslim Voices festival of which this conference was a part. The conference would not have been possible without the financial support of the philanthropic community. My sincere thanks to The Doris Duke Foundation for Islamic Art, The Rockefeller Brothers Fund, The Rockefeller Foundation’s New York City Cultural Innovation Fund, The Robert Sterling Clark Foundation, The Ford Foundation, and The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for their support.
I would like to extend my deepest personal thanks to two foundation presidents in particular — Stephen Heintz of The Rockefeller Brothers Fund and Margaret Ayers of The Robert Sterling Clark Foundation. Stephen and Margaret stood by the Center with unfailing dedication for two years as we worked to make this conference happen and they recognized Obama’s election as a critical window of opportunity for a new cultural diplomacy towards the Muslim world.
Thank you, as well, to my colleagues on the Academic Advisory Committee: Jon W. Anderson, Chair, Anthropology Department, Catholic University; Margaret Ayers, President, The Robert Sterling Clark Foundation; Richard Bulliet, Professor of History, Columbia University; Rachel Cooper, Director for Cultural Programs and Performing Arts, The Asia Society; Dale Eickelman, Professor of Anthropology and Human Relations, Dartmouth College; Bruce Lawrence, Professor of Islamic Studies, Duke University; Samina Quraeshi, Harvard University Fellow; Philip Schuyler, Associate Professor of Ethnomusicology, University of Washington; Anthony Shay, Assistant Professor of Dance and Culture, Pomona College; and Eleanor Skimin, Humanities Manager, Brooklyn Academy of Music. The committee tirelessly explored the complexities of “Islamic Art” and “cultural exchanges/cultural diplomacy.” I hope that they, and indeed all of the conference participants,* will take pride in this report and their contribution to realizing Obama’s vision.
Last but not least, my thanks go to my Center colleagues — Andrea L. Stanton, Helena Zeweri, Sara Courtney Brown, and Evian Patterson — for their hard work and exemplary commitment to the task, as well to Shara Kay, our brilliant editor since the Center’s creation, and Reema Hijazi, who joined our team for a few weeks to work on the report.
Once again, it is our hope that the conference and its findings, described in this report, will help provide the road map for a new cultural engagement with the Muslim world. We look to you, the reader, to help make this a reality.
The conference, “Bridging the Divide between the United States and the Muslim World through Arts and Ideas: Possibilities and Limitations,” was convened by New York University’s Center for Dialogues in Brooklyn, New York, on June 6th and 7th, 2009, on the occasion of the city–wide initiative, Muslim Voices: Arts and Ideas, co–organized by The Asia Society, Brooklyn Academy of Music, and the Center. The conference brought together over 40 scholars, artists, government officials, and cultural practitioners from the U.S., Europe, and across the Muslim world to discuss how cultural exchange can contribute to establishing a relationship of respect and mutual understanding between the two sides.
Participants struggled initially with the classifications “Muslim artist” and “Muslim arts,” which fail to signify the great diversity within the Muslim world, and also collapse the religious and the cultural. Is a “Muslim artist” an artist who hails from a Muslim– majority country, or one who practices Islam as a religion, or one whose art is specifically created for a religious purpose or in response to a religious experience? Although many were uncomfortable with the terminology, others felt that it is impossible to separate art from the cultural context in which it is created and experienced. Yet others saw a true coherence within Islamic art, characterized, for instance, by the marriage of the visual and verbal, such as in calligraphy.
Participants widely accepted the notion that art is completed by the viewer, and its meaning differs depending on the context in which it is viewed. Muslim artists frequently create more traditional versions of their art for Western audiences than for audiences in their home countries. Indeed, many Western organizations that support Muslim arts focus on the preservation of historical art forms to the exclusion of the contemporary Muslim art scene, which is vibrant and deserves greater recognition.
One defining characteristic of contemporary Muslim art — and particularly the art of the Muslim Diaspora — is a fusion of Western and Islamic influences. Several case studies were surveyed, including a Kuwaiti comic book featuring superheroes named for the 99 attributes of God; a Canadian sitcom called “Little Mosque on the Prairie,” which challenges stereotypes while mining them for humor; adaptations of Shakespeare’s plays that comment on political repression in the Gulf states; and the growing trend of Iranian hip hop music, which fuses an American music style with the Persian love of poetry.
The political context of Muslim art was a frequent topic of discussion. Many participants complained that the West views art from the Muslim world through an overly political lens, valuing art according to the degree of persecution or oppression that the artist faces.
Nevertheless, censorship is a real problem for many of the Muslim artists who attended — not only the “hard” censorship of the state, but also the “soft” censorship of the artist’s own community. However, generalizations must be avoided. The official status as well as the social acceptability of various art forms differs greatly from country to country, society to society. Islam does not strictly prohibit any art form; rather, the religion has been co–opted by extremists who impose their own agendas.
The Internet was widely praised as a forum for artists and dialogue between cultures. The Internet is the only distribution method for some artists, such as Iranian hip hop artists, whose work is censored by the governments of their countries. For others, whose art is not banned but is seen as challenging the status quo, the challenge remains to draw audiences to what they “need to hear” as opposed to what they “want to hear.”
Organizers and participants alike were hopeful that, in the new spirit of understanding created by President Obama’s speech in Cairo, cultural expression could do more than ever to build bridges between civilizations. There was broad consensus on the following points:
It is important to recognize from the outset that the impact of cultural exchange is limited in the face of continuing hard political issues. It is impossible to escape or ignore the current political climate; the challenge is to work to defuse tensions within this climate.
Unlike the relationship between the U.S. and U.S.S.R. during the Cold War, the relationship between the West and the Muslim world today is not a “zero sum game.” Instead of promoting “superior” American culture, today’s cultural initiatives should approach the Muslim world with respect, empathy, and parity.
Establishing cultural relations on a parity basis must begin with listening. American individuals and institutions need to take a step back, listen, learn, and reflect before framing a new vision for engagement. As part of this process, cultural exchange must be understood as a “two–way street” during which each side identifies and tries to meet the needs of the other side — for example, by addressing the desire of people in the Muslim world to acquire technical skills from their interactions with people in the West.
Institutions and individuals engaging in cultural exchange initiatives need to recognize that building trust takes time. They should be prepared to invest in long–term relationships and programs and to see impact measured in incremental changes.
Cultural exchange initiatives need to find ways to engage local institutions — including ministries of culture, museums, galleries, and digital media spaces — in order to reach the widest possible audiences. Organizers also need to be sensitive to local context, such as the hierarchies of value, with respect to both historical and contemporary art forms, that exist in the Muslim world. These values may differ from one region to another.
Better communication and collaboration is needed among organizers of cultural exchange. This should begin with an inventory of past and current efforts, public and private, as well as development of a long–term strategy that can be pursued through individual or collective projects.
NYU Center for Dialogues Founder and Director Mustapha Tlili opened the conference by welcoming participants, observers, and guests to this important gathering of artists, producers, presenters, community leaders, scholars, and policy figures. Inspired by the rich variety of artistic production in the Muslim world today, he said, the conference will consider how the arts and cultural exchange might re–invigorate America’s relationship with the Muslim world. He asked the “Muslim Voices: Arts & Ideas” co–organizers to join him in making introductory remarks.
Karen Brooks Hopkins, President of the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM), recognized Senior Project Advisor Zeyba Rahman and thanked the BAM staff. She described their collaboration in organizing the Muslim Voices conference and festival as an extraordinary journey and a microcosm of the struggle for world peace in its engagement with issues of religion, economics, and politics as well as the arts. She closed by expressing her hope that the conference would look at cultural diplomacy as an undervalued tool for creative exchange between people.
The third Muslim Voices co–organizer, Vishakha Desai, President of The Asia Society, began by noting her happiness that The Asia Society had become part of this unprecedented endeavor. The ten days of the festival component of Muslim Voices — celebrating the rich and varied arts of the Muslim world through performances, talks, and exhibits — is a great feast for the eyes and ears. But this conference provides a critical intellectual component that takes the festival experience to another level, much like The Asia Society’s own work, which searches for the nexus of policy, intellectual, and emotional experiences to create global understanding. Desai thanked the conference participants, the Muslim Voices partners, and the New York Muslim communities for making this extraordinary event possible. Referencing President Obama’s June 4, 2009, speech in Cairo, she asked all to consider what needs to be done “at home” in the United States to extend a hand to the Muslim world.1 She concluded with the hope that the conference would be characterized by a robust discussion of these and other issues.
Tlili thanked Brooks Hopkins and Desai and began his opening statement, which described the conference as taking place at a particularly opportune moment. He had met Brooks Hopkins three years earlier at the NYU Center for Dialogues conference “Who Speaks for Islam? Who Speaks for the West?” held in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.2 Disheartened by the Danish cartoon crisis, which reached a peak shortly before the conference convened, Tlili and Brooks Hopkins wondered how the Brooklyn Academy of Music and the NYU Center for Dialogues could work together to harness the power of arts and culture to change American perceptions of Islam, Islamic civilization, and Muslims. (They later brought in Vishakha Desai and The Asia Society, which has been a key partner.)
At the time the initiative was born — when tensions were spilling over into violence and extremist rhetoric was being spouted on all sides — envisioning an initiative dedicated to introducing Muslim–world arts and culture to an American audience seemed unlikely to be popular with either side. The organizers could never have imagined that the conference would take place in the wake of President Obama’s historic speech calling for a “new beginning” in relations between the U.S. and the Muslim world. Indeed, President Obama’s speech provided the ideal opening statement for this conference, asking how arts and culture can contribute to establishing a new and healthier relationship between the U.S. and Muslims around the world — a relationship based on “mutual respect and mutual interests.”
Tlili thanked those in the American academic, cultural, and funder communities whose commitment, conviction, and support made this conference and the Muslim Voices festival possible. For too long, the American people have lacked opportunities to discover the rich cultural prism of Muslim expression and ideas, and have seen American differences with the Muslim world framed not in terms of diversity but as a permanent global conflict. Over the next ten days, more than 100 artists and performers will present music, film, theatre, visual art, and poetry from Afghanistan, Canada, Egypt, France, India, Indonesia, Iran, Kuwait, Malaysia, Morocco, Pakistan, Palestine, Senegal, Syria, Tunisia, Turkey, the United Kingdom, and the United States. The “Bridging the Divide” conference aims to open the hearts, minds, and imaginations of the American public, media, and policy community to the artistic riches of the Muslim world, and encourage them to see Muslims in their own communities and around the world not as threatening strangers, but as fellow citizens who are the inheritors of one of the greatest civilizations in history.
The power of culture is the power to transform perceptions. But recognizing that the power of culture has its limits is a crucial precursor to recognizing its potential. The sufferings of Palestinians in Gaza and camps around the region, the fear of Afghans for whom the sky has become the source of lethal bombs, the pain of three million displaced Pakistanis, the exhaustion of Iraqis longing for peace, and the frustrations of Iranians who see expansion into the nuclear arena as a matter of national dignity are real and acutely felt grievances in the Muslim world. Ten days of music, art, and cultural engagement is no substitute for policies that could work to ameliorate these difficult political situations. Muslim Voices can, however, open the door to a set of new perceptions, centered on the idea of the Muslim world as a rich space for world–class artistic production. This shift in perceptions can in turn foster an atmosphere of respect conducive to addressing harder political issues.
Tlili suggested that the United States’s immigrant history has given it a rich tradition of fusing global cultures into a compound American identity, and reaching out to the world through cultural exchange. With the Obama administration extending a hand to the Muslim world, the U.S. is once again embracing this tradition and placing renewed emphasis on cultural exchange, dialogue, and understanding. By sharing the rich scope of Muslim–world arts and culture with the American people, Tlili expressed his hope that Muslim Voices can move us one step closer to achieving this goal.
SESSION I WORLD OF THE ARTIST: LANDSCAPES OF CREATIVITY AND ART IN QUESTION
Moderator Samina Quraeshi, Visiting Artist at the Peabody Museum of Archeology and Ethnology at Harvard University, opened the first session on the role of the artist in Muslim world societies, historically and today. She noted that “Muslim Voices: Arts & Ideas” opens the door to a new set of perceptions centered on the idea that the Muslim world is a rich space for cultural production — or perhaps a set of rich spaces. The Muslim world is diverse and complex, and its many different ethnicities, nationalities, and interpretations must be addressed carefully in order to avoid over–simplification. On a local and global level, art provides the common ground that enables people to build communities and bridge gaps between disparate peoples. Art is an international resource, she said, and it is more powerful than oil.
The first speaker, Huzir Sulaiman, a Singapore–based Malaysian dramatist, actor, writer, and newspaper columnist, addressed the question of how Muslim artists fit into complex, multi–layered environments. This question led him to reflect for the first time on the relationship between his faith and his work, and the contradictions and complications that relationship implies. Despite his family’s long history of engaging in Islamic scholarship — his maternal grandfather was an Islamic scholar and his parents are lawyers whose work focuses on Islam and human rights issues — he was not particularly conscious of his identity as a Muslim until he left Malaysia to attend Princeton University. The university chapel was a beautiful structure with stained glass windows; Muslim Friday prayers were held in its basement, behind the boiler. The experience made him aware of his identity as a Muslim for the first time, and it struck him as ironic that he had to travel to the West to feel a real connection to his religion.
Sulaiman noted that over time, artists identify with their religion in different ways and to differing degrees. For example, his identity as a Muslim had receded, while his identity as an artist had become more prominent. It is critical to recognize that for some, religion is a spiritual journey that engages every aspect of their lives, while others work secularly, with religion as a mere backdrop. He then posed a series of questions to the participants. First, can Muslim artists make work that addresses their spiritual journeys while offering an outside perspective on their societies? Sulaiman finds an inherent conflict in this, because he believes art should ask, “What is life and how should we live it?” But Islam tells Muslims in minute detail how to live life. What, then, is the purpose of art? Can art be made that does not ask questions about life?
Second, what is Muslim artists’ relationship to the wider political community? In Malaysia today, the artistic community is critical of the regime, which has been in power since 1973. Artists find themselves in coalition with opposition parties, but these parties are largely religious, such as the Pan–Malaysia Islamic Party (known as “PAS”), which has banned the practice of some traditional arts deemed “contrary to tenets of Islam.” Can politically conscious artists reconcile themselves with a Muslim political agenda?
Third, on what merits should Muslim artists be judged by outside observers? Sulaiman expressed annoyance with journalists and critics who analyze artistic work exclusively through a political lens. This is a form of racism: aesthetic considerations are forgotten and an artist’s work is reduced to the sum total of his or her political statements. Sulaiman stated that the current trend in American politics, as exemplified by President Obama’s speech in Cairo, gives hope that Muslim artists and their work can be seen independently from their religious identities or political agendas.
Anthony Shay, Assistant Professor of Dance and Cultural Studies at Pomona College, spoke next, addressing the social position of artists in the Muslim world, which have varied widely, both historically and today. He began by discussing his experiences as a flutist in the Tehran symphony orchestra in the 1970s. He recalled several instances in which complications arose around religious issues and the arts. For example, local clergy shut down a graduation ceremony at a girls’ school because it included a dance performance. Meanwhile, artists performing as part of the government’s Fine Arts Administration were not allowed to perform on the radio because of conflicting patronage systems.
Shay described Muslim art forms and artists as arrayed in several types of hierarchies, which often correlate with degrees of official, government patronage. One highly valued and highly respected form is poetry. In Iran, poetry is central to the culture — national, private, and artistic events all begin with poetry. Classical Persian music is similarly positioned near the top of the hierarchy. The respective position of Western arts, however, has varied over the past several decades. Before the Islamic Revolution in 1979, Western art took priority in Iran. After the Revolution, dance was banned in public, with the exception of folk dance. Dancing had historically been associated with prostitution; today, conservative families might still not permit their children to take up dancing as a profession.
Shay closed by noting the impact that official recognition and an elevated position within the artistic hierarchy can have on artists as well as art forms. There is a vast difference between the reception of official artists and that of popular artists on the street, and the impact on the individual artist can be enormous. Those positioned at the bottom of the hierarchy are not considered artists at all, but entertainers, which limits their social acceptance, their earning power, and the degree of respect they receive. For example, in Iranian academia, no one other than classical, officially approved artists is studied or even mentioned as part of the Iranian artistic tradition.
Tunisian musicologist and composer Mourad Sakli spoke next, considering some of the issues raised by the first two speakers in terms of his own experiences as a musician. He began by describing his family — a practicing Muslim, middle–class family in Tunis. His father was French–educated as a child, studied Islamic theology at Zitouna University, and made the spiritual journey of the Haj.3 His mother, on the other hand, does not speak French or classical Arabic. The youngest of six children, Sakli upset his family by “making trouble” with his decision to pursue music. Music was never forbidden as a hobby, but it was not quite socially acceptable as a profession.
In Tunisia, a professional musician would only be respected after attaining a certain level of achievement. When Sakli was 16 years old, he was chosen to perform as a soloist at the municipal theatre. A student solo was a rare occurrence, but his father did not attend the recital; for him, the occasion was not socially respectable. Sakli studied chemistry for a year after high school, but his interest in music was much greater than his interest in scientific work. His family’s opposition to a career in music was not religious but social, he stressed. In order to pursue music, he promised his parents that he would become a professional and teach. He attained his master’s degree and then his doctorate at the Sorbonne in France, all the while continuing to perform. Finally, after receiving his doctorate, Sakli could give concerts in Tunis with his father’s approval.
Sakli described religion as an indirect influence on social attitudes toward musicians. Music had historically been performed in Sufi brotherhoods, which were low on the social hierarchy; as a result, performing music was not socially acceptable. Sakli suggested that his experience with his family pointed to a shift in Tunisian society, particularly for younger Tunisians. Parents now encourage children to make a career in music, and the social context in general now accepts and respects music. The shift is partly a response to economics: as in Western society, if a musician becomes popular, he or she can make a very good living.
As for the role of Islam as a religion (rather than a culture), Sakli finds this less critical: he does not see his art as either Muslim or non–Muslim. His work refers to a geographical context — Tunisia — a country with a 3,000– year history that began well before Islam. In his view, Tunisian music has lost some of its distinctive character as contemporary Tunisian musicians have been very influenced by Western and Middle Eastern styles. In his work, he feels an obligation to preserve the characteristics of Tunisian music and suggests that artists should be open to all cultures, but preserve their own identities.
Finally, Sakli pointed out, the economic disparity between the West and the developing world greatly affects the production and distribution of music from less wealthy countries. Musicians in developing countries have far fewer opportunities to showcase their art both domestically and internationally. The disparity is vast: in 2008, more than 70% of CDs sold in Europe were released by only four companies. Sakli concluded by restating that the relationship between a musician and Islam is not direct: it emerges through the culture that has developed around religious practices, rather than in direct reference to them.
In her remarks, discussant Joni Cherbo, Executive Director of the Resource Center for Cultural Engagement, noted that all art is socially constrained. Though it is often thought that art should be a transcendent phenomenon, art exists in a social context. The three speakers discussed several social issues that affected their work: political and religious constraints, as well as aesthetic considerations. These issues must be discussed in a specific context, because every nation and every art form that raises them addresses them differently. She opened the floor discussion by asking participants to focus on these constraints, and on how these constraints are shifting in particular contexts.
One participant pointed out that art is socially and politically constrained in the West as well. During the “culture wars” of the late 1980s, for example, conservatives in Congress took exception to art that crossed what they considered appropriate boundaries. As a result, the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), a major funder of the arts in the United States, stopped supporting many artists; many conservatives proposed disbanding it altogether. The participant asked the speakers and other participants whether contemporary popular art in the Muslim world is contentious for similar reasons: what religious, social, or political restrictions does it challenge?
In response, a participant noted that it is necessary to distinguish between Islam the religion and the way people interpret it, which often involves inserting their preferences and practices, and describing these as part of the religion. Islam never prohibited painting, song, or dance. It was people — men — who used religion to justify their fears of women and women’s sexuality.
Another participant added that the relationship between art, society, and spirituality is constantly evolving: the paradigm that enabled productive cooperation in the golden age of al–Andalus, for example, is very different from contemporary Islamists’ rejection of art and performance. Whereas women were celebrated in the pre–Islamic tradition of love and erotic poetry, these forms clash with the new Islamic fundamentalism.
Another participant asked whether labeling art as “Muslim” simplifies and homogenizes the cultural and contextual nuances that the speakers mentioned. Rather than assume the religion’s influence on artists from Muslim communities, perhaps we should consider Islam a variable in need of further investigation. Does Islam put more constraints on artists than other religions? Or is seeing Islam as a constraint merely an outside perception?
Discussion turned to the value and impact of the label “Muslim art”. One person reminded participants that the purpose of the session was not to make a monolith of Islam but to complicate existing notions. Even within the Muslim world, several state education systems reinforce the idea of a monolith by dividing history into pre–Islamic and Islamic periods, suggesting that religion is the primary, and singular, lens. In other countries, there is tension between religious identity and national or cultural identity — such as in Iran, where Muslim identity and Persian identity can conflict.
Another participant suggested that the term “Muslim art” cannot be sufficient since it categorizes artists by the religion of their community, rather than according to the artist’s own choices. A better distinction might be whether the artist, regardless of religious beliefs, wants to help catalyze the evolution of his or her particular society, or practice art for art’s sake. Another participant agreed that the categorization of “Muslim art” is problematic, and criticized the Western arts media for insistently judging Muslim–world artists on their degree of social, religious, or political activism rather than according to aesthetic criteria. Artists in the Muslim world who suffer from imprisonment, torture, or assassination receive more coverage and are treated as having a larger significance than artists who are less persecuted.
One participant mentioned the extension of the Louvre Museum currently being built in Abu Dhabi and asked whether this could be seen as an attempt to build a bridge between Western and Muslim art. According to another participant, the extension reflects the social and political aspirations of Abu Dhabi’s royal family; its purpose and its effect cannot be generalized to the Gulf states, let alone the entire Muslim world. The rulers of Abu Dhabi and Doha have different aspirations than those of Saudi Arabia or Iran.
Another participant agreed with the need for specificity, and suggested that the underlying theme is the importance of acquiring symbolic capital. For Abu Dhabi, the Louvre provides symbolic capital; for Dubai, holding Sotheby’s auctions does. The result, a third participant suggested, may be the creation of a world with multiple poles of strategic and cultural power; President Sarkozy recently visited the new Louvre in Abu Dhabi as part of a trip intended to inaugurate the new French military base there.
When discussing art production or cultural capital in the Muslim world, we must not forget the broader political context, one participant cautioned. Muslim artists, whether they want to be identified by nationality, religion, or aesthetic preferences, operate in the context of a global political conflict between the West and the Muslim world. Avoiding knowledge of this conflict is impossible. Artists who assimilate Western techniques or standards are in effect taking sides, politically. For example, Iranian artists today are often involved in oppositional politics even if as artists they simply want to be judged artistically. However, the West regards them as artists in jeopardy, and they become part of the political narrative, whether they like it or not. Another participant suggested that the politicization of artists can be productive, inspiring sensitive artistic responses.
The discussion turned briefly to the artistic hierarchy described by Shay. Historically, in Europe as well as the Muslim world, entertainers were not considered artists or worthy of social respect. This hierarchy was partly reinforced by practitioners of “high” arts, who competed with “entertainers” for social standing as well as for audiences. Are there parallels today when it comes to government–approved high art and the exclusions it sanctions? When a government approves and promotes a particular artist or art form, is the intention to control the artist or the audience? Were popular art forms historically more likely to encourage social or political disobedience?
Questions about art and the artist cannot be separated from questions of audience and impact, one participant stressed. As an artist who works outside a Muslim–majority country, making art that specifically addresses Muslim life, this participant found that while the government plays no role in approving or suppressing her work, the audience has been extremely vocal in censuring it. There are two groups who take offense to its depictions of Muslim life: right–wing political conservatives who see it as normalizing the dangerous presence of Muslims in their country, and right–wing Muslims who see it as normalizing forms of Muslim life that they consider unacceptable. These two groups are usually in opposition to one another, but have become ideologically aligned in their opposition to art that they feel does not represent what they consider Islam to be.
The discussion briefly returned to the meaning and utility of the term “Muslim art.” One participant suggested that the festival’s title, “Muslim Voices,” is overly unifying; the examples of Muslim art discussed in the session reflected many different zones of activity and influence. Do these artists share anything in common other than being from countries with Muslim–majority populations? How would a festival titled “Christian Voices” be perceived? Islam is not a unifying force, he said: it is a relationship with a point of influence and power that different artists approach differently. For artists, the relevant relationship is between the state, power, and Islam; art is often as much an artist’s reflection on state power as it is on Islam.
In response, a participant observed that one lesson of history is that cultural definitions are always moving; labels offer an imprecise but useful shorthand in an ever–changing world. Another participant suggested that artists may find labeling themselves Muslim valuable because it grants them membership in a larger collective — for example, defining oneself as Muslim rather than Turkish extends one’s community, audience, and influence. Another participant agreed, suggesting that artists may adopt particular labels contextually and pointed to the example of YouTube videos that show Iranian artists dressed as Qajar princes riding motorcycles.4 This fluidity allows artists to operate inside, outside, and between boundaries, but it also puts them in potential conflict with their governments, which may suppress art that challenges the official image of their people and country.
In conclusion, Cherbo suggested that participants further consider Diasporan artists, whose work can powerfully muddle cultural waters. Quraeshi closed by observing that as a model for social integration, the concept of unity in diversity is relevant for all artists. Fostering communication and reaching across boundaries will benefit all humans, individually and as families, communities, and nations.
Karen Brooks Hopkins, President of Brooklyn Academy of Music, delivered the keynote speech during lunch on June 6th. She welcomed participants and thanked Mustapha Tlili, Andrea Stanton, and the staff at the New York University Center for Dialogues. She began by mentioning the very moving Muslim Voices opening event the previous evening — the concert that featured Youssou N’Dour. She described how the intensity of his music resounded with the power of love and the glory of his faith.
Brooks Hopkins then turned to President Obama’s June 4th address to the Muslim world, quoting a portion that she believed resonated with the conference and the overall festival’s objectives:
Human history has often been a record of nations and tribes subjugating one another to serve their own interests. Yet in this new age, such attitudes are self–defeating. Given our interdependence, any world order that elevates one nation or group of people over another will inevitably fail. So whatever we think of the past, we must not be prisoners of it. Our problems must be dealt with through partnership; progress must be shared.5
The subtitle of this conference is “Possibilities and Limitations,” she recalled; working toward a shared progress means realizing that artistic and cultural exchanges can only take us so far. Colonialism, gender issues, post—World War I and Cold War politics are a few of the major historical tensions that have hampered this progress and that cultural exchange can only go so far in addressing.
President Obama’s Cairo speech also included a fervent call for respecting one another. Learning about Muslim culture can be used as an entry point to achieving this mutual respect. With over 1.5 billion Muslims worldwide, does it not make sense to learn more about them? This festival cannot possibly convey the scope of Muslim artistic achievement, but it does show the American public that the Muslim world is large and diverse, and makes major intellectual and creative contributions to global civilization.
Brooks Hopkins noted that she stood before the audience thanks to a very specific type of art — the satirical cartoon, a powerful form not only in the West, but in the Muslim world as well. Before 2006, she, like many Americans and Europeans, knew little of the Muslim world beyond what she read in the news. But in early 2006, art and politics came together in a big way when a now–infamous series of cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammad was published in Denmark’s Jyllands–Posten newspaper. The international reaction to them brought decades of political turmoil, ignorance, and disrespect to a head.
As the cartoon crisis unfolded, Brooks Hopkins traveled to Kuala Lumpur for the NYU Center for Dialogues conference on “Who Speaks for Islam? Who Speaks for the West?” On the final evening, she dined with Tlili, whom she had met there for the first time, and Stephen Heintz, President of The Rockefeller Brothers Fund. Discouraged by the obvious strain between Muslim and Western participants, they concluded that since nothing else had “worked,” why not give the arts a chance? Later on, as they began taking the idea of a Muslim arts festival more seriously, The Asia Society became the third partner, bringing further depth, expertise, and a policy–oriented perspective. Muslim Voices was born.
Three years later, the lack of mutual respect and sense of common humanity persists. President Obama called upon the Muslim world to abandon stereotypes of America as a “self–interested empire” — to instead view Americans as diverse individuals who share values with the Muslim world. It is incumbent upon those in the West to do the same: to learn about and respect the multiplicity of societies and belief systems in the Muslim world.
What better way to “giving each other a face” than to participate collectively in arts and culture — a means of personal expression and source of joy for so many people around the globe? Unfortunately, Brooks Hopkins noted, while all can agree that culture is meaningful to people individually, it remains an undervalued diplomatic tool.
Brooks Hopkins mentioned a recent New York Times article about Palestinian youth finding sanctuary in Western classical music. Two long–standing activists in this area are Argentinean–Israeli musician and composer Daniel Barenboim, and the late Palestinian–American cultural critic and literary theorist Edward Said, who together founded the West–Eastern Divan Orchestra, whose members include Israeli, Palestinian, and other Middle Eastern youth. On the orchestra’s website, Barenboim writes: “[For the orchestra, it] is not necessarily a question of accepting the narrative of the other, let alone agreeing with it, but rather the indispensable need to accept its legitimacy.”6
For an example closer to home, Brooks Hopkins cited a recent conversation with Chuck Davis, Artistic Director of the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s DanceAfrica, which has been performing annually at BAM since 1977. While the DanceAfrica artists were rehearsing at BAM in May, several Muslim Voices musicians came to BAM to get a feel for the space. They began improvising together, transcending their different cultural and artistic traditions through the universal language of music.
For Brooks Hopkins, these examples illustrate the powerful effect that cultural diplomacy could have toward legitimizing “the other.” When over 2,000 audience members watched the Youssou N’Dour performance, they set politics aside and shared in something that was above all human. She urged the conference participants to see this festival not as the culmination of three years of effort, but as a mere starting point. Participants must find a way to seize the moment, which marks a turn in the damaged political relationship between the West and the Muslim world, and find concrete ways to infuse it with the respect and humanity that President Obama called for.
In conclusion, Brooks Hopkins called on participants to join together to convince elected officials, community leaders, journalists, bloggers, and educators to support cultural diplomacy. This discussion must include artists, and must encourage funders and donor institutions to advocate for programs that collectively reach every age group and social sector. Policy makers must be persuaded not to dismiss the arts either as elitist or as “fluff.” The arts alone will not rectify a long history of colonialism and political disputes between the Muslim world and the West. But programs that foster respect and a greater understanding of one another, when executed in the spirit of collaboration and equal footing, will help create a more equitable playing field for these broader debates.
Moderator Vishakha Desai, President of The Asia Society, opened the session on venues and institutions by noting that whereas the first session focused on the creation of art and the artist’s view of his or her work and identity, this session would consider how art is perceived by audiences. Before an audience can appreciate art, however, content is mediated by various kinds of gatekeepers — museums, galleries, government institutions, and cultural organizations — which impact not only what is seen or performed, but also how it is received.
Prior to discussing venues and institutions, Desai recalled the ongoing discussion over the definition and value of the term “Muslim art.” There was some consensus that artists, particularly those working in Muslim–majority countries, do not necessarily feel a need or desire to be identified primarily as “Muslim.” Yet for the purposes of this conference, proposing and then examining the term, rather than accepting or rejecting it automatically, is useful. In fact, using the term in the positive context of a festival celebrating the arts could help overcome negative portrayals of Muslims, which in recent years have
been dominated by traditional and at times extreme versions of Islam.
The power of art lies in its ability to transcend specificity and, at the same time, speak of a specific time and place; Desai termed this ability a “duality” rather than a contradiction. She reminded participants that art varies according to the characteristics of the audience: who sees it, and who does not; how it is presented and reviewed; who talks about it, and in what context. For example, the June 5th opening night performance by Youssou N’Dour7 began with a Qur’anic chant performed by Muslim American New Yorkers from three different ethnic backgrounds. The experience of seeing N’Dour perform in the context of the Muslim Voices festival and after a Qur’anic chant would differ greatly from seeing him perform in Dakar as a native Senegalese musician, or seeing him perform at Carnegie Hall as he did in 2005.8
Bruce Lawrence, Professor of Islamic Studies and Director of the Islamic Studies Center at Duke University, spoke on the question of where art happens in the Muslim world today, looking at the types of spaces — private, public, and commercial — in which different types of art are created, produced, and displayed, and considering the impact that the type of space has on artists and the art they produce. He began by noting that while preparing his remarks, he asked a Muslim artist friend, “Where does art happen in the Muslim world today?” His friend answered, “Everywhere.”
Nevertheless, outside discussion of art in the Muslim world focuses not on the present, but on the past. Even President Obama’s June 4th speech in Cairo referred to “majestic arches and soaring spires; timeless poetry and cherished music; elegant calligraphy and places of peaceful contemplation.”9 These are all historical art forms. Where is the praise — or even the awareness — of the dancing, storytelling, street art, hip hop, films, and satirical art that contributes to the contemporary Muslim arts scene?
A March 2009 review of Wajahat Ali’s play “The Domestic Crusaders” on beliefnet.com says, “As majestic as the history of Islamic art is and as celebrated as it is in today’s world, it has never been able to really extract itself from history,” illustrating the common misconception that art is something Muslims used to do in the past, but no longer do today.10 Shahed Amanullah, the reviewer, praises Ali for working to “expand the meaning of Islamic art in today’s world” by creating a consciously contemporary American Muslim play, but describes efforts by other contemporary artists as meeting with “limited success.”
One type of art being produced today is that of the Muslim Diaspora. Although Diasporan art can be found in as many places as there are Muslim communities, from Europe to North America and from South America to Asia, the Internet is one of the major sites for the production and discussion of contemporary Muslim art and one of the major homes of Diasporan art. The Internet has amplified awareness and raised the profiles of several contemporary Muslim artists, including the London–based, Egyptian–born calligrapher Ahmed Moustafa11 and the Dubai–based Indian painter Maqbool Fida (M.F.) Husain.12
The traditional publishing community has also helped raise awareness of the modern Muslim arts scene. For example, London–based Black Dog Publishing recently published a book titled Contemporary Art in the Middle East, which aims at “showcasing the most explosive, dynamic, and provocative art coming out of the region” to offer “a new way of looking at one of the most complex and misunderstood areas of the world.”13 Lawrence asked participants to continue considering how to create opportunities for the production, display, and circulation of contemporary Muslim art.
Desai offered two observations in response to Lawrence’s remarks. First, she encouraged participants to examine the Internet both as a “post–institutional” context for art and as an institution in itself, whose precise contours and characteristics should be examined. Second, she noted that “Muslim art” is not alone in facing the challenge of being defined as art “of the past.” Asian art and Indian art are also often described by outsiders in this way.
Theodore Levin, Professor of Music at Dartmouth University, spoke next, addressing the mediation and regulation of artists’ access to audiences through galleries, museums, government ministries, markets, festivals, and other institutions — locally, nationally, and internationally. Today, Levin observed, a broad range of social, economic, and political forces regulate artists’ access to audiences: forces of centralization, decentralization, and recentralization. He agreed with Lawrence that the rise of the Internet has transformed cultural flows. The web might be seen as the modern analogue of the souk — a contemporary marketplace. Any artist with a phone or camera can put himself or herself online, setting his or her work up against the institutional arbiters of taste. For audiences, the Internet facilitates access to culture while promoting diversification of taste.
Levin turned to American cultural and other non– profit organizations as one important venue — of production, dissemination, and mediation — for artists today. In part thanks to the Internet, there are more opportunities than ever for Muslim artists to learn about and connect with American organizations that work to promote Muslim cultures and avoid the “clash of civilizations.” Their interests and approaches are diverse; some organizations promote contemporary art while others create libraries and try to preserve traditional art forms. Many try to build cross–cultural understanding in a literal way by supporting art that is a fusion of Western and Eastern styles.
Levin recognized that for many artists, accepting the support of Western foundations comes with a catch. These institutions sometimes frame grants in a way that is obliquely political — by supporting schemes that emphasize artists’ national or religious identity even when the artists themselves are uncomfortable with these designations. He also noted that one key term had not yet been raised: Orientalism. He asked participants to consider what role Orientalism plays in these foundations’ and other institutions’ efforts, noting that this concern arose in his work as the executive director of Yo–Yo Ma’s Silk Road Project.14
Levin went on to discuss how artists, like multi–national corporations, produce different versions of their products for different markets. Muslim artists lead dual or even multiple professional lives, performing for the world music audience and their own national or other communities. Often, the music that is performed for Western audiences under the rubric of world music is more sacred in focus and traditional in style than the music appreciated — either aesthetically or politically — in artists’ home countries. For example, Abdurahim Hamidov, the Uzbek dutar player who performed in the “Salaam Suite” that accompanied Youssou N’Dour’s opening night performance, requested political asylum in the U.S. in 2007.15
Levin concluded by observing that international audiences do not solely enjoy “backward–looking” art from the Muslim world. International venues have also provided great opportunities for “forward–looking” art, while in certain places in the Muslim world, state cultural authorities hold a near monopoly on artists’ access to audiences. This monopolization puts pressure on artists to conform to official standards, or risk losing access to audiences — or worse, risk being branded politically subversive and face persecution. He closed by citing the example of Mark Weil, the prominent Uzbek director of Tashkent’s Ilkhom Theater, who was murdered in 2007 for what seems to be political reasons. His plays, which included reworkings of classics like “Oresteia” and explorations of socially controversial topics like homosexuality, had received international acclaim, and he had received funding from American NGOs.16
Sabiha al–Khemir, art historian and former director of the Museum of Islamic Arts in Doha, Qatar, spoke next, using her experience as a scholar, museum director, and arts consultant as a case study to illustrate how venues and institutions mediate audience access to art. Al–Khemir was born and raised in Tunisia and later studied in the United Kingdom. She described Tunisia as a bilingual culture, in which “the other” is also part of oneself. Studying Islamic art in London broadened her sense of her Islamic identity — her awareness of belonging to a multi–faceted culture spanning from Indonesia to Islamic Spain. While in Tunisia she had found herself looking west; in the United Kingdom she found herself looking east.
In her role as founding director of the Museum of Islamic Arts in Doha, al–Khemir was compelled to use the Western discipline of art history to form the collection and shape the identity of the museum — a process she described as looking at something internal from an external perspective. Although there is great diversity in Islamic art, there is also real coherence. This coherence needs to be investigated, decoded, and understood from within an Islamic perspective, rather than solely from an external one. By virtue of its position as both inside and outside, the museum, which opened at the end of 2008, offers a space for this investigation, as well as an international platform for dialogue.
Al–Khemir is currently working on a series about Islamic art, including art created online, for PBS, the United States’s public broadcasting service. She sees programs like this as opportunities to overcome what she considers Islamic art history’s tendency to focus more on history than on art. She also recently published a novel, The Blue Manuscript (Verso, 2008), which traces the history of a 10th—century Quran, written in gold on blue vellum, whose pages were later separated and sold as individual sheets. The novel interweaves the stories of the original (anonymous) Muslim calligrapher, and the modern–day Western art historians who travel to Egypt in search of the missing pages that will allow them to reconstitute the book. For al–Khemir, the story of her novel was a metaphor through which she could examine the relationship between East and West with respect to culture and history. The juxtaposition between ancient and modern also lay at the heart of this project, and she suggested that participants further consider this dichotomy, given the common assumption that the Islamic world has not made the transition to modernity.
Discussant Jon Anderson, Chair of the Anthropology Department at Catholic University, proposed to draw a distinction between the high art and culture considered the “domain of princes” and what he called “down and dirty” art produced without the recognition and support of intermediary institutions and venues. He referenced Levin’s observation that the Internet “liberates” art from art history, and noted in conversation with al–Khemir that art history itself is a discipline whose tenets are constantly rewritten.
To ground the floor discussion, Anderson proposed distinguishing between three social contexts for art. First is the local context, in which producers and buyers are directly connected. This context includes urban bazaars in which artists and artisans respond directly to needs of the audience, here understood as consumers. Second is the regional context, in which the link between producer and audience or consumer is less direct. As a result, artists and artisans move from asking questions about the particular tastes of individual clients to broader attempts to discern market tastes and trends. This context includes the 400 — year — old industry of Persian carpet–making, for example. Third is the trans–regional context, which Anderson sees as a contemporary phenomenon, in which knowledge is decentralized and located in multiple places, and in which scholars, brokers, and arts experts decide what qualifies as art.
In response to Anderson’s suggestion that the “social life” of art occurs in the locations in which it is presented and exhibited, one participant observed that some of the cultural spaces that presented art relating in some specific way to Islam have disappeared over time. These include mints that produced coins for Muslim states like the Mughal Empire in India; chanceries of various Muslim governments which produced documents in calligraphic script; scriptoria, where hand–copied and lithographed manuscripts and books were sold; and souks or bazaars designed not for tourists, but for the ordinary people whose life–cycles and daily purchases were more governed by Islam than is typical today.
The participant also noted that historically, gifts exchanged between royal courts, such as the Ottoman gifts to the Russian court, would have been produced locally. Today, the gold medal given to President Obama in Saudi Arabia on June 3rd — the King Abdul Aziz Order of Merit — was most likely produced in Italy. The largesse of Arab Muslim monarchs is now expressed by luxury items produced — and sometimes mass–produced — outside their own countries. The participant asked whether this reflects a broader trend: are people in the Muslim world losing their consciousness of spaces as Muslim spaces as artists respond to a different, more Western set of criteria? Has “Muslim art” — as a genre of art produced in conversation with a specifically Muslim political, social, cultural, and economic context — ended, leaving us today with art produced by people who live in Muslim–majority, Muslim–plurality, and Muslim–minority populations?
Reflecting on the diminished importance of government–supported institutions such as mints and chanceries, one participant noted that the ebbing of historic patronage systems, governmental and individual, is a worldwide phenomenon, not specific to Islamic civilization. In response to the anecdote about President Obama and Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah, another participant noted that one critical aspect of these state gifts and honors is their reciprocity. In recent decades, American presidents have tended to give generically “American” gifts. However, President Obama’s gift to King Abdullah was a piece by American calligrapher Mohamed Zakariya, who was asked to calligraph the Qur’anic verse 49:13.17 The participant suggested that Islamic art is a meaningful term today, but that its forms and references differ from those of previous eras.
Another participant concurred, noting that some forms of art have waned as the social context that supported them has changed. For example, weaving has largely disappeared along with the decline in the practice of giving robes at the start of the New Year in Iran. On the other hand, music, which was historically almost exclusively available only to royals and the wealthy in the form of live music performed for patrons, has become available to the general public through recordings. Media technologies have also made historical art forms more broadly accessible. In the past, few eyes had ever seen Persian miniatures, which were also commissioned by wealthy patrons for private display; today, many are displayed in books and on the Internet. While there has been a major shift away from patronage systems, this does not equal the disappearance of Islamic art.
Several participants commented on what might be considered defining characteristics of “Islamic art.” One participant suggested that Islamic art frequently includes a marriage of the visual and the verbal — of images and words. For instance, calligraphy as an art form functions as both a textual statement and also as an emblem or image. However, the presence of calligraphy alone does not qualify something as Islamic art. Nor can Islamic art today simply focus on replicating previous forms; this leads to a state of sterility. Historically, Islamic art developed in a context that offered a coherent vision of the world; the visual expression of this worldview gave rise to the arabesque, geometric, and other traditional styles.
Several participants noted that while “Islamic art” may reflect a particular worldview, it has been historically influenced, shaped, and produced by many non–Muslims. One participant noted the influence of Byzantine and Sassanian traditions in Islamic art. Another noted that the mints of Muslim countries were sometimes run by Jews, and that music at Muslim courts was sometimes performed by Christians: neither public nor private patronage was limited to Muslims, although the art produced reflected the majority–Muslim context. The history of these art forms is shaped by the coexistence of cultures, which extended beyond tolerance to the cultural interaction and exchange that created the civilization of Al Andalus, for example.
Another participant noted that the culture of Islam envelops not only previous cultures, but the neo– traditional as well. For instance, in Tunisia the souks still sell clothes and furniture made for modern Tunisians, as well as goods for tourists. Indeed, the duality of functional and non–functional art forms might be considered another characteristic of Islamic art. Speaking from a different perspective, one participant asked whether critical theory has made it impossible to talk about the intention of the artist; the focus instead has turned to reception — how the art produced is understood. The participant suggested that post–modernism has played a substantive role in complicating the idea of Islamic art.
The closing discussion turned to various institutions’ efforts to preserve and rejuvenate “Islamic art” for contemporary audiences. One participant mentioned the exhibit of gold Bactrian jewelry from the time of Alexander the Great, which had been displayed in Afghanistan’s National Museum before the Soviet invasion and which is now touring the world. The exhibit, titled “Afghanistan: Hidden Treasures from the National Museum in Kabul,” is stopping at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. The artifacts had been hidden from the Taliban by the museum director and other personnel, each of whom took on great personal risk.18 This type of commitment is not about national patrimony or Islamic understanding, the participant suggested, but about the act of safekeeping art of great value to humanity as a whole. How do we harness this human energy?
The participant then asked the participants to imagine New York if all its theaters, museums, galleries, and other cultural spaces were suddenly closed. What kind of human impact would this have? The participant suggested that this is akin to what many communities around the Muslim world today face. Over the past few decades, state machines in many Muslim countries have eviscerated the institutions that carry human knowledge. Today, fragile groups of individuals are at the forefront of the battle for free space and to preserve arts that benefit humanity as a whole.
Another participant observed that today there is a high degree of interest in many places around the world in the fate of Islamic art forms that have died out or largely disappeared. These art forms can be brought back to life, and NGOs — as well as individuals — are playing a significant role in this revitalization. For example, the Aga Khan Trust for Culture and the Aga Khan Music Initiative in Central Asia work to sustain cultural traditions and stimulate interest among young people in these art forms, injecting them with new life.19 In Tajikistan today, for example, the maqam music scene is more alive than it has been in 100 years.
SESSION III ART AND SOCIAL COMMENTARY: TRANSCENDENCE AND TRANSFORMATION
The third session examined art as a means of spiritual elevation and transformation, and considered whether this should be a primary role of art, as well as what limits religious practice places on certain art forms. Moderator Dale Eickelman, Professor of Anthropology and Human Relations at Dartmouth College, opened the session by offering three examples of the intersection of religious devotion and art. First, he described seeing Qur’anic calligraphy written on traditional mud brick homes in Oman. Second, he recalled attending a Moroccan memorial service, which included three days of Qur’anic chanting as well as the recitation of Sufi poems by local writers. Third, he observed that if one wished to be daring in Oman, one would use poetry to criticize the regime — but only among friends.
Faouzi Skali, Director of the Fes Festival of Sufi Culture and former Director of the Fes Festival of World Sacred Music, spoke on the ways that spirituality influences how some art is produced, the venues in which it is presented, and its reception by audiences. He began by recounting that the Festival of World Sacred Music and later Sufi Culture were founded in response to people around the world seeing negative images of the Muslim world with which Skali himself could not identify. By contrast, the Fes Festivals set out to bring the production and inspiration of Fes to the world, and to bring the world to Fes.
During the Fes Festival of Sufi Culture, an annual event that began in 2006, participants are immersed in Sufi Moroccan culture for five days. Sufism is woven into the fabric of Islamic civilization, Skali stated: its traces can be found from the smallest village and to the most distant metropolis, across the Muslim world. Sufism is about religious devotion, but is also about the production of music; its practitioners include internationally known stars. He then drew a comparison between classical musicians and religious figures, many of whom claim to experience “sudden inspiration.” However, this sudden inspiration takes place in the context of certain ingrained cultural values — with individualism being paramount in the West. He asked: what cultural values have helped define the music of the Muslim world?
Skali noted that the Fes Festival of Sufi Culture also illustrates the multiple factors that converge to form identity in today’s world. Sufism is one of the expressions of Islam, and Islamic culture is in turn inspired by Sufi culture. Furthermore, there are different forms of Sufi culture in different places. In today’s globalized world, Skali asserted, we all belong to multiple groups, multiple traditions, and multiple cultures, which can be combined and fused to create new spaces for art and perhaps even “a new modernity.”
Isaac Solotaroff, a documentary filmmaker, spoke next on the boundaries that religious practices put on particular art forms. Certain cultural expectations are established for art forms seen as closely connected to religious practices, such as calligraphy or tajweed. Other borders are drawn around art forms seen as less connected or at odds with religious practices. Solotaroff has come up against many such borders in his experience as the producer of the recent documentary Wham! Bam! Islam!, an examination of the Muslim world’s reaction to The 99, a comic book series produced by Kuwaiti Dr. Naif al–Mutawa. The series, which spans 23 issues, follows the adventures of 99 superheroes whose names and attributes are drawn from the 99 names of God given in the Quran. The series has also spawned a new amusement park in Kuwait, and a television show that will launch internationally in December 2009.
Solotaroff then screened a promotional reel for the documentary. In one scene, a young boy in Kuwait explained that he loves following the adventures of the characters in The 99. In another, students at a Kuwaiti university were highly critical of the series. In Indonesia, critics of The 99 argued that it is an infiltration of Western ideas packaged with Islamic elements, showing, for example, women dressed in fitted clothing speaking about the wonders of God. Kuwaiti clerics who convened to discuss The 99 declared it in contradiction with Islam, because Islam says that it is God who saves humans, but The 99 depicts superheroes as our saviors. Yet other interviewees stated that they see no contradiction between its superheroes’ good deeds and Muslim faith.
Writers Adel Rifaat and Baghat El Nadi, who both live in France and write together under the pseudonym “Mahmoud Hussein,” then presented a case study of their experience writing their new book, Penser le Coran (Grasset et Fasquelle, 2009). In their remarks, they reflected on how they mediate the cultural and religious boundaries established for writing about the Quran, as well as on the impact of location. They live and write in France, where distribution and reception of their work has been quite different than in other parts of the Muslim world — as have audience expectations.
Rifaat and El Nadi began from the notion that since prejudice against Islam still exists, it was fundamentally important to portray Islam as an innovative and revelatory process, rather than as an inflexible ideology. The idea that Islam was great in the past has gained increasing currency in the West. This is in part because, so far as many Muslims are concerned, the Quran is the very word of God and is literally fixed for all time. Rifaat and El Nadi therefore turned to the Sira—the collection of five biographies of the Prophet Muhammad accepted as authoritative. Through the Sira, they discovered a reading of the Quran that leaves behind this literalism and recreates the freedom the first Muslims experienced when they heard Muhammad’s revelation.
Rifaat and El Nadi spent ten years preparing a synthesis of the five chronicles of the Sira that would be accessible to both Muslim and non–Muslim readers. They wanted their book to offer readers the sense of gradually entering the intimate circle of the Prophet, and experiencing with him the process of receiving God’s revelation. Over the course of their writing, Rifaat and Nadi realized that their own perception of the Quran had changed. They now understood the Quran as connected with a specific time and place; God’s word was addressed to people living in that particular historic context. Their way of life could not be changed suddenly, but only modified gradually. The laws of the Quran were intended to make tribal customs more just: they granted women greater rights, but did not wholly change their place in society; they set limits on slavery but did not eliminate it.
Rifaat and El Nadi also described how the Prophet and his Companions would ask God directly for clarification or revision of certain verses that were either not understood or were considered too harsh by the people. In response, the Sira tells us that God modified some verses, such as the laws dictating that Muslims take arms against an enemy that far outnumbers them. This is an illustration of “derogation” — a departure from previously established rules. In Rifaat and El Nadi’s opinion, the Muslim believer cannot treat all verses as equal and timeless, and as relevant in all situations; to do so would be to challenge the power that God has claimed to change his own declarations. For Mahmoud Hussein, this understanding offers everyone the chance to interpret the Quran in a way that is relevant to his or her own life.
The session discussant, Philip Schuyler, Associate Professor of Ethnomusicology at the University of Washington, began by noting that the Fes Festival of Sufi Culture, like the Fes Festival of World Sacred Music, emphasizes spirituality and what is shared; the word “religion” is not mentioned much. Likewise, in Solotaroff’s film, The 99 confronted issues not just of religion, but of gender, geography, culture, identity, and politics — all of which are intertwined. Schuyler observed that all the presenters share a desire to build a wider understanding of Islam, its history, and its various forms in today’s world. He suggested that participants embrace the complexities of defining “Islamic art,” and cited Indian musician Ravi Shankar, who described raga, the melodic mode of classical Indian music, as a form in which “nothing is fixed, but some things are fixed.”
Schuyler concluded by offering participants two observations to ground the floor discussion. First, he described the relationship between artist and audience as a spectrum rather than a dichotomy. The artist and the audience influence one another: the work of art is completed by the viewer, who adds interpretation. Until the viewer sees, hears, or otherwise experiences a work of art, it remains undefined. In many cases, the audience actually participates in the creation of a work of art; Schuyler cited the audience members who danced onstage during Youssou N’Dour’s opening night concert as one example.
Second, Schuyler observed that the context in which a work of art is exhibited or a performance is presented changes its content. For instance, the Muslim world has a long tradition of erotic poetry, but the poetry itself is not “Islamic”; rather, its creators are people who are Muslim, or who live in the Muslim world. Schuyler recalled two different explanations that he had been given for the presence of this tradition in Muslim culture. In one instance, a Moroccan poet whose works included highly detailed descriptions of women’s bodies explained that he was actually a virgin, and that his poems were manifestations of his love for God. In the second, a Yemeni nashid — a man whose profession is to sing songs in praise of the Prophet — sang a very sexually explicit song at a local wedding. Unlike the poet, the nashid said the lyrics were not metaphorical; he felt it was his duty as a Muslim to instruct the inexperienced groom on his wedding night.
One participant, an artist who works with Muslim themes, observed that Muslim communities today have difficulty accepting work that challenges Islam or Muslim practices, even if done humorously and from within the community. This reaction is sometimes based in legitimate fear since many Muslim communities feel themselves harshly and unfairly criticized, and have adopted a defensive posture in response. The participant suggested that engaging Muslim communities in a real way requires first understanding this fear and then working to earn their trust so that they see artistic critique as meaningful rather than merely hostile.
In reference to Wham! Bam! Islam!’s depiction of the gathering of clerics in Kuwait for a “fatwa conference” and their deliberations on The 99, one participant asked where the line determining what is permissible is drawn, and by whom. There is no definitive way to establish the legitimacy necessary to determine this line and the absence of absolute authority in Islam — as opposed to, for example, the centrality of the Pope’s authority in Roman Catholicism — is central to a discussion of Islam and the arts. One result is that Muslim artists may choose not to produce art that could be seen as controversial since any debate is inherently unsolvable.
One participant recalled seeing a comic book for sale in Saudi Arabia in the 1980s that featured a blonde heroine in a miniskirt, and concluding that it had escaped censorship because no one considered children’s books significant. Yet comic books require a certain amount of subversiveness to be attractive to children. The participant asked Solotaroff to comment on how The 99 is positioned and what kind of impact it has had around the Muslim world. Solotaroff responded by observing that The 99 outsells Batman and Robin slightly, for example, but overall sales are relatively small. He believed the real test of The 99’s popularity will come when the animated television series launches globally in December 2009. The 99’s creator, Naif al–Mutawa, hopes that by accepting the realities of and joining the global marketplace, he can help spread a different image of Islam to the non–Muslim world, as well as to give children in the Muslim world, and particularly in the Middle East, better role models.
Another participant asked Rifaat and El Nadi to discuss how reactions to Penser le Coran had varied in different countries and among different audiences. The authors answered that while the book has not yet found an Arabic–language publisher, it has become a bestseller in France. The French edition has also been well received in Morocco, among other places. The authors believe that only the most orthodox of Muslims could possibly have trouble with their book’s message. Another participant echoed that Penser le Coran reflects the openness of Islam’s early scholars and only seems controversial today because media coverage of the Islamic world focuses on extremists who speak for very few of the religion’s followers.
A third participant pointed out that the session’s focus on the intersection of art and spirituality belies that “purely spiritual” art still has a political context — by virtue of its very decision to turn away from politics or political Islam. Mahmoud Hussein’s “interpretive” approach is also political, he claimed, in its decision to open the debate from a defensive point of view rather than addressing the current situation directly.
In response, El Nadi explained that he and Rifaat were Marxists until they discovered the Islam of the Sira, which led them to engage more actively with their religion. They had been surprised at how little the French people knew about Islam, despite France’s culture of learning. Upon further investigation, however, it turned out that even Muslims were ignorant of their own history. The authors hoped that their book could address this knowledge deficit both within Muslim communities and outside them.
One final comment emphasized the importance of distinguishing between artists from Muslim–majority cultures and those who are members of a Muslim minority elsewhere. Several panelists, including Rifaat and El Nadi, Huzir Sulaiman, and Sabiha al–Khemir, had commented on the effects that moving from one type of society to the other had on their relationship to their faith and to their art. This is in part, the participant felt, a reaction to the expectations that majority cultures have of what it is to “be Muslim.” The participant asked the floor to reflect on how spirituality emerges for members of Diasporan, minority cultures, and how this may differ from the role that spirituality played in their Muslim–majority cultures of origin.
The session concluded with closing responses from the panelists. Skali agreed with the participant who had stated that, when discussing Muslim arts, the political context cannot be avoided. Politics affects economics, culture, and spirituality — it cannot be separated out. For Solotaroff, the political message of The 99 might be “if you can’t beat them, join them,” but its real aim is to project a new image of Islam within the Muslim world, which has been hijacked by the people “who make the most noise.” Rifaat and El Nadi said that for them, the critical issue with respect to religion is to encourage freedom of thought. Schuyler closed by noting that while everything does have a political dimension, this does not mean that everyone is or must always be politically engaged. He suggested that the message of The 99 is not “if you can’t beat them, join them,” but rather, “if you can’t beat them with the tools in your hand, infiltrate.”
The fourth session focused on art’s social dimension, both its capacity to integrate multiple cultural influences and the use of humor as a vehicle for commenting on politics and society. Participants drew examples from Sufi poetry, storytelling, hip hop, theater, and film, and examined the contemporary migration of literary, musical, and theatrical genres across cultural boundaries.
Moderator Bruce Lawrence, Profession of Religion at Duke University, opened the session by noting that Muslim storytelling often includes both pious and impious messages — and that the boundary between them can be hard to distinguish. He mentioned the ubiquity of figures like Nasr al–Din throughout the Muslim world, and observed that humor plays a central role in Muslim societies — a role that many outside observers today do not recognize.
The first speaker, writer and director Sulayman Al–Bassam of the Sabab Theater in Kuwait, addressed the theme of the fusion of multiple cultures and traditions in contemporary Muslim art, and specifically in his own work. Al–Bassam began his theater career in London in the 1990s, and moved back to Kuwait in 2001. His work is framed, he said, by two opposing narratives: on the one hand, the extreme violence typified by martyrdom and jihad; and on the other hand, the War on Terror. He sees a profound structural similarity between the two. The conflict between them, he said, is a focus of the theater work that he has been doing in Kuwait since 2002.
The social, political, and religious commentary of his plays has exposed Al–Bassam to the “hard” censorship of government authorities as well as the “soft” censorship of societal pressure. One route he has taken to avoid censorship is the use of texts from the canon of world literature; he has adapted and reworked Shakespeare’s plays into “Trojan horses” that enable him to explore contemporary societal issues. For example, “Al–Hamlet Summit” depicts a prince struggling with radical Islam. Al–Bassam’s plays are not direct translations — the end product is often very unlike the original — but working in translation allows him to invest the text with covert meaning.
Another approach to avoiding censorship that Al–Bassam has taken is the use of Arab–Islamic history as a mask of orthodoxy behind which he hopes to effect change. His play “The Mirror for Princes,” for instance, recounts the life of a 9th–century Abbasid ruler, but is actually a reflection on contemporary politics of empire and sectarian tensions that he hoped would “prick the conscience of the king.”
Al–Bassam suggested that his work can be seen as an example of transnational fusion, reflecting both the potential and the challenges of such projects. “Al–Hamlet Summit” was written and premiered in the United Kingdom, and subsequently traveled to the Tokyo International Arts Festival, Tehran, and Singapore. Although it was performed by a pan–Arab theater company, Al–Bassam described the play as a “failed” Trojan horse because it was never performed in the Arab world.
Al–Bassam went on to discuss his current production, “Richard III: An Arab Tragedy,” which is being presented as part of the Muslim Voices festival.20 Like his prior work, it uses an ostensibly foreign context — the England of Richard III — to examine regional issues: specifically, the misuse and abuse of power in the contemporary Persian Gulf. Unlike “Al–Hamlet Summit,” this work has successfully infiltrated the Arab world, with performances from Kuwait to Damascus, where it was seen by the President of Syria, Bashar Al–Asad. The play, echoing Shakespeare’s text, includes a reading of a list of those who have died in Richard III’s final battle. In Al–Bassam’s version, this includes Arab figures, one of them being murdered Lebanese intellectual Samir Kassir, who was known for his opposition to Syria’s military presence in Lebanon.21 Al–Bassam hoped that this would help open a space for critique of the regime.
Hamid Ismailov, novelist and head of the BBC’s Central Asia bureau, spoke next, addressing the impact that art can have as an oppositional tool as well as what the limits of this influence might be. Ismailov began by referencing the Granta Diary 2008: The Books They Tried to Ban (Granta Books, 2007), which lists books — including Lolita, The Origin of Species, and The Satanic Verses — that have been banned in different countries at different times for different reasons: sexual, religious, social, or political. In other words, opposition can arise in relation to many different things.
Turning to examples of oppositional art in the Muslim world, Ismailov cited the Uzbek tradition of erotic love poems, which were historically presented as metaphors in praise of the divine. For some writers, rebellion took the form of the decision to write in local languages rather than in Russian, while for women writers, writing as a woman was in itself an act of opposition.
At the beginning of the 20th century, he explained, opposition took the form of syntax; several poets were executed for writing in single words rather than in traditional phrases that placed the verb at the end of the construction. Then, when the Soviets took power in Uzbekistan in the 1920s, they re–canonized medieval literature while persecuting living poets who they considered “bourgeois individualists.”
Ismailov concluded with a caution against thinking primarily in oppositional terms: West versus East, West versus Islam, and so on. These oppositions merely replace Cold World terminology with a new “other.” He ended by suggesting to participants that what is needed is to develop alternatives to this oppositional way of thinking.
Neda Sarmast, documentary filmmaker and producer of the recent film Nobody’s Enemy, spoke third, using her experience as a case study that illustrated how art might serve as a space for fusion and for satire. Sarmast began by noting that although she has lived in the United States for most of her life, she was born in Iran and sees herself as connected to both places. In the United States, she has long found herself called to explain Iranian points of view and behavior, and vice versa when she is in Iran.
In Iran, she said, art has many purposes: it can be used as an oppositional tool, and it can also be used to bring people together. Prior to making her film, Sarmast had worked in the American music industry and toured with many artists, including Jon Bon Jovi. She saw first–hand art’s power to affect ordinary people. After September 11, 2001, she set out to change the skewed perceptions of Iran that she felt were being propagated in American media by making a movie featuring mainstream Iranians — not the extreme fringe.
After two years of fundraising, Sarmast traveled to Iran in 2005 to shoot what became Nobody’s Enemy: a documentary about the youth culture of Iran, including the vibrant Iranian hip hop scene. The film intends to entertain audiences rather than argue for a political point of view, Sarmast said. It offers a view of real people and how they live: the music they listen to, the food they eat, and how they relate to family and friends. Sarmast acknowledged that one film cannot fully explain an entire country, but it can help break down cultural stereotypes and barriers in a meaningful way.
Sarmast described the challenge of obtaining distribution for her film in the United States. One television station declined to air the film because its executives considered its positive portrayal of Iranian society to be “propaganda.” Without a TV or theatrical distributor, Sarmast has turned to less traditional venues. She has started screening the film on college campuses, speaking at conferences and other gatherings, and organizing smaller screenings for special groups, such as New York firefighters and police.
Sarmast described how making the film led her to discover the Iranian hip hop scene. She was surprised, at first, to find that Iranian youth had taken up a genre so clearly originating in American culture. But then she heard the result — a fusion of beats with poetry, which plays an important traditional role in Iranian culture. The vibrancy of Iran’s hip hop scene was all the more impressive to her since it is strictly underground; artists cannot release albums due to censorship, and therefore cannot make money from it. Nevertheless, Sarmast called hip hop the biggest trend in Middle Eastern music today.
Session discussant Richard Bulliet, Professor of History at Columbia University, began by recounting his own experience with censorship inside the United States. In the 1980s, he worked in the censorship division of CBS, one of America’s three major television networks. Americans rarely discuss censorship as a domestic issue — in fact, most of Bulliet’s colleagues later denied having been involved — but the practice is “the bread and butter of American culture,” he said.
Bulliet recounted how, under the Motion Picture Production Code, which was in effect from 1930 until 1968, every script produced in Hollywood was reviewed by the Production Code Administration. Much of the PCA’s work was done by one man, Joseph Breen, who imposed his own Roman Catholic tastes on an industry dominated by Jews, in a country primarily composed of Protestants. The PCA’s reign was enormously oppressive, Bulliet said, and segued into the black–listing that took place during the Cold War. In Bulliet’s view, the censorship of American movies and television reflects the country’s tendency to identify a knowable enemy — whether “deviants,” Communists, or Muslim extremists — and then obsess about that enemy to the exclusion of all others.
Bulliet then recalled Al–Bassam’s idea of art produced in exile acting as a “Trojan horse,” and noted that many artists from Muslim–majority countries share this ambition but fail to insert their work back into their societies of origin. What strategies can artists in exile employ to reach audiences in their original home countries? How should they relate to their host societies?
Bulliet agreed with Ismailov that there is danger in oppositional thinking, but noted that monolithic environments do exist, whether the monolith arises from the current American tendency to see Islam exclusively in terms of extremism or stems from the prevailing political and social climate in many Middle Eastern countries. He suggested that participants take the floor discussion as an opportunity to propose specific approaches for critics and satirists to adopt in order to effectively oppose these hegemonic systems.
The floor discussion initially focused on negative perceptions held about Muslims in the West. One participant commented that in Europe, people use the concept of “freedom of speech” to justify making insulting statements about Muslims. Anti–Semitic comments are considered racist and censured, but Islam is only considered a religion. It needs to be recognized that — like Judaism — Islam has racial, religious, and cultural components.
Another participant commented that Muslims are more integrated into American life than European life. Despite the geographical proximity and the shared history between Europe and the Islamic world, Europeans focus exclusively on “Judeo–Christian history.” Indeed, Richard Bulliet’s recent book, The Case for Islamo–Christian Civilization (Columbia University Press, 2004) points out that the phrase “Judeo–Christian” is relatively new, having gained popularity after World War II as a gesture of solidarity. Bulliet argues for the introduction of the phrase “Islamo–Christian,” to encourage recognition of the sibling relationship that exists between Christianity and Islam, as well.
In response to the challenges that several participants face in finding distribution for their work, one participant observed that the Western media are dependent on ratings and advertisers, and therefore on their ability to attract an audience. As a result, they often cater to what people want to hear or see, rather than what they need to hear and see. Are there parallel forces at work in the Muslim world? Another participant felt that this question assumed the existence of two opposing monoliths and that only by relinquishing this model will we be able to approach issues of difference and division from a “win/win” point of view.
Another participant suggested that education is the key to overcoming misperceptions of the Islamic world as a monolith. The great diversity of the Muslim world needs to be taught not only in the West, but in many countries whose education systems have been given over to groups with particular agendas. Kuwait, for instance, is a constitutional democracy, but the Muslim Brotherhood has come to dominate public education while the ruling family turns what the participant called a blind eye to the effects.
The Internet is a valuable tool for breaking down monoliths in the United States and in Muslim countries, another participant suggested. Has there been any measurable reaction from entrenched and long–standing assumptions and beliefs? In response, someone remarked on the growing number of blogs in the Muslim world; the trend has become pervasive in Turkey and Egypt, among other places. Some blogging does draw the attention of state governments and other authorities, but thus far, each time a government shuts down access to one site or proxy server, another opens up.
Another participant cited YouTube as a means of getting past censorship barriers in many Muslim countries. YouTube’s combination of user–produced videos and clips of broadcast content offers many people access to images of daily life, world news, and entertainment that they would otherwise miss. Sarmast mentioned that the Iranian hip hop artists featured in her documentary reach audiences almost exclusively through the Internet. Furthermore, since 2007, Farsi has become the tenth– largest blogging language on the web.22 Today, many second– and third–generation Persian–American families and other Diasporan communities are reconnecting with their roots online.
Another participant suggested that the Internet could serve as a platform for a modern version of the “citizen diplomacy” movement of the 1980s, which sought to end the Cold War by encouraging ordinary American citizens to visit the Soviet Union and get to know their counterparts there, in hopes of finding common ground. The movement’s efforts to engage diplomats and correspondents in discussions about a different point of view that focused on commonality rather than conflict contributed to an eventual shift in perception.
Changing perceptions of “the other” may be easier today, with the Internet providing more people access to more information, different perspectives, and new experiences. However, a final participant pointed out, while the rise of “soft media” such as blogging and social networking may present a less monolithic picture, it has also resulted in a decrease in “hard” investigative reporting.
Iqbal Riza, Under–Secretary General and Special Adviser for the Alliance of Civilizations to the Secretary General of the United Nations, spoke in his personal capacity to participants over lunch on June 7th. He began by observing that we live today in the shadow of the fallen Ottoman, Spanish, British, and French empires. Following World War II, the nations of the world were supposed to be equal, but this equality exists only in principle. Throughout history, human relations have been shaped by power, with the powerful dominating the weak. The impact that empires have had on their former colonies persists today. Acknowledging that power shapes societies leads to the question: how is that power exercised?
To explore this question, Riza drew upon two concepts articulated by the political scientist Joseph Nye: “hard power” and “soft power”.23 Both are means of subjugation, with hard power referring to military, industrial, and technological power, and soft power referring to cultural domination over societies, whether accomplished by tradition, example, persuasion, or intimidation. It is easy to see hard power, but soft power, though less visible, also controls. Soft power manifests itself in the Coca–Cola, McDonald’s, and Popeye’s locations found throughout the developing world.
Global media also wield soft power. The media are most often independent of government, but have their own worldview and agenda. Al Jazeera, for example, works within the framework defined by CNN, following its 24–hour news coverage model and aiming at the standard it has established. Popular media, such as Hollywood films, have an even wider impact, an impact that becomes negative only when it propagates stereotypes and prejudices.
Today, soft power continues to function according to colonial models. The formerly colonized still look to the metropole for culture and ideas, for recognition of artistic achievement, and even for their own history. In this sense, colonialism is still with us, just as Orientalism and racism are still with us. In other words, soft power is a historical process.
Of course, Riza noted, hard power still reigns politically. It remains an obstacle to free interaction between individuals, specifically in the divide between what are referred to as the “Western world” and the “Muslim world.”
Today people live in an age of extremism and terrorism, performed by both state and non–state actors. The United Nations Alliance of Civilizations was established in 2005 on the initiative of the Prime Ministers of Spain and Turkey, respectively José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, to build cultural bridges that can connect not just governments, but societies.24 Riza noted that this effort differs from interfaith efforts, and operates more along the lines of Samuel Huntington’s clash of civilizations thesis, although this thesis is recognized as problematic.25
The foundations of the Alliance of Civilizations, which President Obama mentioned in his June 4th Cairo address, were led by the report of twenty eminent persons from member states of the United Nations — the High Level Group. The report of the High Level Group concluded that religion is not the root of this confrontation between the Muslim world and the West. Rather, the confrontation stems from the exploitation of religion for ideological and political reasons. The report was accepted by the entire membership of the High Level Group, which include former President Khatami of Iran, a Russian Middle East scholar, a Jewish leader in the United States, and a Jewish leader from the Middle East.
The report pointed to two other roots of the current confrontation. The first is the history of Western involvement in the East since World War II. According to the report, this involvement consists of the creation of Israel in historic Palestine in 1948; the invasion of the Suez by France, Britain, and Israel in 1956; the 1967 Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories; the United States’s post–9/11 attack on Afghanistan — which resulted from a horrible provocation — and the entirely gratuitous invasion of Iraq in 2003.
The second root of the current confrontation, according to the Alliance’s report, is the stagnation of Muslim societies. This refers to the failure of these societies to adapt to the world as it has changed. Today, Riza said, Muslim societies are characterized by repression, both in so–called republics as well as in kingdoms. This repression is particularly harsh against women, and includes the refusal to recognize the popular will.
Riza concluded by noting that his comments with respect to Muslim societies are negative, but he hails from the Muslim society of Pakistan, which is today the most violent place in the world. He closed by observing that the effort to build cultural bridges is impeded by the harsh realities he described, but not obliterated. It is imperative to persevere.
In this session, participants were asked to consider the roles that artists and patrons — public and private, religious and secular, domestic and international — play in generating “cultural capital.” How can cultural capital, including commercial output, be harnessed to support substantive dialogue and relationships among global populations? Moderator Farhan Nizami, Director of the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies at the University of Oxford, opened by urging participants to focus on practical ways in which the arts can contribute to mutual understanding.
Nizami described diplomacy as “the art of providing ladders for people to climb down.” Cultural diplomacy can make these ladders stable and comfortable; perhaps more importantly, it can suggest a desire to understand the narrative of the other, without trying to influence or reinterpret it. Whereas diplomacy is what takes place between states, cultural diplomacy takes place between societies. It can build bridges between them, but the bridges’ strength depends on people appreciating the cultural variations that they experience.
Nizami concluded his introduction with two broad points. First, if the purpose of this project is to understand the narrative of “the other,” there are many positive potential results. If we could make Baghdad as familiar a cultural reference point as Venice, for example, it would put a face on human suffering and sensitize us to the Iraqis’ pain, which we all too often ignore. Second, we need to develop a new vocabulary that distinguishes between art and culture, makes authenticity a requirement for legitimacy, and prioritizes the examination of values that all understand but do not necessarily share.
The first speaker, Zarqa Nawaz, addressed the issue of how art and cultural capital can promote mutual understanding between Muslim and non–Muslim individuals, communities, and nation–states, taking into account her own experience as the creator and executive producer of the Canadian sitcom “Little Mosque on the Prairie.” Nawaz came to be a producer in a roundabout way: she is the child of immigrant parents who encouraged her to become a doctor, and she studied science in college. After not passing the medical school entrance exam, she turned to journalism, working for a while for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC), Canada’s national television channel.
Eventually, Nawaz realized that she wanted to tell her own story, and decided to move into film. She made several short satirical films as well as a documentary, Me and the Mosque, which explored how Wahhabi imams affect the lives of Muslim men and women in the West. The film stemmed from Nawaz’s personal experience; after moving to western Canada with her husband, their small, liberal mosque was transformed when a Saudi Arabian imam imposed gender segregation.
Nawaz began to wonder what a mosque would be like if it grew organically within its community and was inspired to create “Little Mosque on the Prairie.” The show’s imam is a former big–city lawyer who has a calling to become an imam and is posted to a small mosque on the Canadian prairie. The show includes seven Muslim characters that play on different archetypes — for example, the stringent South Asian immigrant who doubts the new imam partly because he is beardless. CBC bought the show — initially ordering eight episodes, but increasing the order to twenty for the second season. “Little Mosque” is now the channel’s highest–rated sitcom; it revitalized the network at a time when the Canadian government was considering funding cuts. The show has been sold to 60 countries and can also be seen on YouTube.
Tahar ben Jelloun, poet and writer and recipient of numerous awards, including the Prix Goncourt, addressed how inequalities of power and money impact cultural exchanges, and how this impact might be minimized. As an illustration, Ben Jelloun read a selection from his latest novel, Au Pays (Gallimard éditions, 2009). The main character, Mohamed, is a Moroccan émigré in his 60s. Although illiterate, his most prized possession is his copy of the Quran. Ben Jelloun emphasized that illiteracy did not mean that Mohamed is without culture; the Quran is his culture, his identity, his passport, and his pride.
Ben Jelloun suggested that it is not an accident that increasing numbers of people are embracing Islam, even though it has come under suspicion in recent years. This increase is creating fear and jealousy in Americans, he said, who only see Islam as “poverty and bombs.” His character Mohamed would not have had the courage to respond to this jealousy and would have instead taken solace in the Quran. Indeed, at the end of Au Pays, Mohamed returns to Morocco, but his children remain in France. They are happy, but they have new problems — French problems. Mohamed does not resent the West, which was his home for 40 years; all along, the message of the Quran, the book he could not read, was in his heart, and comforted him.
The third speaker, Pennie Ojeda, Director of International Activities at the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), presented her work with the NEA as a case study of how to manage the power equation in cultural exchanges. She focused on a current NEA project with the Pakistani government, in which the U.S. would publish an anthology of Pakistani poetry, and Pakistan would publish an anthology of American poetry.
Ojeda began by noting that, unlike many other countries, the United States has no “Ministry of Culture”; instead, it has several arts and culture–focused agencies, including the National Endowment for the Arts. The NEA supports domestic organizations engaged in cultural projects on a national scale, but it also supports some international projects, usually in coordination with private organizations. The NEA itself operates with a staff of 150 people; its annual budget of $155 million funds all government–supported art in the United States.
Ojeda described the international literary exchange between the NEA and Pakistan’s Ministry of Culture as a work in progress; the specific goal is to promote the availability, in Pakistan, of American poetry translated into Urdu. But publishing the counterpart anthology of Urdu poetry translated into English has presented several bureaucratic challenges. In order to select a publisher — Eastern Washington University Press — the NEA had to undertake a time–consuming grant competition. The government of Pakistan, on the other hand, was able to designate the Pakistani Academy of Letters. The “power equation,” in other words, does not always give the U.S. the advantage.
The translation process has also taken more time in the U.S., Ojeda explained, because it was difficult to find Urdu–English literary translators. Nor could the NEA underwrite the cost of publication, which meant that Eastern Washington University press had to be able to publish a marketable book. This made publishing a bilingual book, as will be done in Pakistan, impossible; in the United States, the poetry anthology will be published exclusively as a translation. It will not include the original Urdu text.
Ojeda said that although the project has created relationships between the NEA and the Parkistani Ministry of Culture, the true cultural exchange will begin once the anthologies are published. The next phase of the project will involve sending American poets to Pakistan and bringing Pakistani poets to the U.S. for a promotional book tour. Six American universities have committed to hosting events with students, as will the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. At this point, a cultural dialogue involving audiences will begin, hopefully leading to the establishment of substantive positive relationships.
In the United States, Ojeda explained, the Department of State is the agency generally responsible for cultural diplomacy, but cultural diplomacy is precisely where arts–driven government initiatives can take the lead. In the case of the poetry exchange with Pakistan, it may complement government objectives, but does not intend or expect to fulfill them. The interpersonal relationships created by this project will continue to develop over time, regardless of the status of the political relationship between the two governments.
Discussant Rachel Cooper, Director of Cultural Programs and Performing Arts at The Asia Society, began by observing that the speakers generally appeared wary or critical of government–initiated exchanges, but that this might reflect a problem of nomenclature. She asked that during the floor discussion, participants look at pragmatic ways of reaching people: what are the goals of each project, and what are the agendas of the organizations responsible for carrying them out.
Cooper suggested that one idea is to build relationships not just between artists and audiences, but between people who coordinate exhibits and performances in different countries. Exhibitors’ support can help foster a culture of listening — not only in the sense of experiencing different art forms — but, more broadly, a culture of curiosity. Real listening means being invested in what is being heard and curious to the point of seeking out more.
Cooper closed by stating that if globalization has indeed made the world “flat,” as Thomas Friedman has suggested, then it is time to use the arts to find ways to bring people together. This also means defining what kind of impact arts initiatives can have and how to measure it. Should the impact be visible immediately, or after ten years of work? How is it manifested?
Discussion began with one participant citing the example of state–initiated cultural exchange between the United States and the Soviet Union in the 1980s. The Soviets sent a hundred–person dance company that performed on the popular Ed Sullivan Show and then live for ten weeks to sold–out shows. The dance troupe successfully changed Americans’ image of what Soviets were like, and the American government scrambled to put together a dance troupe of their own. Avoiding government co–optation is of paramount importance for cultural exchange projects to succeed, the participant cautioned.
Authenticity and legitimacy are also factors to consider when assessing the success of cultural exchanges. For example, in Nawaz’s mosque in western Canada, the foreign Wahhabi imam was granted legitimacy because the community saw him as authentic, even though there was a different local authenticity. How is authenticity viewed, and which authenticity is granted greater power? Understanding requires privileging local specificity as authentic, the participant suggested, while remaining cognizant of outside factors that are potentially legitimate as well.
Another participant noted that cultural diplomacy assumes that education will have a direct and immediate impact. However, evaluating changes in perception is difficult, particularly when judging from a community rather than individual level. How many people must an initiative reach in order to make change happen? For example, how many people will the NEA poetry exchange reach, and how does the organization determine what number is sufficient?
One participant reflected on the plot of ben Jelloun’s novel, describing the character Mohamed’s experience as a “missed cultural exchange.” Although this is a fictional example, it describes a very real problem. In the book, Mohamed lived in France for forty years; he benefited from many societal advantages but remained untouched and untouchable by French culture, never participating in any true exchange.
Several participants discussed the cultural dimension of the war in Iraq. One mentioned the pillaging of the Baghdad Museum and other cultural repositories in 2003 and 2004, in which cultural artifacts of inestimable value were stolen. Would it be possible to create legislation granting amnesty to those who return the objects to the Iraqi state? The legislation would be a major political act, and would acknowledge that the war was not only political, but also contributed to robbing a nation of its culture and patrimony.
Another participant pointed out that individual expression of culture can have huge impacts. For example, a concert at the Fes Festival in which one singer chanted in Arabic, Berber, and Hebrew became a three–page story in The New York Times. Although the Judeo–Arab tradition was familiar to Moroccans, it was completely surprising to Americans. This musical tradition, which emerged from a long history that remains largely unknown in the Western world, helped deconstruct American prejudices.
The session concluded with final comments from each speaker. Ben Jelloun commented that authors from the Muslim world who write in European languages are producing original works of “cultural transposition.” Through literature, these writers invite a new audience to enter the intimate life of a different society. Although literature in translation can play an important role as well, those who write directly in European languages should be considered true (non–political and non–ideological) cultural ambassadors.
Nawaz concluded by noting that patriarchy and sexism are not inherent to Islam — they are problematic tendencies of every organized religion. In her opinion, conservative foreign imams, such as the one who came to her mosque, mix patriarchy with theology and bring sexism into the Muslim faith. With respect to the challenges of distribution, Nawaz noted that the audience for “Little Mosque on the Prairie” is predominantly non–Muslim; they watch the show because they find it funny. Upon the show’s launch, it received an unexpected publicity boost from the media, which predicted controversial reactions in the wake of the 2006 Danish cartoon crisis. However, its long–term success resulted not just from the sensationalism that put the show on Canada’s cultural radar, but from creating accessible content that continues to attract viewers.
Cooper closed the session by observing that exhibitors, artists, and patrons do not work in isolation — their impact depends on the broader context. Today, that context is shifting: President Obama’s speech in Cairo frames the cultural exchange in a new, more positive way. Even Fox News, Cooper claimed, is reacting to this shift as commentators with narrow worldviews are finding fewer receptive listeners. She hoped that the practitioners of cultural diplomacy can capitalize on this trend, and turn this “stream of cultural understanding into a river.”
In this session, participants were asked to propose practical steps for government and private institutions involved in cultural exchange to maximize their abilities to meaningfully promote mutual understanding on a person–to–person as well as state–to–state level. Moderator Stephen Heintz, President of The Rockefeller Brothers Fund, opened by asking the speakers to directly address how U.S. cultural diplomacy can be used to achieve the vision that President Obama described in Cairo. Heintz acknowledged the many structural, operational, and political challenges that organizations face, and, since the panelists were primarily American, asked Muslim and non–American participants to actively contribute to the floor discussion.
Frank Hodsoll, Chair of the Center for Arts and Culture at George Mason University and former head of the National Endowment for the Arts, addressed the session’s theme of “next steps” through the lens of encouraging cultural exchanges. He highlighted the need for public and private sectors to facilitate exchanges large and small. To his mind, the public sector should focus on specific public policy goals, while the private sector should focus on artistic or individual goals. He also noted that the private sector includes NGOs, corporations, educational and religious institutions, and foundations for which culture is not the main thrust.
Hodsoll suggested that long–term cultural relationships are best nurtured at a distance from government and at a peer–to–peer level: parent to parent, artist to artist, scientist to scientist. The government can help with development, education, and health efforts, but its cultural resources are minuscule compared to the private sector. Today, government institutions lack the necessary variety of cultural affairs officers, as well as the capacity to train them.
Hodsoll compared the situation in 2009 with the challenges that the U.S. faced in the Cold War, suggesting that the most salient difference is the involvement of non–state actors. During the Cold War, the conflicting ideologies were held by nation–states; today, conflict involves smaller groups. In the contemporary era, global power is increasingly defined by networks: by what persons or organizations are connected to what others. Hodsoll referenced a recent speech by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, in which she stated that now is the time to deploy the tools of diplomacy and redefine political engagement between actors — including NGOs, businesses, and individuals.
One of the great sources of America’s national power is the strength of its civil society, Hodsoll stated. American civil society organizations today are engaged in numerous overseas programs, but the government knows little about them — and nor do they always know about one another’s efforts. Hodsoll suggested that these efforts — private and public — could benefit from the increased use of new technologies, including text messaging. Cell phones are prevalent in the Muslim world, even in places where access to the Internet is rare.
Hodsoll concluded by suggesting that cultural engagement can help end the “cycle of suspicion” between American and Muslim world societies, but that the United States needs to devote more public resources to the effort, as well as to strengthen civil societies’ capacity to engage directly with one another.
The second speaker, William Luers, former ambassador and recently retired President of the United Nations Association of the United States, looked to American history for other models of cultural diplomacy. Luers began by noting that most of his diplomatic experience took place during the Cold War, and suggested that while we must find new ways to communicate, there are lessons that can be learned from that period.
Luers noted that July 2009 marked the 50th anniversary of the first American National Exhibition in Moscow, which introduced Russian people to American lifestyles and technologies, and led to many other exhibits that toured the Soviet Union for the following 30 years. American presidents personally committed large funds to promoting these programs, and major cultural figures contributed their efforts to make these exhibitions successful. Luers noted that he himself escorted Edward Albee, John Steinbeck, John Cheever, and John Updike to the Soviet Union and saw first–hand the impact that these cultural exchanges had in both directions.
However, Luers stated that the current situation is considerably different. Cultural exchange during the Cold War was grounded in a competition of ideas and the belief that one side was superior. The United States cannot hold this point of view regarding Islam: today, the challenge is to blend cultures rather than compete. Whereas the Cold War was a conflict between two superpowers of relatively equal weight, the Islamic world sees itself as a victim of interventionism and colonialism; engagement requires the U.S. to be far more sensitive.
First, the Obama government should commit to training every major U.S. official in the basics of the language and culture of the people with whom he or she interacts. This will give their positions respect and credibility. The U.S. should also commit to symbolic acts that may involve cultural organizations, such as a recent proposal that an Iranian presidential candidate visit New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, which has an extensive Islamic arts collection. Luers concluded by suggesting that at the governmental level, the primary objective should be the identification and public funding of long–term programs.
The third speaker, Anne Imelda Radice, Director of the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), commented on how she tries to enact the principle of mutual respect through her institute. The institute, she explained, encompasses 18,000 museums and 23,000 libraries and operates on a $300 million annual budget, $50 million of which is dedicated to international efforts. IMLS’s recent international work includes adapting the National Endowment of the Arts’s “Big Read” program for Egypt, Mexico, and China,26 and sending 36,000 sets of reproductions of American art abroad. In partnership with the American Film Institute, IMLS imports films, even those critical of the United States, to expose Americans to new international voices. She stressed the importance of outreach efforts that extend beyond America’s big cities and reach the general public.
The fourth speaker, Sharon Memis, Director of the British Council USA, presented a case study of the British Council’s cultural exchange efforts across the globe. She began by noting that the British Council was created by royal charter in 1934 in Cairo to combat the threat of fascism.27 However, over time, the organization has come to operate at arm’s length from the government. It has offices in such controversial locations as Burma, Palestine, and Zimbabwe, and had offices in Iran until they were shut earlier in 2009. The British Council tries to act as a “window on the world” wherever it operates.
Memis defined its activities as “cultural relations” rather than cultural diplomacy, noting that “diplomacy” implies a certain official political agenda rather than a real exchange aimed at earning trust. One of the challenges of an enterprise such as the British Council is setting goals and knowing how to measure success. The Council has recently focused on strengthening its strategic framework, focusing more on the intention behind each program and tracking its progress, rather than simply supporting “art for art’s sake.”
As an example, Memis cited a major new project, “Our Shared Europe,” which launched in late 2008 and aims to change perceptions of Muslims in the United Kingdom and Europe more broadly. Despite their shared history and the 15 million Muslims in western Europe today, Europeans harbor a deep ignorance about who Muslims are. Issues like immigration and recent efforts to keep Turkey out of the EU have resulted in writing Islam out of Europe’s history. “Our Shared Europe” tries to shape a new shared narrative in which Muslims are an integral part of Europe’s past, present, and future. Until Europe can come to terms with Islam “at home,” Memis suggested, there is little point in trying to build bridges internationally. The goal is to make everybody proud of their origins — and to communicate that Europeans live in a multi–cultural, not monolithic, environment.
Discussant Margaret Ayers, President of the Robert Sterling Clark Foundation, began by noting that since the end of the Cold War, there has been a major disinvestment in the arts by both public and private sectors in the U.S. She linked this to the culture wars of the 1990s and to the 1999 elimination of the United States Information Agency (USIA), the American public diplomacy organization that was folded into the Department of State. From 2001 to 2007, the State Department’s annual budget for initiatives using the arts as cultural diplomacy never exceeded $7 million, while by comparison the British Council spends nearly one billion dollars annually on cultural relations. Even the Netherlands spends $13 million per year solely to promote Dutch art in the United States.
Ayers expressed her hope that the Obama administration would strengthen the United States’s commitment to international cultural exchange and would help create a unified vision for the NEA, NEH, and other government bodies, which currently have widely differing mandates. A commitment of this kind will require not only more money, but also more effective fin ancial management, and the pursuit of long–term efforts by various actors based on a single vision.
The first participant contrasted the current situation in the United States with that of France, where the Sarkozy government has dedicated major resources to cultural relations. Whereas for example only 3% of books published in the United States are translations of works originally published in other languages, works in translation make up 45% of literary output in France. This is not just a government problem; American publishing houses cannot afford to publish world literature as long as the American public shows no curiosity in translated works. Nevertheless, introducing writers from different cultures to one another and to readers could begin shifting awareness.
Another participant agreed, stressing the importance of an authentic movement that can educate and interest average Americans about the cultures beyond their own borders. How do we avoid “preaching to the choir” (those who are already interested in and knowledgeable about the Muslim world) and bring the message to the wider public, the participant asked.
Another participant noted that the United States Department of State’s annual budget for international exchange programs, which includes educational programs such as the Fulbright Exchange as well as arts programs, is in the hundreds of millions. The State Department considers cultural relations a high priority, but is dependent on Congress to allocate a budget sufficient to undertake these efforts.
Cultural exchange is not always symmetrical, another participant recognized. In his view, many Americans are genuinely interested in learning about “the other.” However, artists from Muslim cultures may be more interested in raising their visibility or acquiring technical skills. In order to be successful, exchange programs need to be mutually beneficial.
Cultural exchanges are often described as exercises in “soft power.” One participant noted that “soft power” does not exist on its own: it is connected to and contingent on “hard power,” and can only be ethical if it is self–critical. Otherwise, it is coercive in nature and people will confront rather than engage with it. Another participant agreed that soft power or cultural diplomacy will not work if the exercise is perceived as aiding repression or oppression or seeking hegemony. This is not an issue for the United States alone: the participant noted that people in Pakistan often ask him how to improve Pakistan’s image abroad. The answer, he said, is for them to improve their reality.
American hard power has not always been exercised in a negative or hostile way vis–à–vis the Muslim world, a participant pointed out. In Bosnia and Kosovo as well as during the Suez crisis, it was used to positive ends as far as Muslims are concerned. It is the U.S.’s continuing support of Israel’s occupation of Palestinian lands that is at the root of the rage felt in a large part of the Muslim world. The American presence in Afghanistan is also perceived as an occupation, as is its presence in Iraq. As long as these perceived occupations persist, the impact of soft power or cultural diplomacy is very limited.
Other participants focused on the potential shift in relations represented by President Obama’s June 4th speech in Cairo. Obama addressed Muslims as a mature audience, treating them with respect and understanding, while also speaking to them about difficult topics like violence and Israel. Even well–intentioned Westerners generally speak as if Islam is a global monolith; Obama reminded his Muslim audience of the fact that, according to the Quran, it is the conscience of the individual person that is responsible to God for his or her behavior, without any intermediary. Another participant noted that President Obama’s speech not only acknowledged that extremists do not represent the majority of the Muslim world, but he also recognized the essential fact that Islam is a part of the American story.
President Obama’s speech is a good beginning, another panelist said, but the United States needs continuing internal diplomacy to convince Americans to view Muslims as a positive force and as part of the global community. Americans’ willingness to elect an African–American president shows that a widespread shift in perception is possible. Once the West’s perception of the Muslim world changes, it is possible to conceive of real political change. It is not necessary to wait until the situation in the Middle East is fixed for effective cultural exchange.
Another participant stressed that, in order to change public opinion in the Muslim world, Americans need to engage at official levels. Cultural diplomacy cannot just be left to the private sector, which is too subject to market forces. The government must get involved in order to realize a consistent strategic structure for dialogue. On the other hand, another participant noted that one reason for the lack of “long–term” strategies at the federal level is that any truly long–term vision would exceed a Presidential term, making it politically and logistically difficult. While measuring progress is important, it is difficult to assess long–term impact on a month to month or even year to year basis.
Long–term planning is an objective in the Muslim world as well as the West, a participant commented. Several Middle Eastern countries have opened “branch campuses” of Western universities; building educational institutions takes a long time but increases local capabilities more so than importing a model from elsewhere. Yet these university campuses may offer new opportunities for exchange, such as videoconferencing between students taking comparable classes in Kuwait and New Hampshire, for example. These programs could be difficult to control in any direct way, but could be low–cost, immediate, and effective in the short term.
Discussion turned to the need to bring artists and institutions together to improve strategic planning. Training practitioners in the private sphere, as Luers had suggested for government officials, would help make cultural organizations’ work more effective as well. In this participant’s opinion, many U.S. performing arts institutions are simply ill–prepared to implement programs on a large scale. Another participant pointed to the lack of a national cultural organization as the underlying reason. Funding, logistics, and other hurdles restrict projects like “Muslim Voices: Arts and Ideas” to major urban centers, where they reach a geographically limited audience. How do we reach people from California to Oklahoma to Rhode Island? One suggestion was to mobilize American popular culture and celebrity in support of the arts.
Heintz asked the speakers to offer final thoughts. Hodsoll suggested several next steps, including inventorying the efforts of various institutions, public as well as private, and assessing their impact, positive and negative, to develop a long–term strategy. He encouraged the search for areas of common artistic interest between cultures, such as hip hop music, as well as for new and improved channels of distribution so that cultural exchanges can have an impact on mainstream audiences. He also noted that there will always be government policies that are unpopular in other places. The role of cultural diplomacy is to create other contexts for communication, even when people disagree over policy.
Ayers directed her suggestions at the Obama administration, encouraging it to adopt a program of strategic action regarding cultural initiatives that would combine long–term commitment with greater financial support. She also suggested that the administration oversee the creation of a semi–autonomous government institution, such as the now–defunct Arts International, that can train artists from abroad.
Luers emphasized the need for new terminology. The terms “soft power” and “cultural diplomacy” both shoehorn art into a functional role. Instead, arts should be thought of as a way to communicate on the basis of parity, which also requires being far more learned, careful, and sensitive to the needs of others. He agreed that it may be time for the establishment of a new USIA–like institution that can take arts initiatives out of the realm of the State Department. The government must change its cynical attitude towards art.
Radice, too, saw the need for a new U.S. institution that can receive funds from government and private sources and can spend them internationally. She suggested that organizations focus on programs that can be carried out over a two—to—three—year period and that other institutions can mine for “best practices.”
Memis separated cultural relations from the notion of “soft power” and insisted on organizations’ need for a transparent long–term strategy in the form of a publicly available plan. The Muslim world recognizes propaganda and is not fooled by it. The British Council views the arts as one of the most important tools for cultural relations, but not in an instrumentalist way. Hence it does not commission work, but rather puts artists together in a given context — including outside major metropolitan areas. Making public subsidies available for this type of effort is crucial.
Heintz drew the session to a close with a summary of several key observations, conclusions, and recommendations. Among the themes that arose over the course of the conference were: the need to recognize the great diversity that exists within the Muslim world, even as this complicates initiatives aimed at dialogue; the inherent value of the arts as a tool for creating mutual understanding, despite the challenges of the current political climate; and the importance of approaching the Muslim world with respect, empathy, and parity, as opposed to the climate of competition that prevailed during the Cold War.
Heintz noted that the suggestions directed at cultural institutions focused on the need for cooperation, communication, and long–term strategic planning. Institutions should target artists and venues outside those in the major cities and those that are already internationally known. In order for these initiatives to succeed, many participants felt that they must begin with listening and learning about “the other,” including Muslim communities in the West. The corporate sector, as well as the non–profit community, needs to be convinced to provide financial support for these endeavors.
The U.S. government must also commit significant funding for arts initiatives aimed at Muslim–Western understanding. Many participants felt the need for a government body, separate from the Department of State, dedicated to fostering cultural initiatives. This organization must recognize the inherent power of art and culture in their own right, not just as political tools. Finally, the federal government must amend legislation that hampers these initiatives, such as overly tight visa restrictions and certain terms of the Patriot Act, which currently discourage organizations from bringing Muslim artists to the U.S. and limit U.S. funding institutions’ ability to make grants in the Muslim world.
Mustapha Tlili concluded the conference by marveling that an event that he and Karen Brooks Hopkins had first conceived of in early 2006 could succeed in producing the tremendous wealth of ideas that he heard over the previous two days. By electing President Obama, the American people paved the way for a paradigm shift in U.S.–Muslim world relations. The organizers never could have foreseen that the conference would take place in such a receptive climate.
Nevertheless, real challenges remain. Where we go from here requires dealing with difficult political realities that call for nuanced understandings. After President Obama’s speech in Cairo, commentators in the Muslim world were cautiously optimistic. They are looking for real change on the ground before they start celebrating. The task for conference participants is to contribute to initiatives that will help those in the West understand more about the Muslim world, and vice versa. Arts and culture can create common ground and relationships between people that will outlast political realities.
Tlili told participants that the conference report would be disseminated to government and civil society institutions and he hoped that, in this new climate of understanding, its conclusions and recommendations would be taken seriously and put into practice. He also, hoped that, if a follow–up conference is held in a few years time, there would be much to celebrate.
Tlili closed by thanking all those who participated in the conversation, as well as conference observers. He thanked the Muslim Voices partners, Vishakha Desai of The Asia Society and Karen Brooks Hopkins of Brooklyn Academy of Music, and their staffs. Finally, he thanked the NYU Center for Dialogues staff, and in particular the three program assistants — Sara Courtney Brown, Evian Patterson, and Helena Zeweri — whose tireless efforts made the conference such a success.
1 For the full text of this speech, see http://www.whitehouse.gov/the_press_office/Remarks-by-the-President-at-Cairo-University-6-04-09/.
2 For the full report of this conference, see http://islamuswest.org/publications_islam_and_the_West/Who_Speaks_For_Islam/.
3 Zitouna University, part of the Tunisian university system, is the modern–day incarnation of the renowned institute of Muslim higher education associated with the Zitouna Mosque, which was founded in the 8th century CE. Today it is divided into two sections: the Higher Institute of Theology, and the Higher Institute of Islamic Civilization.
4 The Qajar dynasty ruled Iran from 1794 until 1925, when the coup d’état undertaken by Reza Khan (ruling as the shah Reza Pahlavi) was formally recognized by Iran’s national assembly.
5 See note 1.
6 For more on the West–Eastern Divan Orchestra, see http://west-easterndivan.artists.warner.de/.
7 For a full description of this event, see http://muslim voicesfestival.org/event/youssou-n%27dour. For Associated Press coverage of the concert, see http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/U/US_MUSLIM_MUSIC_ CONTROVERSY?SITE=IADES&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT.
8 For more on this event, see http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9E06E1D8123FF932A15753C1A9639C8B63.
9 See note 1.
10 For the full review, see http://www.beliefnet.com/Faiths/Islam/2009/03/Crusading-for-Modern-Islamic-Art.aspx.
11 For more about Ahmed Moustafa, see http://www.fenoon.com/artist/artist.html.
12 For a recent article about M. F. Husain’s work and the controversies it has sparked, see http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/09/world/asia/09india.html.
13 For more information about this book and Black Dog Publishing, see http://blackdogonline.com/all-books/contemporary-art-in-the-middle-east.html.
14 For more about the Silk Road Project, see www.silkroad project.org.
15 For more on Abdurahim Hamidov, see Jean During, “Snapshot: Abdurahim Hamidov — An Eminent Contemporary Master,” Garland Encyclopedia of World Music, edited by Ruth M. Stone, James Porter, and Timothy Rice (Routledge, 2004).
16 For more on Mark Weil’s murder, see http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/08/world/asia/08weil.html.
17 The text of this verse, which is generally considered an endorsement of pluralism and diversity, reads: “O mankind! We created you from a single pair of a male and a female, and made you into nations and tribes, that you may know one another. The most honorable of you in the sight of God is the most righteous among you. Truly, God is All–Knowing, and All–Aware.”
18 For more about this exhibit, see http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20090615/lf_nm_life/us_usa_afghanistan_gold_1.
19 For more about these organizations and their work, see http://www.akdn.org/.
20 For the New York Times’s review of this production, see http://theater2.nytimes.com/2009/06/11/theater/reviews/11brantley.html.
21 Kassir was killed in June 2005 by a bomb placed under the driver’s seat of his car; while there was little evidence to suggest the identity of the killers, Kassir’s murder was widely attributed to the Syrian government. For more on the murder, see http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/03/international/middleeast/03lebanon.html?scp=1&sq=samir%20kassir&st=cse.
22 An April 2007 report by E–Marketer, “Blogs Rank Among Top Websites,” lists Farsi as the tenth–most–popular blogging language in the world. See http://www.emarketer.com/Results.aspx?N=0&Ntk=basic&Ntt=farsi%20blogging. According to Internet World Stats’ 2009 report, Arabic is the eighth–most–used language on the web. See http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats7.htm. English, which remains the most–used language, is used by 29.1% of Internet users.
23 For more on these concepts, see Nye’s Soft Power: The Means to Success in World Politics (Public Affairs, 2005).
24 For more about the Alliance of Civilizations, see http://www.unaoc.org/.
25 For more about Huntington’s thesis, see his book The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (Simon & Schuster, 1998).
26 For more information about the “Big Read” program, see http://www.neabigread.org/. For more on the Institute of Museum and Library Services’s involvement, see http://www.imls.gov/about/bigread.shtm.
27 Italian governmental and non–governmental cultural organizations were active throughout the Middle East in this period, and particularly targeted local youth for cultural activities and — in some cases — trips to Italy.
Muslim Voices opening: Youssou N’Dour concert at Brooklyn Academy of Music
21:45
Muslim Voices opening: reception
9:30–10:30 Opening Session
9:30–9:45 Welcome
9:30–9:35 Mustapha Tlili, Founder and Director, Center for Dialogues: Islamic World–U.S.–The West, New York University
9:35–9:40 Karen Brooks Hopkins, President, Brooklyn Academy of Music
9:40–9:45 Vishakha Desai, President, Asia Society
9:45–10:15 Opening Statement Mustapha Tlili Conference Chairman
10:45–12:30
Session I: World of the Artist — Landscapes of Creativity and Art in Question
This session examines the individual and collective life experiences of artists, whether writers, musicians, dancers, or visual artists. It asks: How do artists fit into Muslim world societies, both in the past and today? What socio–economic position do they occupy, and what moral space do they inhabit? It also looks at how “art” has been defined in different places and times, questioning the meaning of distinctions such as “art” versus “craft,” and considering how performance intended as religious ritual differs from that aimed at a public audience.
10:45–10:50
Moderator: Samina Quraeshi, Gardner Fellow and Visiting Artist, Peabody Museum of Archeology and Ethnology, Harvard University, U.S.A. / Pakistan
10:50–11:00
How do Muslim artists fit into cosmopolitan cultural environments?
This question considers the complex, multi–layered cultural contexts in which many people — including Muslim artists — live today. How do they negotiate the cultures in which they live, and with which they interact in their professional and private lives?
Speaker: Huzir Sulaiman, dramatist, Malaysia
11:00–11:10
What are the implications of how artists are defined in the Muslim world?
In many parts of the world, artists have historically been somewhat marginal figures. How are artists defined in various parts of today’s Muslim world, and how are those definitions impacted by access to professional training, degrees of religiosity, and exposure to outside notions of arts and artisanal crafts?
Speaker: Anthony Shay, Assistant Professor of Dance and Cultural Studies, Pomona College, U.S.A.
11:10–11:20
Case study: An artist’s experience
What led this artist to take up his particular art form? What training or education did he have? How does he define himself as an “artist,” and what does the term mean to his family and friends? With what cultural and artistic traditions does he affiliate, and how does this impact his art?
Speaker: Mourad Sakli, musicologist, composer, Director, Centre des Musiques Arabes et Méditerranéennes, Tunisia
11:20–11:30
Discussant: Joni Cherbo, Executive Director of the Resource Center for Cultural Engagement, U.S.A.
11:30–12:30 Floor discussion
12:30–14:00
Lunch for participants with keynote remarks by Karen Brooks Hopkins, President, Brooklyn Academy of Music
14:15–16:00
Session II: World of the Artist — Venues and Institutions
This session asks: Where does art happen, and what impact does location have on both the art and its reception? It looks at the places where art is produced and displayed, considering the venues and institutions that mediate and regulate the artist’s access to audiences. It examines the role that government ministries, museums, and privately owned galleries all play vis–à–vis the artist, and how this in turn affects the content that reaches audiences (what art is shown or performed) and the impact that it has (how venues influence audience response).
14:15–14:20
Moderator: Vishakha Desai, President, Asia Society, U.S.A.
14:20–14:30
Where does art happen in the Muslim world today?
In what types of spaces — private, public, and commercial — are different types of art created, produced, and displayed? What impact does the type of space have on artists and the art they produce?
Speaker: Bruce Lawrence, Professor of Islamic Studies and Director of the Islamic Studies Center, Duke University, U.S.A.
14:30–14:40
Mediating and regulating artists’ access to audiences: galleries, schools of art, museums, government ministries, markets, festivals, and other cultural institutions (locally, nationally, and internationally).
Through what venues do artists reach audiences, domestically and internationally? What factors impact artists’ ability to reach audiences, and what impact does mediation have on the types of art produced and viewed?
Speaker: Theodore Levin, Distinguished Professor in the Humanities, Department of Music, Dartmouth College, U.S.A.
14:40–14:50
Case study: An experience
What kinds of art does this person handle? In what kind of institution does she work? What kinds of experiences has she had in presenting art and artists to particular audiences?
Speaker: Sabiha al–Khemir, writer and former Director, Museum of Islamic Arts, Doha, Qatar, U.K. / Tunisia
14:50–15:00
Discussant: Jon Anderson, Chair, Anthropology Department, Catholic University, U.S.A.
15:00–16:00 Floor discussion
16:00–16:30
Coffee break
16:30–18:15
Session III: Art and Social Commentary — Transcendence and Transformation
This panel looks at the possibility for artistic production to act as a means of achieving spiritual elevation for artists and audiences. It considers how Qur’anic chanting, religiously focused music, calligraphy, and arabesque design can bring about feelings of transcendence and experiences of interior transformation, for individuals or for groups of people. It asks whether this is, or should be, a primary role of art, particularly in a religious or devotional context, and it considers what parameters religious practices set on particular art forms.
16:30–16:35
Moderator: Dale Eickelman, Professor of Anthropology and Human Relations, Dartmouth College, U.S.A.
16:35–16:45
How do spiritual elements influence some Muslim artistic expressions?
What role does religious faith play in some artists’ approach to their work? How do spiritual elements influence how some artistic expressions are produced, in what venues they are exhibited, and how they are received by audiences?
Speaker: Faouzi Skali, Director, Fes Festival of World Sacred Music, Morocco
16:45–16:55
What boundaries do religious practices put on particular art forms?
What cultural expectations are established for those art forms seen as more closely connected to religious practices, like calligraphy or dhikr? What borders are drawn around those — like dance or pop music — seen as less connected or at odds with religious practices?
Speaker: Isaac Solotaroff, documentary filmmaker, U.S.A.
16:55–17:05
Case study: Artist’s experience — writing
How does this artist mediate the cultural or religious boundaries established for his particular art form? What impact does location have: how do particular venues influence audiences’ expectations of his art’s relationship to religious practices?
Speaker: Mahmoud Hussein, author of Penser le Coran, France/Egypt
17:05–17:15
Discussant: Philip Schuyler, Associate Professor of Ethnomusicology, University of Washington, U.S.A.
17:15–18:15 Floor discussion
20:00 Sufi Music Ensembles concert at Brooklyn Academy of Music
9:00–10:45
Session IV: Art and Social Commentary — Fusion and Satire
This session considers art as a means of linking cultures and traditions, producing rich combinations that blend the local and the global. It looks at examples drawn from Sufi poetry, storytelling, spoken word/hip hop, and the migration of literary, musical, and theatrical genres across cultural boundaries. It also examines art’s capacity to serve as a vehicle for commenting on politics and social mores, considering art’s capacity for satire as rooted historically in traditions of poetry and prose, karagöz theater, jokes and caricature, and “wise fool” figures like Nasr al–Din.
9:00–9:05
Moderator: Bruce Lawrence, Professor of Islamic Studies and Director of the Islamic Studies Center, Duke University, U.S.A.
9:05–9:15
Cultures, traditions, the local, the global, fusion and combination in Muslim artistic experiences today
How do the many and sometimes conflicting cultural traditions interact and meld in different Muslim artistic expressions today? How do juxtapositions of local and global influence artists?
Speaker: Sulayman al–Bassam, Writer and Director, Sabab Theater, Kuwait/U.K.
9:15–9:25
What impact can art have as an oppositional tool?
How does art introduce space for political and social commentary in some Muslim societies? What effect does oppositional art have on audiences? What social responsibility does art have, and what are its limits?
Speaker: Hamid Ismailov, novelist and Head of BBC Central Asian Service, U.K. / Uzbekistan
9:25–9:35
Case study: Film and hip hop
What social commentary does this artist’s art offer? How does she balance the aesthetic demands of art with the call to social responsibility? How does this impact audience reception and access to venues for display and distribution?
Speaker: Neda Sarmast, documentary filmmaker, U.S.A. / Iran
9:35–9:45
Discussant: Richard Bulliet, Professor of History, Columbia University, U.S.A.
9:45–10:45 Floor discussion 10:45–11:00 Coffee break for participants
11:00–12:45
Session V: Cultural Exchange — Cultural Capital
This session considers the role of cultural capital, defined as official and non–official art generated through multiple disciplines, at “folk” and “high” levels, in promoting mutual understanding. It looks at the role patrons (public and private, religious and secular) and individual artists play in generating cultural capital and making it available for exchange. At the same time, it recognizes that exchanges of cultural capital often occur asymmetrically, with cultural products flowing primarily from more powerful countries to less powerful ones; and it notes that commercial sector activities such as advertising, filmmaking, recording, and broadcasting facilitate exchanges that occur largely outside government control. It asks in what way cultural capital can be harnessed to provide a context for engagement that supports dialogue and the creation of substantive, positive relationships among global populations.
11:00–11:05 Moderator: Farhan Nizami, Director, Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies, University of Oxford, U.K. / India11:05–11:15
How can art and cultural capital promote mutual understanding among Muslim and non–Muslim individuals, communities, and nation–states?
What are some examples of ways in which arts and culture have helped bridge divides between Muslim and non– Muslim communities at the local, regional, and national levels — and how might they serve as models going forward?
Speaker: Zarqa Nawaz, Executive Producer, FUNdamentalist Films, Canada / Pakistan
11:15–11:25
Cultural Exchanges and the Power Equation
How do the real inequalities of power and money impact the flow of cultural exchanges? What are the consequences of today’s unequal distribution of cultural capital, and how might this be managed more equitably?
Speaker: Tahar ben Jelloun, poet and writer and Prix Goncourt winner, Morocco/ France
11:25–11:35
Case study: The role of cultural capital and managing the power equation in cultural exchanges
How has the NEA’s experience, with a government– to–government partnership focused on producing poetry anthologies with American and Pakistani poets, engaged cultural capital as a means of exchange? What issues relating to power and politics, as well as logistics and funding, have arisen, and how has the NEA addressed them? What follow–up efforts are envisioned, and what recommendations for other organizations interested in similar initiatives can be offered?
Speaker: Pennie Ojeda, Director, International Activities, National Endowment for the Arts, U.S.A.
11:35–11:45
Discussant: Rachel Cooper, Director of Cultural Programs and Performing Arts, Asia Society, U.S.A.
11:45–12:45 Floor discussion12:45–14:15
Lunch for participants with keynote remarks by Iqbal Riza, Under–Secretary General and Special Adviser for the Alliance of Civilizations to the Secretary General of the United Nations
14:15–16:00
Session VI: Re–envisioning U.S. Cultural Diplomacy
This session looks at the value of cultural diplomacy — the exchange of art, ideas, information, and other aspects of culture through official channels — as a means of advancing understanding and achieving national objectives. It considers the role of the state and of the private sector — commercial and non–profit — in facilitating exchanges that range from large–scale exhibitions, conferences, and festivals to workshops, individual residencies, and fellowships; and it looks at the degree to which the private sector can and should be mobilized to help realize diplomatic goals. It asks what practical steps can be taken by institutions involved in cultural exchanges to maximize their ability to meaningfully promote mutual understanding on a personal as well as state level.
14:15–14:20
Moderator: Stephen Heintz, President, Rockefeller Brothers Fund, U.S.A.
14:20–14:40 Next Steps: Encouraging Cultural Exchanges What role should the public and private sectors play in facilitating exchanges that range from large–scale exhibitions, conferences, and festivals to workshops, collaboration, individual residencies, and fellowships?
Speaker: Frank Hodsoll, Chair, Center for Arts and Culture, George Mason University, U.S.A.
14:40–14:50
Next Steps: Examining Other Models of Cultural Diplomacy
How can public– and private–sector institutions involved in cultural exchanges maximize their ability to meaningfully promote mutual understanding on a person–to–person as well as state level?
Speaker: William Luers, Former Chairman, United Nations Association of the United States, U.S.A.
14:50–15:00
Next Steps: Enacting the Principle of Mutual Respect through Cultural Exchange
What approaches can cultural institutions take that employ cultural exchanges to foster mutual respect? What new paradigms or best practices are emerging for cultural institutions, and what particular contributions can they make to cultural diplomacy?
Speaker: Anne Imelda Radice, Director, Institute of Museum and Library Services, U.S.A.
15:00–15:10 Case Study: The experience of the British Council
Speaker: Sharon Memis, Director, British Council U.S.A., U.K.
15:10–15:20
Discussant: Margaret Ayers, President, Robert Sterling Clark Foundation, U.S.A.
15:20–16:15 Floor discussion
16:15–17:00
Closing session
Sulayman al–Bassam, Founder and Director, Sabab Theater (Kuwait)
Sabiha al–Khemir, Art Historian, British Museum (Tunisia)
Jon Anderson, Professor of Anthropology, Catholic University (United States)
Margaret Ayers, President, Robert Sterling Clark Foundation (United States)
Tahar Ben Jelloun, Poet and writer (Morocco)
Richard Bulliet, Professor of History, Columbia University (United States)
Joni Cherbo, Executive Director, Resource Center for Cultural Engagement (United States)
Michael Conforti, Director, Francine and Sterling Clark Art Institute (United States)
Rachel Cooper, Director, Cultural Programs, Asia Society (United States)
Vishakha Desai, President, Asia Society (United States)
Dale Eickelman, Professor of Anthropology, Dartmouth College (United States)
Baghat El Nadi [Mahmoud Hussein], Writer (Egypt)
Sandra Gibson, President and CEO, Association of Performing Arts Presenters (United States)
Farid Hafez, Research Fellow, University of Vienna (Austria)
Darcy Hector, Program Officer, Robert Sterling Clark Foundation (United States)
Stephen Heintz, President, Rockefeller Brothers Fund (United States)
Frank Hodsoll, Chair, Center for Arts and Culture, George Mason University (United States)
Hamid Ismailov, Writer and Head, Asia Bureau, BBC (Uzbekistan)
Bruce Lawrence, Professor of Religion, Duke University (United States)
Theodore Levin, Professor of Music, Dartmouth College (United States)
Ambassador William Luers, Former Chairman, United Nations Association of the U.S.A. (United States)
Mohd Anis Md Nor, Professor of Ethnomusicology, University of Malaya (Malaysia)
Sharon Memis, Director, British Council U.S.A. (United Kingdom)
Mohiaddin Mesbahi, Professor of International Relations, Florida International University (Iran)
Kenizé Mourad, Writer (Turkey)
Zarqa Nawaz, Executive Producer, FUNdamentalist Films (Canada)
Farhan Nizami, Director, Oxford Center for Islamic Studies (India)
Pennie Ojeda, Director, International Activities, National Endowment for the Arts (United States)
Samina Quraeshi, Gardner Fellow, Harvard University (Pakistan)
Anne Imelda Radice, President, Institute of Museum and Library Studies (United States)
Adel Rifaat [Mahmoud Hussein], Writer (Egypt)
Iqbal Riza, Under–Secretary General, United Nations (Pakistan)
Nadia Roumani, Program Officer, Doris Duke Foundation (United States)
Neda Sarmast, Documentary filmmaker (Iran)
Mourad Sakli, Musicologist, Centre des Musiques Arabes & Méditerranéennes (Tunisia)
Philip Schuyler, Professor of Music, University of Washington (United States)
Anthony Shay, Assistant Professor of Dance and Culture, Pomona College (United States)
Faouzi Skali, Director, Fes Festival of World Sacred Music (Morocco)
Isaac Solotaroff, Documentary filmmaker (United States)
Huzir Sulaiman, Dramatist (Malaysia)
Ivan S. Weinstein, Political Officer, Bureau of European and Eurasian Affairs, U.S. Department of State (United States)
Hillary Wiesner, Director, Islam Initiative, Carnegie Corporation (United States)
Excellencies, Dear colleagues and friends, Ladies and gentlemen,
I am lucky to stand here before you to open this conference at this particular moment. I say I am lucky for two reasons. One—three years ago, when Karen Hopkins and I first met in Kuala Lumpur at the height of the Danish cartoon crisis, at another conference organized by my Center on related issues, and wondered what our two institutions could do together to draw on the power of culture to change American perceptions of Islam, Islamic civilization and Muslims, we could not in our wildest dreams imagine that together with Vishakha Desai and Asia Society as our third partner, we would open the Muslim Voices Festival exactly one day after President Obama made his historic speech of a “new beginning” addressed to the Muslim world. Three years ago, with tensions spilling over into violence and extremist rhetoric on all sides, envisioning an initiative dedicated to introducing Muslim–world arts and culture to an American audience seemed likely to be unpopular at home and an object of skepticism in the Muslim world. We could not, then, have imagined the timeliness of this initiative coming to fruition at a moment in which all the stars have aligned to highlight the merit of our belief—that culture could enhance and frame the new dialogue between America and the world of Islam. We owe this particular stroke of “luck” to the American people, who elected President Obama and turned the page on eight years of misunderstanding, hostility, and reckless policy–making.
The second reason for feeling lucky is that President Obama’s Cairo speech, which focused on bridging the divide between the U.S. and the Muslim world, is a perfect opening statement for this conference. Speaking with deep sincerity borne out of personal experience and conviction, the President set the tone that should inspire all of us this weekend as we reflect on the role art and culture can play in repairing the terrible damage of the last eight years, and building a new and healthier relationship between the people of this country and over one billion Muslims around the world — a relationship based on mutual respect and mutual interests, as stated by the President.
Organizing this festival and its conference component would not have been possible without the foresight, commitment, conviction, and support of many in the American funding, academic, and cultural communities at a time when improving the U.S.–Muslim world relationship did not feel like the realistic goal it seems today. My deepest thanks to them all. I am sure they feel — you feel — vindicated by the turn of events, and you have every right to enjoy it.
We are gathered here this weekend to explore the transformative power of culture as part of a national U.S. strategy for a new dawn in the relationship between this country and the Muslim world. The power of culture is the power to transform perceptions, and Muslim Voices might offer a case study of how the cultural expressions of the world’s one billion—four—hundred—million Muslims, including seven million in the United States, can harness this power. Our goal is to shift non–Muslim Americans’ perception of the Muslim world as a bleak and threatening monolith, and to align it with the picture of a tolerant and diverse civilization that the President painted in his Cairo speech. Over the next ten days, more than 100 artists and performers will present music, film, theatre, visual art, and poetry from Afghanistan, Canada, Egypt, France, Senegal, Morocco, Syria, Iran, Palestine, Kuwait, India, Malaysia, Tunisia, Indonesia, Turkey, the United Kingdom, the United States, and Brooklyn. This weekend’s conference aims to open the hearts, minds, and imaginations of the American public, media, and policymakers to this unprecedented aesthetic feast. We hope it will whet their appetites for future celebrations of Islamic culture and in particular bring them to see the Muslims around them no longer as threatening strangers but as fellow citizens who are the proud inheritors of one of the greatest civilizations in history.
With the dedicated help of an outstanding group of academic colleagues, we constructed an agenda for this conference that considers the diverse arts and cultural practices of the Islamic civilizations from the various angles of history, sociology, economics, anthropology, literary analysis, and so forth. Four sessions of the conference will be devoted to the analysis of these art forms and cultural practices. We hope that you have all read the background material, particularly the introductory essay, and will keep in mind the policy implications of these cultural practices more than their history or theoretical underpinnings. The last two sessions are precisely to be devoted to policy considerations—essentially to answer the question of how to contribute, through a new cultural diplomacy, to the paradigm shift that the President called for in Cairo. The conference organizers and funding institutions hope that our efforts will result in few clear recommendations for reshaping cultural diplomacy towards and cultural exchanges with Muslim communities. It is also my personal hope that you will view this conference as only the first step in a process, and that you will build upon our experience here to launch new projects, enlarging the network of organizations, groups, and individuals of goodwill in both the U.S. and the Muslim world. We at the NYU Center for Dialogues stand ready to do our part.
Ladies and gentlemen, while culture offers many opportunities and possibilities, it is not a panacea for the problems that divide the U.S. and the Muslim world — problems rooted in hard political issues, some of which go beyond what Muslim Voices (or any arts and culture initiative) can realistically address. The suffering of Palestinians in Gaza and camps around the region, the fear of Afghans for whom the sky has become the source of lethal bombs, the pain of three million displaced Pakistanis, the exhaustion of Iraqis longing for peace, and the frustration of Iran in the nuclear arena are real and acutely felt grievances in the Muslim world. These are not issues that can be answered or fully addressed in this event: Ten days of music, art, and cultural engagement is no substitute for policies that work to remedy these complex political situations.
Recognizing that the power of culture has its limits is important. What Muslim Voices and this tremendous collaboration between three of New York City’s major cultural institutions can do is open the door to a set of new perceptions — in this case, centered around the idea of the Muslim world as a rich space for world–class artistic production. This shift in perceptions can in turn encourage an atmosphere of respect and equality in which to address the harder political issues. For too long, the American people have lacked opportunities to discover the rich cultural prism of Muslim expression and ideas. For too long, our differences with the Muslim world have been framed not in terms of diversity but as the foundations of a permanent global conflict, a so–called “clash of civilizations.” Behind the ambitious endeavor that is Muslim Voices is the passionate belief that when people participate in an aesthetic experience, they elevate themselves to the universal plane of aesthetic judgment, changing their perceptions, and creating an environment more conducive to addressing hard issues on the basis of mutual respect and empathy.
Thanks to its immigrant history, the United States has a rich tradition of fusing global cultures into a compound American identity, and reaching out to the world through cultural exchange. While this tradition has lagged in recent years, we are currently witnessing a pivotal shift in our national history: a rebirth of cultural exchange, dialogue, and understanding. With the new American administration extending a hand to the Muslim world, we are on the brink of a new cultural engagement and a new climate of understanding. I believe I speak on behalf of all the organizers in hoping that by sharing the rich scope of Muslim–world arts and culture with the American people through this unprecedented event, we can move one step closer to achieving the goals set out by President Obama in his paradigm–changing speech in Cairo.
Thank you to all the participants for being here — many of you for traveling long distances to do so — and for the contributions you will make to our dialogue. I look forward to enjoying this productive, thought–provoking, and aesthetically rich weekend with all of you.
Most Americans knew next to nothing about Islam before the image of Ayatollah Khomeini exploded onto their television screens at the start of the Iranian Revolution in 1978. Between then and the terrorist attacks of 9/11, awareness of Islam grew, though few people, including news reporters and key government officials, understood the crucial differences between Sunnis and Shi‘ites, secularists and observant practitioners, Arabs and Persians, or sometimes even African–American Muslims and immigrant Muslims from South Asia or the Arab world. After 9/11, awareness of Islam again intensified, but the psychological impact of the attacks channeled the new feeling of urgency away from religion and culture and toward questions of war, terrorism, and homeland security. Today almost every American has learned something about Islam, but mostly through the distorting lens of fear at home and ongoing crisis in the Muslim world.
This is not unusual. Peace and harmony combined with geographic and cultural remoteness usually foster ignorance and lack of interest. Consider, for example, America’s general lack of interest in Scandinavia. Crises, on the other hand, typically stimulate interest. Postwar Japan was of scant interest to Americans in the 1950s and 1960s when memories of World War II were still fresh and Japanese industry was popularly associated with flimsy imitations of Western goods. But when Japan began to challenge America’s global economic leadership in the 1970s, Americans suddenly became eager to read about their new rival. Businessmen read books on Japanese management techniques, and the general public made James Clavell’s Shogun (1975) a bestseller and a hit television miniseries. But they also found fascination in darker views of Japan, like that presented in the Michael Douglas film Black Rain (1989).
The same is true of earlier confrontations with Muslim societies. The Crusades awakened a dormant European interest in Islam. Advocates and veterans of those “holy wars” supplied heavily biased images of infidel Saracens that satisfied that interest and convinced most Europeans that the Muslims were a perpetual menace. The same thing happened again when the Ottoman Empire advanced militarily into eastern Europe in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Frightened Christians wanted to know how “the Turk” had become so powerful, and this stimulated a multitude of publications from sophisticated analyses of the structure of the Ottoman government and army to hysterical sermons, both Catholic and Protestant, calling for new crusades.
Our current period of crisis differs from these earlier confrontations in one aspect in particular. The Muslims who defended themselves against the crusading European invaders in the twelfth century and who fought to extend the empire of the Ottoman sultans in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries knew next to nothing about Christian Europe. But today, American culture, and Western culture more generally, have been making headway in the Muslim world and influencing cultural values and institutions there for many decades. Because of this, the current crisis is radically asymmetrical, particularly at the cultural level. Many Muslims have long considered the impingement of Western culture on their own traditions a crisis. The most militant among them condemn every type of cultural import, from rap music and satellite television to wearing neckties and dispensing with female head coverings. Thus, if very few Americans knew much about the culture of the Muslim world before 1978, the opposite situation prevailed on the other side of the cultural divide. Few Muslims in any country were immune to the cultural impact of movies, television shows, and popular music coming from Europe and America, and few could ignore the inexorable replacement of domestic manufactures with Western or Western–style products in the marketplace.
Whether the impressions conveyed by the entertainment media or by the spread of American business franchises accurately reflect Western culture, or present it in the best light, is of concern for policy makers and diplomats charged with projecting an accurate and appealing American image abroad. But the problem these officials face in trying to improve international understanding of the American people and their culture during a period when American political and military actions are widely seen as aggressive and implicitly anti–Muslim is quite different from the problem of trying to counteract, in this country, a pervasive and growing litany of charges that Islam is an undifferentiated terrorist leviathan defined by oppression of women, amputation of hands, rigid imposition of benighted puritanical regulations, and hatred of the success and superiority of the West. In fact, the global faith community of Islam embraces an astonishing diversity of religious, artistic, and institutional cultures that bear no resemblance to the degrading stereotypes that have gained circulation since 9/11. But how are Americans supposed to realize this?
Muslim Voices: Arts & Ideas consists of a ten–day series of cultural performances, exhibitions, and scholarly conversations in New York City under the aegis of the Brooklyn Academy of Music, The Asia Society, and New York University’s Center for Dialogues: Islam–U.S.–the West. The initiative celebrates the extraordinary range of artistic expression in the Muslim world, bringing together Muslim artists, curators, scholars, and public speakers from Asia, Africa, and the Middle East — as well as North America. Performances range from the traditional — calligraphy, storytelling, and Sufi chanting — to the contemporary — video installations, Arabic hip hop, and political cartoons — allowing New York and, more broadly, American audiences the opportunity to experience and learn about the cultural diversity and multiple perspectives that characterize the Muslim world, both in the past and today.
Muslim Voices has been conceived of quite differently from its most noteworthy predecessor, the World of Islam Festival held in Britain in 1976. Against the background of a crisis in oil prices that had increasingly disturbed the lives of ordinary people from 1973 onward (and the harsh caricaturing of Arab “oil sheiks” then rampant in popular culture), the festival described itself as “a unique cultural event . . . in concept and in scale. . . . No less than an attempt to present one civilization — in all its depth and variety — to another.”1 It was an outstanding collaboration between museums, universities, and performance centers and had the salutary effect of making its audiences aware of the rich cultural depth and historical importance of Islam as a world civilization.
But softening the Arab government leaders’ suddenly scandalous reputation for greed and lavish expenditure by displaying indisputable evidence of a historically rich Muslim culture was less of a challenge than the one we face today. A skeptical and frightened American public is told by today’s media that the heads of state of Muslim countries are their allies in the struggle against international terrorism. Yet the public is still suspicious of Muslims more generally. What is needed, and what Muslim Voices seeks to provide, is a clear demonstration that the creative leaders of Muslim societies throughout the world bear no similarity to the cave–dwelling preachers of jihad whose slightest communiqué is erroneously treated by the news media as a fundamental expression of Islamic faith.
Though Muslim Voices shares with the Festival of Islam a deep appreciation for the historical antecedents of today’s Muslim societies, the emphasis of today’s initiative is less on Islam’s past grandeur than on the contemporary artistic sensibilities of Muslim peoples around the world. It seems to be difficult for Americans who have come to fear Muslims—as opposed to simply resenting the high cost of gasoline as in the 1970s—to remember or believe that at some time in the past, Islam may have had a rich culture that produced artistic masterworks and made original contributions to science, medicine, and philosophy. Difficult but possible. By comparison, violent expostulations by self–proclaimed leaders like Osama bin Laden, terrorist attacks against civilians in a score of different countries, and a widespread, and in many ways understandable, Muslim reluctance to accept American military actions as measured and rational responses to a legitimate security crisis make it much harder for many Westerners to accept the Muslim communities of today as normal groups of people, concerned, like everyone else, for their families, their livelihoods, their cultural values, and their identities.
Ironically, the proponents of terrorism in the Muslim world, despite their hollow claim that they are speaking in the name of Islam, are almost without exception wedded to the most stultifying minority interpretations of Islamic tradition. Aside from chanting the Quran, reciting poetry, and listening to unaccompanied male voices sing militant songs, there is scarcely any manifestation of art and creativity that they find religiously acceptable. They tolerate no photographs, no television, no movies, no musical performances, no dance, no theater, no female personages, and certainly no freedom of oral or written expression.
Thus the artistic world of Islam stands as an open refutation of the absolutist religious philosophy that triggered today’s crisis. This will be all the more true when artists and performers from the Muslim world present their uncensored creative visions to audiences of Muslims and non–Muslims in New York City, the cultural capital of the West, and there find an enthusiastic response. Every round of applause bestowed on a Muslim performer by a New York audience strikes at not just the negative stereotypes of Islam and Muslims so prevalent in American culture, but also at the perception within the Muslim world that Western ignorance and hostility — Islamophobia, in short — is paving the way for a triumph of obscurantism and rigidity.
Muslim Voices has high aspirations. It seeks not just to expose American audiences to brilliant examples of contemporary Muslim creative culture, but beyond that, to reaffirm the value of artistic exchange as a means of lessening fears, building intercultural bridges, and blunting the force of arguments that pit a “global war on terror” against “Islamic jihad” as the only path to the future.
Around the time of the American Revolution, the historian Edward Gibbon penned one of the most commonly quoted lines about relations between Islam and the West. He wrote that if the Frankish king Charles Martel had succumbed to Saracen invaders at the Battle of Tours in 732, “Perhaps the interpretation of the Koran would now be taught in the schools of Oxford, and her pupils might demonstrate to a circumcised people the sanctity and truth of the revelation of Mahomet.” 2 The appeal of this quotation has been its combination of exoticism and succinctness in encapsulating an apparent truism of European history: struggle between Europeans and Muslims is and always has been inevitable, and the consequence of European defeat in the struggle would be cultural annihilation and inundation by Islam.
People who share Gibbon’s apocalyptic vision commonly cite a long list of Crusades against the Saracens and a similar series of Ottoman forays into eastern Europe, the latter culminating, symbolically, not just in the occupation of more and more Christian land but in sieges of Vienna in 1529 and 1683, in which Christian defenders reenacted the heroic role of Charles Martel’s Franks in holding back the Muslim tide. But Gibbon’s followers fail to observe that Muslim rule did not normally result in the annihilation of peoples and cultures, any more than Crusader rule in the Holy Land resulted in the destruction of Muslim society there. To be sure, when Muslims and non–Muslims have lived together, harmony is not an inevitable outcome. At its best, however, cohabitation has worked quite well, as is demonstrated in accounts of the era of Muslim rule in Spain, the long period of peaceful relations between Muslims and Confucianists in China, and twelve centuries of generally peaceful coexistence and cultural exchange (660–1860) between Muslims, Christians, and Jews in the Middle East.
Sadly, Gibbon–esque grand narratives of religiously based cultural hatred have a vividness that sometimes overshadows, in the popular memory, the myriad instances of cohabitation, mutual respect, and cultural exchange that would flesh out an honest and balanced account of Islam and the West.
A more benign grand narrative that highlights rather than buries these facts is sorely needed in today’s climate of religious animosity. Fortunately, there are a wealth of materials that support a retelling of history in which there is a continual flow of cultural influences between European society and the Muslim world, and a joint exploration of a common heritage from classical antiquity. The debt owed by European philosophers, theologians, and scientists to translations of books from Arabic into Latin has been abundantly studied, though sadly it is often misrepresented as purely a transmission of Greek lore from the Hellenistic era with little or no mention of the important additions, refinements, and intellectual breakthroughs made by Muslim scholars.
Less known are the many instances in which cultural and artistic goods have passed back and forth between Muslim and Christian lands. Consequently, the few instances that have found their way into the common historical narrative appear anomalous, or even amusing. The earliest of these is the exchange of embassies and gifts between Charlemagne and Harun al–Rashid, the Abbasid caliph, in 798. What made this exchange memorable to later historians was the delivery of an elephant in 801 to Charlemagne’s capital in Aachen.
However, the elephant was not the only gift from the caliph. He also sent a carved ivory horn, a golden tray and pitcher, two tall and intricately engraved brass candlesticks, perfumes, a chess set, some lengths of fine cloth, and a tent and robe of honor bearing the words “There is no God but God.” Finally, there was a water clock in which 12 metal balls sounded the hour by falling on a cymbal, and 12 carved horsemen emerged from little windows and paraded. Historians of Islamic art easily recognize each of these items as representative of the high cultural standards of the Baghdad caliphate, and some of the items—the tray and pitcher, possibly chess pieces, the carved ivory, and the robe of honor—still survive in European museums.
Though this episode is usually cited as an oddity, it was not an isolated instance of the exchange of embassies and gifts. Charlemagne’s great–great–granddaughter, Bertha, the daughter of Lothair II, repeated her famous forebear’s actions when she sent an embassy to the Abbasid caliph al–Muktafi in 906. Her letter, preserved in an Arabic manuscript compiled less than a century later, describes her as “Queen of all the Franks” and relates that “a friendship took place between [her] and the King of Ifriqiyah [Muslim Tunisia].” Despite this friendship, a Tunisian ship fell to her navy in battle and a man named ‘Ali, one of 150 captives, entered her court and stayed for seven years. Through ‘Ali she learned that:
There is friendship between you [the caliph] and the Byzantine king who resides in Constantinople. But my armies are far greater than his, and my kingdom is larger, and my authority covers twenty–four kingdoms, the language of each of which being different from that next to it. The great city of Rome lies within my kingdom, thanks to God. [‘Ali] told me good things about you that filled my heart in regard to your state of affairs. I do request God to support me in winning your friendship and peace between us for as many years as you wish. The [final] decision in this is yours. A settlement of peace is something that had never been requested by any member of my family, or my relatives, or the like of us.’3
The text goes on to list the gifts Queen Bertha’s ambassador, who was none other than the Tunisian ‘Ali, was charged to deliver to the caliph: fifty swords, fifty shields, fifty Frankish spears, twenty garments woven with gold, twenty pieces of cloth made of sea wool (i.e., fibers from the shells of Pinna nobilis, a Mediterranean bivalve; also known as “sea byssus” or “byssus silk”), twenty male slaves, twenty female slaves, ten large dogs, seven falcons, three birds that sniff out poison, and beads to remove spearheads and arrowheads from wounds. This list contrasts sharply with the artistic manufactures that Harun al–Rashid sent to Charlemagne and thereby symbolizes the great disparity between the refined arts of the Muslim realm and the much less sophisticated military courts of western Europe. The two lists together further demonstrate that embassies and gift exchanges were very elaborate affairs involving scores of people, as they continued to be through the following centuries.
Even at peak periods of military confrontation the exchange of gifts across contested frontiers was commonplace. Venice in particular was a Christian state repeatedly in confrontation with the Ottoman Empire. Yet during the fifteenth through seventeenth centuries, Venetian records mention scores of gift exchanges in both directions, particularly in the period 1520–1566 when Suleyman the Magnificent ruled in Istanbul. As Stefano Carboni relates in his book Moments of Vision, “This is also the period that marks the closest proximity in artistic production between Venice and the Ottomans or, better, that denotes a peculiar vogue in Venice for ‘Oriental’ patterns.”4 As in earlier times, the most desired products were those of the highest artistic value, whether a portrait of Sultan Mehmet the Conqueror by the Venetian artist Gentile Bellini on the one side, or luxurious silk brocades and velvets on the other. Nor was the flow of fine Islamic goods limited to exchanges with the Ottomans. In 1603, an embassy sent to Venice by the Safavid ruler of Iran, Shah ‘Abbas I, gave to the doge a selection of very fine carpets crafted from silk and silver–wrapped thread.
To this day the tradition of gift exchanges continues, a recent example being Saudi King Abdullah’s presentation of a heavy gold necklace and medallion — the King Abdulaziz Order of Merit — to President George W. Bush in 2008. (Although, in all likelihood, the necklace was produced by Italian rather than Saudi jewelers.)
Though the gifts of ambassadors and rulers often included exquisite examples of artistic production, they frequently ended up in palace treasuries, or in royal menageries, as was the case not only with Charlemagne’s elephant, but also with a polar bear brought to Baghdad by European ambassadors in the thirteenth century for presentation to the caliph al–Mustansir (1226—1242). The more common mode of making the arts and crafts of Muslim societies known to a wider world was through commerce. This involved not only the goods being traded, but also the moneys used in the exchange. Tens of thousands of Muslim coins stamped with elaborate Arabic inscriptions have been found in Scandinavia and Poland, where they were often perforated, strung, and used as jewelry. Many Christian authorities, starting with King Offa of England in the eighth century and proceeding through various twelfth and thirteenth century rulers in Castile, Aragon, Norman Sicily, and Georgia, not to mention the Bishop of Maguelone in southern France, issued coins with Arabic inscriptions, sometimes with the words changed to convey Christian meanings, and sometimes not.5 Though numismatists usually presume that these issues were intended for trade with Muslims, this has never been proven. But whether or not this was the case, it is apparent that the Arabic script was at that time a clear signifier of wealth and luxury, showing up not only on Christian coinage, but also on imported textiles used in European churches and sumptuous furnishings depicted by European artists in prosperous Italian and Dutch households.
The goods that arrived in Europe through normal commercial exchange ran the aesthetic gamut from fine textiles, glassware, carved ivory, metalwork, and ceramic vessels at the high end; through exotic spices transshipped through the Middle East; to basic commodities like sugar, paper, cotton goods, and, from the fifteenth century on, coffee. The measure of their appreciation was a wave of borrowing of a material variety that swept southern Europe from the twelfth century onward.
Venetians adopted sophisticated ceramic and glassmaking techniques and began to grow sugar on the Mediterranean islands that made up part of their seaborne empire.6 Cotton farming and weaving spread from Syria to northern Italy. Paper mills gave Europe its own source of cheap writing materials just in time for the Gutenberg revolution. In short, alongside the well–known translation movement that restored Europe to its Greek heritage by way of Arabic intermediaries, there was a massive flow of lifestyle innovations from the southern and eastern shores of the Mediterranean to the northern shore. The arts and styles of Muslim lands became so commonplace in major metropolitan centers that their point of origin lost any importance.
Further rounds of commerce affected different parts of Europe, particularly after 1600 and the advent of joint stock companies. High quality goods from the Muslim world—Persian rugs, Indian calicoes, Damascene swords—found ready markets even as European military and political force was making certain Muslim lands subject to imperialist control. European builders similarly benefited from a growing, if often imprecise, familiarity with Islamic architecture.
Not until the twentieth century, with the burgeoning of the Industrial Revolution, did Europeans begin to turn away from fine imports from Muslim lands. Though the capitalist need to expand the markets for industrial goods on a worldwide scale eventually spelled the demise of most high–quality craft production, both for domestic consumption and for export, the Muslim reputation for exquisite cultural products continued. However, it became increasingly tinged with exoticism as a succession of international fairs and expositions beginning with Great Britain’s Crystal Palace Exposition of 1851, which included an exhibit from India, familiarized European consumers with images of “Eastern” products, often in artificially contrived “native” settings.
While these historical patterns of gift–giving and cultural exchange could be elaborated further, they point to a clear conclusion: despite the marvels of worldwide travel and communication, educated and prosperous Europeans and Americans today are less familiar with the artistic traditions and current cultural standards of the world’s various Muslim societies than their social counterparts were during almost any one of the first thirteen centuries of cultural contact. Today’s American and European tourists visit Muslim countries and buy souvenirs, but the items they buy are usually mediocre imitations of the artisanal production of the past, not works by artists who are considered within those societies to be great talents. That is to say, a Western tourist in Iran is more likely to acquire a shabby knock–off of a Persian miniature painting than a canvas by a contemporary Iranian oil painter. By the same token, despite the electronic techniques that have revolutionized the production and distribution of cultural performances, familiarity with Muslim music, theater, and dance has generally decreased.
The history of art cannot be separated from the history of patronage of the arts. However, patronage must be seen as involving ordinary consumers with a taste for beauty and not just rulers and august cultural institutions. It must also be recognized that some creative efforts have more to do with individual expression, whether spiritual or worldly, than with any market, though this sort of individuality is less marked in pre–modern times than over the past two centuries. Historians sometimes sort out different creative contexts by distinguishing between “fine arts” and “minor arts” or “crafts,” between “secular” and “sacred” objectives, and between personal expression and market–oriented production. Unfortunately, from the perspective of Euro–American exposure to the artistic cultures of the Muslim world, these distinctions are not particularly helpful. An Anatolian silk rug or an Iranian ceramic bowl originally produced for sale to ordinary homeowners may end up in an exhibit, hundreds of years later, in a major European or American museum, or sell at auction in London for much more money than an oil painting by an early twentieth century Turkish artist striving for individual expression. Similarly, an amulet or talisman in a finely tooled silver case, originally created to ward off evil, may be used today as expensive jewelry in New York or Paris. This can also apply to performance arts. A Sufi dance that originated as a religious ritual, and that still conveys spiritual meaning to those who participate in it, may become simply a cultural exhibit when performed on a European or American stage. In short, the world of patronage that surrounds a cultural artifact or performance at the time of its creation may differ considerably from the world of patronage that transfers that artifact or performance from its native land to a Western audience.
Yet despite the fact that the ways in which Westerners have become familiar with Islamic art throughout the centuries do not directly reflect the creative or commercial environments in which the art was produced, nevertheless, over the past century, the forms of creative output and the practical aspects of creative life in the Muslim world have tended to converge with the realities of trans–cultural marketing and exposure. At the most mundane level, this is seen in the transformation of artisans in such crafts as pottery, leatherwork, and metalwork from producers for a local consumer market to producers for a tourist or export market, as mentioned above. In a different vein, this convergence can be seen in the adoption and adaptation of Western literary forms, artistic styles, and modes of expression, e.g., novels or motion pictures, by creative individuals who are acutely aware of the different impact their work may have on international as opposed to national or regional audiences. Changes in the lives and working conditions of Muslim artists cannot be ignored when considering how their work has been received in the West, both long ago and today.
Envisioning the lifestyles and creative environments of Muslim artists at different periods can be a useful exercise insofar as the work produced by these artists, as received or encountered by Europeans and Americans, has shaped and continues to shape the West’s shifting image of the Islamic world as an arena of cultural expression. There are five basic periods that illustrate the changes in creative lifestyles that took place historically: 1) the ninth century, when the Abbasid caliphate based in Baghdad still represented a unified Islamic empire; 2) the fourteenth century, in which the Islamic world settled into a more stable social and economic pattern following the wrenching dislocations brought about by the Mongol invasions of Genghis Khan and his grandson Hulagu (which in turn came on the heels of decades of economic disarray, Turkish invasion, and Crusader warfare); 3) the late eighteenth century when most Muslims came under the political and economic control of European imperialists but had still not felt the impact of the Industrial Revolution; 4) the late nineteenth to early twentieth century, when the phenomenon of industrialization in Europe and America was having its strongest economic and political impact; and 5) the contemporary world of the twenty–first century.
By the ninth century, the shock of the Arab conquests was long past, and a welter of conquered peoples and countries had been incorporated into an empire with a more or less centralized government but with great cultural differences from region to region. Most of the people living under the rule of the Muslim Caliph were still non–Muslims—principally Christians, Jews, and Zoroastrians—since the process of conversion to Islam took centuries rather than decades. It should be kept in mind that, at the time of the Conquest, Arabic as a language had been confined to the Arabian Peninsula and the desert inland areas of Syria, Jordan, and Iraq. Thus the words of the Quran were unintelligible to the vast majority of the conquered peoples, and communication with the new ruling elite, including the dissemination of information about their religion, was difficult until new generations of bilingual Muslims, largely the product of intermarriage between Arabs and non–Arabs, came of age.
To the extent that creative cultural expression related specifically to Islam and to Muslims, therefore, it was largely experienced by people who were either associated with Arab power centers, like the city of Baghdad, or with urban Muslim communities that were in commercial contact with those power centers. Christians in Egypt, in other words, continued to produce textiles with the distinctive patterns and images of the Coptic church, and Zoroastrians in Iran composed many of their most important religious treatises in the Middle Persian language. Other Iranians, who were converts to Islam, were learning to read Arabic and, by the end of the century, adapting the Arabic writing system to the Persian language. The totality of cultural expression, in other words, cannot be characterized as Islamic. It was rather an amalgam of customs, styles, and techniques aimed at consumer markets of varying religious, ethnic, and linguistic identity.
The continuation of allegiances to the styles and practices of non–Muslim religions makes it difficult for scholars today to define what precisely constituted Islamic art. Nevertheless, elements of a distinctively Muslim lifestyle and material culture did slowly emerge. Arabic calligraphy, architectural ornamentation techniques based on the designs of Abbasid palaces, elegant glazed pottery incorporating Arabic calligraphic motifs, and clothing styles based on the plain linen or cotton recommended by the traditions of Muhammad (instead of the silk brocades preferred before the Arab conquests) spread from the Muslim power centers and gradually gained wide popularity. In short, the ninth century was a period that saw the waning of many local, pre–Islamic cultural forms and their slow replacement by styles and practices preferred by the growing Muslim communities. Yet there was certainly no cultural uniformity, and common economic and institutional features across the vast expanse of the caliphate were few indeed.
Artisans who sold their goods to local buyers either repeated or adapted styles inherited from earlier times. They knew little about the lives and professional practices of their counterparts in other regions. The textiles woven by Coptic Christians in Egypt were not exported to Iran, nor did the elaborate silver plates patterned on pre–Islamic Sasanid Iranian models find buyers in Egypt. Only in the major political centers — Baghdad itself or provincial capitals like Tunis, Fustat (later called Cairo), Damascus, Isfahan, Nishapur, and Bukhara — did the patronage of Muslim rulers and courtiers foster a robust creative climate. Physicians, scientists, translators (from Greek, Sanskrit, and Middle Persian), poets, writers, legal scholars, and merchants selling religiously neutral or explicitly Muslim luxury goods flocked to these centers. According to one interpretation, this court–centered culture made the ninth century a sort of Golden Age of Islam. But another viewpoint, based on the fact that Muslims were still a minority in most areas, recognizes that there was still great diversity of culture and social forms within the lands of the caliphate, and that despite the political dominion of the caliphs, Islam was not yet a dominant cultural marker.
In concrete terms, descriptions survive of slave–girls in Baghdad who could perform vast repertoires of songs while playing musical instruments. Though sometimes pejoratively portrayed as prostitutes or concubines, there is no reason to doubt their skills or deny them a central role in the preservation and development of musical traditions in a Muslim environment. In this respect, they deserve to be mentioned alongside court musicians and poets (including members of ruling families), as contributing to newly forming Muslim traditions of music and dance. Separating creative artists at the top of the social scale from those closer to the bottom can make analytical sense if one is interested primarily in patronage. After all, a rich man who purchased a skilled singing girl to entertain his household differed profoundly from a prince who decided to compose songs for the lute. But from the point of view of the development of Muslim music, it is hard to distinguish contributions made by performers of high social status from those made by slaves.
By the same token, potters in Nishapur who dipped broad shallow dishes in a thin wash of white clay and then decorated the pristine surface with ornate Arabic calligraphy were of low social status and would not even have been considered artists in their own time. Yet, the wares they produced are today coveted by major museums and private collectors of Islamic art. The same can be said of the weavers, dyers, and embroiderers who produced the elegant fabrics that were the mainstay of the Muslim ambassadors and traders who maintained occasional contact with Christian Europe; or of the lowly stucco workers and wood carvers who pioneered the art of the arabesque in the ornaments they devised for the walls of palaces and doors of mosques. Only at the highest social levels do there exist records identifying individual patronage, for instance, a purse of gold coins paid to a poet singing the praises of a caliph, or the commission paid for a translation of a work of Greek philosophy. As a consequence, the role of patronage in the formative stages of Islamic art — Arab vs. non–Arab, elite vs. commoner, new convert vs. longstanding Muslim — remains obscure.
By the fourteenth century, the social and economic context of cultural production had changed dramatically. Urban markets had come to be organized in similar fashion throughout the lands of the caliphate. Goods of similar type were typically sold in adjoining stores, and production was increasingly organized by guilds. The function of the guilds to ensure equal business opportunity for all members fostered a conservatism in style and technique that persisted for generations. Diversity of regional styles continued, but characteristics identified as “Muslim” — such as shape–concealing, draped male and female garment designs, narrow streets and covered bazaars, the ornamental use of Arabic calligraphy and interlaced arabesque patterns, and domes, archways, and minarets in architecture — conveyed a greater sense of cultural homogeneity and provided markers of Muslim identity in lands such as Anatolia, India, Southeast Asia, China, and West Africa where Muslim communities were then in their early phases of growth.
Though the preponderance of artistic goods that came to the notice of European buyers or collectors were crafted by guild–oriented artisans who were not seen in their own society to be “artists,” more and more of the highest quality products carried the names of their creators. Expression of individualism in cultural production was particularly noteworthy in fields like miniature painting, which by the end of the century was reaching a peak of excellence in Iran and Afghanistan. But the names of artists also began to appear in ceramics, metalwork, calligraphy, and rug–making. Poets, who had always been the elite among writers, sometimes included their own names in the closing lines of their verses. In comparative terms, it may well be that this sort of artistic self–consciousness arose slightly earlier in the Muslim world than it did in Europe.7
The fourteenth century also saw an increasing intrusion of creative artistry and individualized expression into the field of religion. Many of the Sufi brotherhoods that grew during this period institutionalized the use of poetry recitation, singing, dancing, and the playing of musical instruments in their rituals. This raises a question as to whether religion simply became a new venue for artistic expression during this period — another source of patronage, so to speak — or whether artists began to give greater play to their own spirituality. By and large, despite charges by certain legalistic religious authorities that some Sufis were charlatans, there is little evidence that Sufi singing, dancing, and poetry writing constituted performances for hire comparable to the paintings, sculpture, and choral music commissioned by popes and bishops in Europe. The ambiguity between individual, spiritually motivated art and art created for the marketplace continued to mark Muslim societies through the following centuries.
A final aspect of cultural production by Muslims in the fourteenth century relates to the new lands into which Islam was then expanding. In the ninth century, the process by which a congeries of pre–Islamic cultural tastes and practices evolved toward something that would eventually warrant the term “Islamic art” was still inchoate. Would the spectacular spiral minaret constructed at a caliph’s command at Samarra in Iraq become a model for later towers of faith? No. But nobody could have presumed that at the time it was built. Would the caliphally sponsored tiraz style of plain linen or cotton fabric ornamented with a band of silk calligraphy set a permanent standard for elite Muslim clothing? No. But converts to Islam who then wore the plain garments to signal their membership in the Muslim community did not know that the silk brocades of the pre–Islamic period would return to popularity and gain religious acceptance by the year 1000. No one could tell where Muslim tastes were headed. The arabesque was one of the few developments of that earlier era that persisted through the centuries.
By contrast, in the fourteenth century, Muslims everywhere recognized certain markers of Muslim cultural identity and patronized the creative craftsmen who produced them. Pottery, metalwork, manuscript production, architecture, clothing styles, Quran chanting, calligraphy, and many other features of daily life and religious ritual, all rooted in the old heartlands of the caliphate, had become integral parts of a Muslim cultural complex that spread afar as the frontiers of the faith expanded geographically. Yet this same expansion exposed new Muslim communities — combinations of immigrant (and sometimes invading) Muslims and local converts in lands that Islam did not deeply penetrate until after the year 1000 — to cultural influences that had never before been seriously encountered. On the religious frontiers from West Africa to Indonesia, cultural encounters began to produce works of combined influence, such as Sufi poetry with heavily Hindu imagery; shadow plays in which Muslim audiences followed the adventures of Indian religious figures like Rama and Sita; architectural forms that blended West African building techniques with the templates of the mosque and minaret; Indonesian devotional manuscripts illustrated with pre–Islamic images of naga serpents; and Arabic calligraphy in China that uncannily calls to mind Chinese ideographic characters.
Thus the Muslim cultural world of the fourteenth century encompassed a mix of stable and fairly uniform styles and practices in the old caliphal center, and new and dynamic trends in outlying areas where these styles and practices encountered other cultural traditions. In a sense, what was being experienced on the periphery of Islam in the fourteenth century was a replay of what had been experienced in Iran, Iraq, Egypt, Syria, and Tunisia in the ninth century, namely, the challenge of discovering within a complex of differing and competing cultural forms some combination that could be popularly accepted as appropriate for a community of Muslims. What was different in the fourteenth century, however, was that the creative community of the ninth century had had no template for “Islamic art,” whereas in the fourteenth century that template existed; and this made circumstances ripe for the development of the eclectic artistic forms and practices that are still manifest in the world of Islam today.
By the late eighteenth century, the peripheral regions of the Muslim world were increasingly falling under the sway of European imperial regimes even as the old caliphal core, incorporated into the weakening Ottoman Empire or the weak royal regimes in Iran and Afghanistan, continued to stand against European encroachment. Artistic creators in these territories, still working within guild traditions, slowly evolved new styles, although a pervasive economic weakness dating (in most places) from the late seventeenth century, had lowered the levels of patronage that fostered outstanding works of art, architecture, poetry, and scientific inquiry only a century and a half earlier. It is widely acknowledged that the royal portraits and flower arrangements painted under the Qajar dynasty in Iran fell aesthetically short of the elegant miniatures of the Safavid court painters of the seventeenth century, and the eighteenth century mosques of Istanbul do not rival the great edifices of the Ottoman heyday. Comparison of late eighteenth century and early seventeenth century productions in a variety of fields betrays a growing, though sometimes quite lively, provincialism.
The story in the peripheral lands penetrated by European imperialism was different. Personnel working for European trading companies or imperial administrations in a variety of countries — Dutch in Java, English and French in India, Portuguese in various Indian Ocean ports — acquired a taste for exotic manufactures and artworks. European patronage opened new perspectives for craft producers in areas where the guild system was less comprehensive than in Ottoman and Persian territories. Works from these outlying areas that found their way into international trade increasingly “represented” Islamic art despite local variances from the styles that in earlier eras had imparted a special cachet to the art forms of the central Islamic lands. This helped fuel still–existing tensions between Muslim cultural articulations emanating from the Middle East and those from other Muslim regions. To this day, surveys of Islamic art contain little or no mention of wooden mosque architecture from Malaysia and Uzbekistan or Arabic calligraphy from China and Sulawesi. Yet these cultural forms were flowering at a time when the arts of the Ottoman, Arab, and Persian lands were losing some of their dynamism.
By the late nineteenth century, the world of the fourteenth century artist, craftsman, and performer was rapidly disappearing in the central lands of Islam. Guilds were dying out as new producing and marketing institutions characterized by exchange with the imperialist Western powers reoriented the economies of Muslim lands. Though an increasing number of Muslim lands had come under direct rule by European imperialists, and many of the Ottoman provinces in the Balkans had rebelled and acquired Christian regimes, this had not initially undermined their artistic and cultural vitality. Local demand for performers, artists, and crafts had remained strong, and some of the handful of Europeans who administered their countries’ overseas possessions continued to exhibit a taste for local luxuries. European museums and libraries testify to avid collecting of art and artifacts by administrators and officials professionally occupied in colonial Muslim lands. Moreover, although common European tastes were often satisfied by goods of lower quality and price, an increasing flow of goods from Muslim lands to Europe led to the development of new markets there. Purely touristic craft production was still on the horizon, but the degeneration of standards that eventually became associated with such craftsmanship was not far off.
It was the industrialization brought about by imperialist powers, rather than imperialism itself, that destroyed the livelihoods of local cultural producers. For instance, European and American factories produced goods like machine–made carpets that were cheaper and more abundant than hand–knotted imports from Turkey, Iran, and India. While the quality of the machine–made product was naturally inferior, the new goods were offered at a price that made them more accessible to a wider range of consumers, and they gradually took the place of local, hand–made products. Plastics came to replace pottery; aluminum pans drove copper containers from the market. By the middle of the twentieth century, the spread of Western entertainment media, and the inventions that they depended on — the phonograph, radio, and motion picture projector — had inaugurated a wave of cultural influence that would quickly lead to a large–scale rejection of traditional arts and aesthetic standards in many Muslim societies.
The world of the modern–day Muslim creative artist has undergone a seismic reorientation. Even as the craftsman’s livelihood was disappearing — to be sustained in most places only by a low–quality tourist trade or government– sponsored programs to preserve dying traditions — creative individuals were adapting to a new world of artistic possibilities. Some learned new literary and artistic forms. Novelists, some of them writing in European as well as traditional Muslim languages, began to overshadow poets, who for many centuries had been the literary elite. Portrait and landscape painters graduating from newly created academies of fine arts initially imitated European styles, which appealed to a small local market of Westernized collectors but seemed remote from Islamic artistic traditions. Eventually, however, they would delve into their cultural past for idioms that would make their works more distinctive and appealing to an international market. For instance, a painter in Bahrain produces canvases that are reminiscent of the New York School of abstract expressionism but also contain shapes and impressions suggestive of the life of the local suq. Another artist in Iran makes extravagant use of Persian calligraphy while depicting Orientalist scenes deriving from European fantasies of the Arabian Nights.
The shadow puppet and folk theater traditions that were still alive in 1800 had largely died out in Turkey, Iran, and Malaysia by the turn of the twentieth century. They were replaced first by Western–style theater companies, and then by filmmakers whose work in recent decades has garnered international acclaim. An Iranian film like “Kandahar,” directed by Mohsen Makhmalbaf and released in 2001, admits a purely political interpretation that sees it as revealing the negative face of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, but also a Sufi interpretation that follows its protagonist on a journey — the original title of the film was “Journey to Kandahar” — from death, to life, to enlightenment.
In music, Western instruments, compositional styles, and performance techniques have found receptive Islamic audiences at the popular level. Fusion styles combining Western sounds and rhythms with aspects of Muslim tradition abound in a number of Muslim countries, as well as among Muslims living in the United States or Europe.
To be sure, wealthy patrons can still commission and collect traditional artistic products. A poet with an oeuvre consisting solely of works in praise of the Shi‘ite imams, for example, can still live a comfortable life enjoying the patronage of the pious rich in a country like Kuwait. But other artists have come to recognize newer sources of patronage. Magazines and newspapers offered new venues not just for editors and writers, but also for calligraphers, cartoonists, and photographers. Here and there, an impresario would bring a theater or dance company into being, despite inherited taboos, particularly on public performances by women. Women themselves have become cultural pioneers as publishers and writers and increasingly challenge long–standing patterns of male domination. And television has opened the new vistas for cultural variety in the Muslim world as it has elsewhere.
Of course, these changes have not happened evenly across all Muslim lands. Turkey and Egypt were in the forefront of cultural transitions in the early twentieth century, while imperialist regimes in countries like India, Algeria, and Indonesia tended to be wary of new forms and venues of artistic expression that might challenge their hegemony. Wariness also surfaced in religious circles, though Sufi attitudes often proved more flexible and creative than those of religious judges and jurists. The Islamic Republic of Iran is one of several regimes that have tried unsuccessfully to suppress satellite television reception and interdict the smuggling of videotapes and DVDs deemed religiously or morally unacceptable.
In general, however, Muslim writers, artists, and performers everywhere have been deluged with Western styles, manufactures, modes of communication, and forms of entertainment under political and economic conditions that have placed immense leverage in the hands of those who were most willing and able to adapt to Western hegemony. Their responses laid the groundwork for understanding the rich array of Islamic cultural expression in the world today, and also established new patterns of life and professional practice for artistically creative individuals in every Muslim land. At the same time, they created a wide array of new institutional forms — museums, ministries of culture, broadcasting authorities, publishing companies, and cultural marketers — that would reshape the character of patronage in the world of the Islamic arts.
Cultural developments that span fourteen centuries, scores of countries, and currently touch upon the lives of well over a billion people cannot be encapsulated in a few pages. Time and space, language and ethnicity, class and gender, genre and style all contribute a range of achievements that defy easy summary. In order to place the components of an arts festival into a meaningful historical context for an American audience, this brief account will track the development of the following art forms in the Islamic world:
A. Poetry and SongThough the average American is more likely to have had some exposure to Muslim visual arts, we will begin with the literary arts because they are the ones most deeply associated with the origins of the faith. So widely accepted is the general belief that Islamic societies are theologically opposed to depictions of living beings that even knowledgeable people sometimes declare that the greatest arts of Islam are all verbal, or at most calligraphic or abstract in visual expression. This bias toward the verbal is sometimes attributed to the oral origin of the Quran, which is understood by Muslims to be God’s holy word. Others attribute it to the nomadic nature of Arab society in pre–Islamic times, in which poetry was, according to surviving documents, the sole recognized expression of the creative imagination. In either case, the visual forms that eventually became part of “Islamic art” are usually assumed to derive from forms that pre–existed in the lands that came under caliphal rule in the seventh and eighth centuries.
Since the fledgling state of archaeology in Saudi Arabia makes it difficult to reconstruct with any certainty the visual and social environment of Mecca and Medina in the time of the Prophet, we can only guess at any connections that might once have linked these locations with the architectural or ornamental traditions of earlier Arabian societies, that of Himyar in Yemen to the south, or that of the Nabataeans in Jordan to the north, or for that matter any other regional culture. It seems beyond question, however, that dance and song animated both settled and nomadic Arab societies of that time, as they still do in some tribal areas. These precursors of the song and dance traditions that have been collected in the field in modern times must be considered as underlying, to some extent, the poetic production that is recorded in early sources. One indication of this is that the holy cities of Mecca and Medina became the locus for the composition of wine songs during the first century of the caliphate, though these were disapproved of by pious Muslims.
A. Poetry and Song
So far as can be judged from surviving examples, Arabic poetry of the period before and shortly after the advent of the Quran—assuming this to be an Arabian document that was essentially completed in its current form by roughly 6708 — seldom dealt with religious matters. Unlike the Quran, poetry of this era was metrical; but like the Quran, it used mono–rhymes to give unity to a succession of verses. Pre–Islamic odes became highly important in the eyes of early Muslims because they provided clues for understanding the words and phrases in the Quran in the context of their usage at that time.
Considering this poetry as a reflection of life in its era, rather than as a source for linguistic study, we can conclude that the society of Muslims in the middle decades of the seventh century valued poems including evocations of desert and tribal life, praise of heroes and their deeds, panegyrics extolling leaders and patrons, expressions of mourning, satirical or derisive attacks on enemies, and, for some, drinking songs.9 The “new poetry” of the early Abbasid period (late eighth century)added love poems, “indecent” poems, and exaltations of poetic idiosyncrasy. It also increasingly departed from the ode structure.
Thus, despite being the most acclaimed art of the Arabian Peninsula, Arabic poetry did not, for the most part, center on Islam as a faith — at least during the first two centuries of the religion. Eventually, more strictly religious poetry did come to be written, but the study of Arabic literature has not generally ranked the later, religiously oriented poetry on as high a plane as earlier works. Nevertheless, poetry commands enormous respect in all Arab societies down to the present day, and it is commonplace for prominent individuals from all walks of life, including, most notoriously, Osama bin Laden, to turn their hand to poetic composition.
It must not be lost sight of that in the earliest period of Islam, much of this poetry was sung. One of the most extensive early compendia of poetry, compiled by Abu al–Faraj al–Isfahani, was called the Kitab al–Aghani, or “Book of Songs.” And when one thinks of song, one must further keep in mind that many of the foremost singers of the early era were slave women. Al–Jahiz, in his Epistle on Singing–Girls written in the early Abbasid period, says that high–priced slave girls knew thousands of songs. It is also apparent that their singing was accompanied by musical instruments. The distinction between the poet, assumed to be free and respectable (despite certain notorious exceptions), and the singing girl who could be bought and sold provides an early example of the ambiguous relationship between singing, playing musical instruments, and composing poetry.
Throughout the following centuries, poets tended to be lauded and rewarded by patrons while singers and musicians were often relegated to a demimonde of social outcasts. One early indication of this is the condemnation of musical instruments in the sayings (hadith) of the Prophet Muhammad, e.g., “from among my followers there will be some people who will consider illegal sexual intercourse, the wearing of silk, the drinking of alcoholic drinks and the use of musical instruments, as lawful.”10 There are also many historical examples of religious zealots who publicly broke musical instruments in display of their puritanical feelings.11 Meanwhile, other thinkers of the day took no moral issue with music. For instance, the Arab philosopher Abu Yusuf al–Kindi (d. 873) wrote fifteen treatises on music theory and displayed great knowledge of the Greek tradition of musical writing.
Arabic poetry was joined over the centuries by poetry in the other languages spoken in the various Muslim societies, though many non–Arabs continued to compose in Arabic. Persian poetry emerged in the tenth century, Turkish poetry in the fourteenth, and Urdu poetry in the eighteenth. In Muslim Spain, whose musical practices influenced the Christian cultures of southern Europe, poems were composed that mixed Arabic with the local Romance dialect. In the centuries since, numerous other languages of the Muslim world, from Maltese to Somali, have served as vehicles for poetry. Though some Arabic poetic forms continued to be used in these other languages, new forms arose as well, including love lyrics (ghazals), quatrains (ruba‘iyat), and folk epics celebrating legendary figures from the Islamic past.
Just as with Arabic, these other poetic traditions address a wide variety of subjects (panegyrics, satire, love songs, etc.), but they also sometimes manifest a particular emphasis on Islam as seen through the sensibility of Sufis. It is ironic, given the conventional emphasis on Arabic as the language of Islam, that any historical anthology of religious poetry from across the Islamic world would have a higher representation of non–Arabic than of Arabic verse. The fourteenth–century Persian poet Mawlana Jalal al–Din Rumi, whose verses enjoy enormous popularity in English translation, exemplifies the preeminence of non–Arabs in composing religious verse. Given the wide variety of languages, verse forms, and subject matter, it is difficult to arrive at a summary appraisal of poetry and song in Muslim societies. Moreover, songwriting departed substantially from poetry in the twentieth century under the influence of new styles and instrumentation derived from Western sources. Today, for example, rap music is composed and performed in Arabic, Persian, Turkish, Urdu, Swahili, Malay, and other languages predominantly spoken by Muslims. As Muslim poetry and song continue to head in new directions, the weight of fourteen centuries of devotion to this art form suggests that it will long continue to be appreciated by Muslims in almost all regions and social settings.
B. Qur’anic Chant
While the chanting of the Quran (tajwid) is unquestionably a Muslim religious practice with very early beginnings, it is important to note its resemblances to Sephardic, Armenian, and Eastern Orthodox chanting traditions. It is likely that Qur’anic chant began in efforts to imitate the sound of other liturgies. Be that as it may, the chanting of the Quran became one of the few standardized artistic expressions of Islam across linguistic and ethnic boundaries. While there are several recognized schools or styles, all require classical Arabic pronunciation, and there are fixed rules for how specific letters are to be pronounced.
Though it is true that most of the world’s Muslims, who are not Arabic speakers, do not understand all of the words of the Quran when they are chanted, the same thing holds true for the Latin, Sanskrit, or Hebrew chants in the rituals of other faiths. Thus it is necessary to regard chant–listening as a spiritual and social experience, and not primarily a means of communicating precise meaning. Today, Qur’anic chant can be commonly heard on radio and television, especially during religious festivals or holidays, and in some countries, such as the Islamic Republic of Iran, official government events often open with some chanted passages.
Chant instruction — both voice training and interpretation of cantillation marks — has experienced a modern revival across the Muslim world, particularly in non–Arabic–speaking lands, which testifies to its function as a pan–Muslim experience. Several countries now hold annual competitions,12 and famous reciters, like the Egyptian Abd al–Basit (1927–1988), are known throughout the Muslim world with examples of their art being readily accessible on YouTube. 13
C. Calligraphy
The Arabic script has become the hallmark of most Muslim societies, regardless of language, in the same way that Hebrew script historically accompanied Judaism around the world, no matter what vernacular a Jewish community might speak. But Arabic calligraphy stands out in comparison with other calligraphic traditions in its flexibility of form, from squared off mosaic to hyper–cursive nasta‘liq and shekasteh, and its application to almost every decorative purpose. The evolution and variety of the bookhands that provide the main vehicle for the transmission of written knowledge is paralleled by that of numismatic, architectural, and ornamental scripts where legibility is not the primary intent. The earliest versions of the Arabic script on parchment and papyrus, which date to the first decades after the death of the Prophet Muhammad in 632, are difficult to read, especially since most scribes felt it unnecessary to represent short vowels. During that period, documents and records emanating from Muslim rulers newly installed in the lands conquered by the Arab armies were commonly written in Greek or some other established administrative language. Muslim coins minted in Iran, for example, retained inscriptions in Middle Persian.
However, in the early Abbasid caliphate, that is to say, from the late eighth century onward, the shapes and conventions for writing in Arabic script became more standardized, and this led to Arabic calligraphy bonding with Muslim identity far more firmly than any writing tradition other than the Chinese. It can be argued, in fact, that the Arabic script became more strongly associated with Islam than the Arabic language itself. That is, even illiterate people who could not understand either spoken or written Arabic knew immediately when they were in a Muslim environment when they saw the Arabic script prominently displayed. This distinctive function of the Arabic script continues to the present day.
The history of Arabic calligraphy, like that of poetry, displays significant variations over time and space. But schooling in script for the literate elite was established very early as a basic skill — indeed, an art for the most highly skilled — and often became a sine qua non of social or professional advancement. By the time of the Ottoman Empire, each branch of government utilized its own distinctive calligraphic style, and apprentice bureaucrats went through a lengthy period of preparing rough drafts of documents before being entrusted with producing final drafts. Scholars who have been schooled in the reading of Arabic scripts can often identify at a glance the geographic origin or time period of a book or inscription. In parts of the world far from the Middle East, the adaptation of Arabic script to a local language often becomes a hallmark of the expansion of Islam. In Southeast Asia, for example, the Jawi (from the island of Java) version of the Arabic script first appeared in the early fourteenth century; despite the general adoption of Roman characters in the twentieth century, it continues to be used for ritual purposes in some parts of Malaysia and Indonesia up to the present day.
Nevertheless, there are some Muslim societies that do not use the Arabic script. In some cases, this is because another script had been well established before the extension of Islam into the region, as is the case in Bangladesh where the Bengali language is written in a script that is identical to that of India’s largely Hindu province of Bengal. In other cases, the disuse of the Arabic script was the result of pressure from non–Muslim imperialist powers, notably Tsarist Russia and the Soviet Union, which forced their Muslim subjects to use the Cyrillic (or occasionally the Roman) alphabet. The Republic of Turkey stands out as the one Muslim country that adopted the Roman alphabet, for nationalistic reasons, in 1931.
Alphabet choice and styles of script acquired special importance with the advent of printing. After a now mostly forgotten period between the ninth and the fourteenth centuries, in which woodblocks and tin plates — called tarsh in Arabic — were used to print Arabic script, there was almost no printing done by Muslims until the nineteenth century.14 When the printing press did reach the Muslim world, printers used both conventional European typesetting and the lithographic printing process pioneered in Austria by Alois Senefelder (1771–1834). Though Europeans exploited the flexibility of lithographic printing primarily to produce pictures, Muslims from Morocco to Indonesia produced complete books. Since the shapes and styles of Arabic calligraphy could be readily transferred to a lithographic stone, printing did not degrade the fluidity and elegance of handwriting as it did in Europe. This contributed significantly to the retention of calligraphy as an art form in the contemporary Muslim world, while the once artistic handwriting styles of Europe largely disappeared. It might be noted that the replacement of the Arabic script with Roman or Cyrillic characters has led to a parallel decline in the importance of artistic calligraphy in the countries affected.
D. Belles Lettres
The Arabic word adab designates a broad category of writing roughly equivalent to the idea of belles lettres. That is to say, it signifies a studious concern with literary style regardless of subject matter. Prior to the transfer of Western literary forms into the Muslim world in modern times, prose fiction played a relatively small role in adab. Religious, philosophical, historical, biographical, satirical, and scientific writings, on the other hand, often displayed the author’s conscious concern with literary style. From the tenth century onward, the preoccupation with style often took the form of couching prefatory remarks, or even entire texts, in rhymed prose, a style of writing attributed to Badi‘ al–Zaman al–Hamadhani (969–1008). Other stylistic devices included rapid and diverting changes of topic and tone, and frequent introductions of poetry into works of prose.
Various forms of adab originated in Arabic in the early Abbasid period, but they spread over time to other languages. The common denominator among the forms was a conscious concern for style, which also marked the writer as a member of a class that was not just literate, but highly schooled in literary composition. The connection between the words adab (spelled with long a’s), meaning “literature,” and adabiya, meaning “polite manners,” highlights the degree to which skill at composition came to be a mark of refinement. In Ottoman times, for example, it was commonplace for members of the governmental and literary elite to be adept in composing poetry and prose in three languages, Arabic, Persian, and Turkish, which differ linguistically to a greater degree than do European languages like English, Italian, and Russian.
In modern times, the tradition of elegant writing has been adapted to the novel and short story forms, which now dominate literary production. Though modern taste often militates against the stylistic artificiality associated with classical adab, creative prose writing by Islamic authors continues to attract attention, both within the Muslim world and internationally. Prose fiction in Muslim languages varies thematically from popular historical novels in Urdu, to the incisive social and political vignettes of Pramoedya Ananta Toer in Indonesian, to the multi–layered symbolism of the Turkish Nobel Prize winner Orhan Pamuk. Yet, there has been strong resistance to considering the colloquial Arabic of common people a suitable vehicle for literary creativity. Some Arab authors have experimented with colloquial composition, but none has produced something generally accepted as a masterwork.
E. Music and Dance
In dance, as in other areas of creativity among Muslims, social attitudes were often carried over from pre–Islamic societies like Byzantium and Sasanid Iran. In fact, the Empress Theodora had once been a public entertainer, and because in Roman society it was forbidden for members of the elite classes to marry public performers, Justinian had to seek a special dispensation from his predecessor and uncle, Justin, in order to marry her. But not all of the considerable imperial propaganda machinery of the Byzantine Empire was able to erase the stain, and Procopius in his Secret History spread many colorful, and off–color, stories of Theodora’s sexual activities.
Today, many apologists for the low status of dancers, actors, and musicians in Iran attempt to portray pre– Islamic Iran as a society that gave royal patronage to artists, even housing them at court as Louis XIV did.15 Unfortunately, for many years, Medjid Rezvani’s book on theater and dance in Iran was the only one available on the subject; thus, some serious scholars like ethnomusicologist Amnon Shiloah accepted Rezvani’s fantasy of a classical dance tradition with formal rules and training that was performed in secret and “guarded, right up to our own times, the rules of the classical dance, even if a few old dancers are the only repositories of them.”16 This led Shiloah to conclude the following: “From the scattered information we possess, however, it emerges that alongside non–professional dancing, a well–defined form of sophisticated dance did exist. The latter probably referred to the glorious pre–Islamic Iranian dance with its codified rules and aesthetics. . . .”17 However, no evidence survives to demonstrate that any such classical dance tradition existed or that artists and entertainers were regarded any more highly in Sasanid Iran and Byzantium than in the Islamic world of the Middle East and Central Asia.
That the low position of dancers and other performing artists in the Middle East and Central Asia is a result of the continuance of earlier societal attitudes in those regions is considerably strengthened when one looks at the high position of classical dancers and musicians in the Javanese courts. In Java, by way of contrast to the position of Middle Eastern and Central Asian dancers and musicians, Muslim royal courts, continuing and adapting pre–Islamic attitudes, did indeed lavishly support classical dancers and musicians.
In response to the high priority and popularity of the performing arts in the West, many 20th century governments, including Egypt, Turkey, pre–Revolutionary Iran, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and Tunisia, formed national dance companies for touring purposes. These companies frequently created fantasy visions of their respective nation states to correspond to Western images of the Orient.18
Steps were taken to ensure that the dancers, culled for the first time from the middle classes, did not suffer from the traditionally poor reputation of professional dancers. These actions did not always succeed. All dancers, whether ballerinas in Cairo or Istanbul, or members of folk troupes in national companies, can regale listeners with the horrified reactions of friends and family when it became known that they have followed the profession of dancer.19 Lotfollah Mansouri, a well–known Iranian artistic director of the San Francisco Opera, recently told an audience of his father disowning him, calling him a raqqas (dancer), and of his father refusing to speak to him for years, despite his international celebrity, because he followed the disreputable profession of music.
As for music, classical forms (which differ from country to country) have often been granted official status by the state, thereby denying more popular forms of music access to state–supported media such as radio and television. Classical musicians frequently supported efforts to exclude other musicians from public performances by denigrating popular music forms as corrupting, establishing false hierarchies of permissible and impermissible genres of music, and attempting to imbue classical music with spirituality in order to bolster their societal positions at the expense of others.20 The well–known “Arabesque debate” in Turkey. which involves conservative opposition to popular, working class songs influenced by Arab melodies, is another example of the contestation of musical genres.21
Though the playing of musical instruments to accompany songs appears very early in the historical record of Muslim societies, dance makes a comparatively late arrival. When dance finally does appear, it is associated most strongly with Sufism. Some Sufi masters placed dance forms at the center of their ritual practices, and by the fifteenth century the theme of dancing Sufis, intoxicated by love of God, became common in miniature paintings from Iran and India. Other Muslim religious leaders, however, particularly among the non–Sufis, eschewed both dance and song, considering them distractions from true religious devotion.
This does not mean that dance was always associated with Sufism, or even with the religious life. The important role of court–sponsored music and dance in Indonesia has already been mentioned. In certain other regions, tribal customs involved dancing by groups of men or women. Moreover, traditional popular festivals held for centuries from Morocco to Egypt to India are known to have included dance groups, sometimes involving men dressed as women. Dance played a role in private life as well. In Iran, female dancers are a favorite theme in paintings of the Qajar era (late eighteenth to nineteenth centuries), and women of elevated social status sometimes danced for the entertainment of female friends.
F. Theater
Perhaps the last art form to find an expression under Islam was theater. Neither the ancient Greek theatrical tradition, which was closely bound to the rituals of the city–state, nor the narrative pageantry of the various Christian communities of the Middle East seems to have spurred Muslim imitations. Among Shi‘ite Muslims, however, a desire to commemorate the martyrdom of the Prophet Muhammad’s grandson, al–Husain ibn ‘Ali, in 680, eventually gave rise to what is sometimes referred to as a Muslim “Passion Play.” Actors took the roles of al–Husain and his various family members, and also the roles of the villains who killed them at the behest of the Umayyad Caliph Yazid ibn Mu‘awiya. Mourning processions held at the beginning of the year in the Muslim religious calendar date back to at least the tenth century, but full–scale theatrical renditions of the tragedy, known as ta‘ziyeh, did not take shape until the middle of the eighteenth century.22
Though Sunni Islam did not develop a counterpart tradition of religious performance, more secular forms of theater appeared in Turkish areas (including in Iran) and in Southeast Asia. In the latter region, shadow puppets acting out stories from pre–Islamic sources like the Ramayana became highly popular. Shadow plays also gained popularity under Turkish rulers in Egypt and Turkey. Colored, translucent figures and stage sets, all cut out of stiff leather, were pressed against a white cloth and illuminated from behind. The puppeteer manipulated the figures, which were on the ends of sticks and at the same time provided the voices of the various characters. Typically, a wise–cracking scalawag named Karagöz, or Blackeye, engaged in elaborate bantering confrontations with his more sober counterpart Hacivat. Other stock characters, such as an Arab, an Armenian, a Jew, or a Muslim bully, would also appear. The Karagöz performances, as they were collectively called, held up a mirror to the social foibles of Ottoman popular society.23 At the same time another type of popular theater, called orta oyunu (literally, “middle play”), developed with live performers instead of puppeteers. All of these forms were designed to appeal to a broad public and to children, and stand in sharp contrast to the Shi‘ite Passion Play.
Although the theatrical form was not as strong in Muslim tradition, theatrical performances based on European models appeared in a number of Middle Eastern cities in the nineteenth century. But whereas Muslim playwrights have still not achieved the degree of acceptance accorded many Muslim novelists and short story writers, the development of the cinema in the Muslim world has brought forth a number of internationally acclaimed directors including Atif Yilmaz and Yilmaz Güney (Turkey), Yousef Chahine and Salah Abu Seif (Egypt), and Abbas Kiarostami and Mohsen Makhmalbaf (Iran).
G. Painting, Sculpture, and Design
The debate over what makes an art “Islamic” has most frequently been framed in terms of the visual arts. The Arab–ruled societies of the first two centuries of Islam were mostly populated by non–Muslims. Arabs and early converts to Islam may well have been the foremost contributors to the literary arts and calligraphy, but most craft production and building construction was carried out by non–Muslims or, by the late ninth century, by non–Arab converts to Islam who often had skills and styles that pre–dated their conversion. Images dating to the first two centuries include mosaics of cities and trees at the Umayyad Mosque in Damascus, the wall paintings of kings and female bathers preserved in desert palaces built for the Umayyad caliphs, and the depictions of royalty on coins produced before the changeover to purely calligraphic designs in the eighth century. In each case, the “Muslim” art is influenced by earlier styles and techniques.
Nevertheless, over time, certain religious beliefs can be said to have impacted the development of visual art forms. Historians commonly cite the religious bias — sometimes misinterpreted as an absolute prohibition — against representations of living beings to explain a preference for geometric and arabesque decorative motifs, particularly in the ornamentation of religious buildings. The early eighth century decision to remove the image of the caliph from all coinage and replace it with calligraphy containing his name, title, and selected Qur’anic quotations is cited as a case in point. However, the turning away from images of living beings was not consistent or absolute, and figurative representations had again become common by the beginning of the tenth century.
Ceramics loom large in the early history of Islamic art because they survive more abundantly than works on parchment or paper. By the ninth century, a distinctive style emerged in Iraq, Iran, and Central Asia, featuring Arabic calligraphy against a plain background. The words are often difficult to read, and non–Arab converts to Islam may not have understood the writing. Nevertheless, they bought these ornamental plates to demonstrate their adherence to the new religion. After a century or so of popularity, however, competing styles emerged, at least in Iran. Many of the new designs reproduced plant, animal, and human images characteristic of the pre–Islamic period. Men wearing the loose trousers and brocade tunics of the pre–Muslim aristocratic class are shown hunting on horseback or feasting. Both of these themes recall the images on silver plates produced under the Sasanid dynasty before the Arab conquest.24 In the eleventh century, both of these styles disappeared, but by the thirteenth century, new figurative styles showing influences arriving from China by way of the Central Asian Silk Road became common in Iran.
Nor is Iran the only place where figurative imagery persisted. Carved ivory boxes made in Egypt, Sicily, and Muslim Spain during the ninth through eleventh centuries display a wide variety of human and animal images, often set within arabesque framing patterns. Furthermore, after the Normans wrested Sicily from its Muslim rulers in the eleventh century, they employed Muslim artists to decorate their palaces with figurative images that are clearly based on Muslim models.
The technique of making paper, originally developed in China, appeared in Muslim Central Asia in the eighth century and rapidly spread throughout the Middle East and North Africa. Initially, paper was a scarce commodity produced in small sizes.25 Although production increased over time, the small original size of individual sheets of paper contributed to the development of miniature painting, which became the paramount expression of Islamic visual art from the thirteenth century onward. Miniature painting also displays clear stylistic influences from China, for instance in the appearance of rocks, trees, and clouds, and sometimes the Asian facial features of human figures. Miniature painting was practiced in almost every Muslim society from India to Spain, but it reached its most sophisticated expression in the East, including the Mongol, Timurid, Safavid, Ottoman, and Mughal schools of painting.
Larger–scale paintings were also produced in some areas. The Chehel Sutun palace constructed in Isfahan in the seventeenth century is noted for wall paintings that show the impact of European styles. Some Muslim painters were evidently willing to experiment with figurative images from a variety of cultures. Sculpture in the round was not common in Muslim societies. However, all sorts of surfaces came to be used for painted or inscribed decorative display, including metal plates and lamps, pen cases, and book–bindings.
Across the Islamic world, while some styles of rugs and fabrics incorporated floral, animal, and human imagery, geometric designs have remained most common down to the present day. Some of these designs include traditional pre–Islamic, non–Arab patterns, while others reveal the identities of weavers or designers as members of particular tribal groups. A substantial market for imported rugs sprung up in early modern Europe. At present, there continues to be a significant Western demand for rugs of artistic quality made in Turkey, Iran, and Pakistan.
H. Architecture
Students of the architectural history of Muslim lands sometimes focus on particular periods or regions, while others divide their studies by building types, tracing the separate histories of the mosque, the palace, the madrasa (college or seminary), the fortress, and the suq or bazaar.26 Each of these building types has its own chronological and stylistic markers. Some of these histories show how a particular style spread within the Muslim world; for instance, the “Samarra” style of surface decoration, developed for a temporary caliphal capital in ninth century Iraq, was manifested soon thereafter in eastern Iranian stuccowork or Egyptian woodwork. Sometimes, these histories show an openness to distant cultural influences, such as the square North African minarets that hint at sub–Saharan forms, or the Anatolian tomb towers derived from Central Asian models. Other times, they exhibit a creative melding of pre–Islamic and Islamic forms, whether in the re–use of Roman columns in the Great Mosque of Cordoba in Spain, of stonework from Hindu temples in many Indian mosques, or in motifs from Armenian stone architecture in eastern Anatolian buildings.
Across the Islamic world, from at least the eighth century onward, mosques, minarets, and open or covered markets became the most visible markers of Islamic social life. This is particularly true in places where the disappearance of wheeled vehicles from the Middle Eastern and North African transportation system during the centuries immediately preceding the rise of Islam had given rise to labyrinthine networks of narrow streets.27 Urban space scaled to pedestrian movement, with the distribution of goods within neighborhoods performed by porters and pack animals, struck European travelers as a distinctive aspect of Islamic society from the seventeenth century onward. This gave rise in the 1960s to a scholarly debate over whether the “Islamic city” had been shaped by religious doctrine, and was negligent of the public needs of a civil society. More often than not, this theory proved not to reflect the reality of Islamic urban life, particularly when geographically peripheral regions like Indonesia and West Africa were taken into account. Moreover, some Muslim cities did incorporate large public spaces, such as the Royal Square (Maidan–e Shah) in Isfahan or the Djemaa el Fna market in Marrakesh, while others featured grand thoroughfares like the long avenue connecting the sultan’s palace with the city walls in Istanbul. However, instances of urban planning were more likely to focus on gardens and complexes of buildings centered around mosques or palaces, rather than checkerboard street layouts or uniform building codes that had once been a feature of Roman urbanism and reemerged in Europe in recent centuries.
The infiltration of architectural forms from the West in modern times fits unevenly into this highly diverse pattern with clear influence in some situations and very little in others. For example, although European baroque forms did have an impact on a few Ottoman mosques, like the eighteenth century Nur–u Osmaniye in Istanbul, the influence of Europe is much more easily discerned in entirely new structural types, such as railroad stations, and in efforts to reconfigure urban space to accommodate modern transportation systems and concepts of what a city should be. Plans to “modernize” Muslim cities proliferated in the nineteenth century, sometimes in the form of “modern” cities being built alongside “traditional” cities, as happened in North Africa under French imperial control, and sometimes under the aegis of modernizing Muslim leaders, such as the Pahlavi dynasty in Iran, which favored broad avenues and traffic circles. Most of these plans never got off the drawing board or were not fully realized.
In the present age, the desire for historical preservation competes with the need for innovation in architectural projects throughout the Muslim world. Given the impact that built environments have on local inhabitants and visitors alike, there may today be no area of creative endeavor that is as crucial as architecture to the definition of what is or is not “Islamic.” The fact that major building projects in Muslim countries are often designed by non–Muslims from outside the Muslim world rather than by Muslim architects highlights this problem. Since 1978, the Aga Khan Awards for Architecture have focused international attention on both the preservation of historic Islamic architecture and the importance of new design initiatives incorporating aspects of that heritage. Meanwhile, the fast–growing new cities of Saudi Arabia and the sheikhdoms of the Persian Gulf do not always place such value on architecture as an expression of Muslim heritage and aesthetics.
This brief survey of the creative culture of Muslim societies strongly supports the conclusion that Islamic art has been characterized by diversity and openness to fresh ideas for a span of over fourteen centuries. But while this diversity has remained a constant, the lives of contemporary Muslim artists and performers differ profoundly from those of their predecessors. Guild systems have disappeared. Patronage has passed from rulers and prosperous citizens — who lived (for the most part) within a Muslim universe of discourse — to a global market economy in which the value of Muslim art and other cultural wares is established by dealers in Europe, the U.S., and elsewhere, while Muslim consumers are increasingly attracted to cultural goods produced outside their societies.
To be sure, local artisans and performers in more or less isolated areas still respond to local tastes, but change is pervasive. The enormous Djemaa el Fna market in Marrakesh caters to tourists, but also features entertainment and products that appeal primarily to local consumers. A rural fair in conservative Kelantan province in Malaysia may include both traditional shadow plays and arcade video games. And in Islamabad, Pakistan, or Amman, Jordan, it is easier to find a T–shirt decorated with English slogans and corporate logos than one bearing Urdu or Arabic writing.
How does today’s Muslim artist or performer negotiate the complexities of the creative life? For writers, including screenwriters and dramatists, deciding what language to write in may be a challenge. Some North African novelists write only in French; others prefer Arabic. Some write in both. South Asian Muslims may choose between English and Urdu or Bengali. Whatever choice is made involves evaluating not only the readership at which the work is aimed, but also other factors, such as avoiding censorship or acquiring an international reputation. Muslim winners of the Nobel Prize for Literature — Egypt’s Naguib Mahfouz and Turkey’s Orhan Pamuk — both earned their distinction with works originally written in their native tongues. But despite their international fame, both encountered criticism within their own countries for opinions expressed in their work. Salman Rushdie, on the other hand, achieved fame for works written in English, one of which, Satanic Verses, became the focus of popular outrage in many Muslim countries because of allegations that he defamed the Prophet Muhammad and his family. On the other hand, Grimus, his seldom–read first novel, is a science—fiction—tinged retelling of the famous Sufi tale of The Conference of the Birds by Farid al–Din Attar.
Visual artists face similar challenges. Some, like the Iranian painter Mahmoud Farshchian, adapt traditional motifs drawn from miniature painting to the tastes of international buyers and émigrés from their homelands. Others, such as Muhammad al–Turki — the designer of Baghdad’s Shaheed (“Martyr”) Monument, dedicated to the soldiers killed in the Iran–Iraq War (1980–1988) — have devoted their talents to projects expressive of the ideologies of the leaders of their countries. And in some cases, Muslim rulers have called on non–Muslim foreigners to advance their aesthetic agendas. A case in point is a victory arch consisting of two hands gripping crossed swords that Saddam Hussein commissioned for the entrance to a military parade ground. He gave a photograph of his own hands and forearms to the German company H+H Metalform, which built the monument, to use as a model.
Instrumental music and dance, being free from the problems of linguistic translation, may not pose quite such clear–cut issues with respect to catering to specific audiences. Nevertheless, recording contracts, tours, and participation in a growing number of national and international festivals and arts competitions challenge performers and impresarios in ways that bear little resemblance to the artistic life of only a century ago. Clearly, cinema and television are relatively new forums for artistic expression, and therefore have little to do with artistic traditions of many centuries ago.
Given the complexities of the cultural scene in the Muslim world today, Muslim Voices could only have come together through the collaboration of many institutions, notably The Brooklyn Academy of Music, The Asia Society, and New York University’s Center for Dialogues: Islam–U.S.–The West. Many people with a remarkable array of skills and backgrounds were involved in selecting participants, designing events, and finding funding for the enterprise. Yet, the festival can, at best, only provide a glimpse of the great cultural variety and creative talents to be found in Muslim societies across the globe. It is the hope of the organizers that this glimpse will whet the West’s appetite for more exposure to the best artists that the Muslim world has to offer. If this hope should be realized in the years to come, a growing cultural familiarity between non–Muslims and Muslims will surely help combat the ignorant misconceptions about the Muslim world that have prevailed since the tragedy of 9/11, and allay fears and mistrust on both sides of the cultural divide.
General
Walter Armbrust, ed., Mass Mediations: New Approaches to Popular Culture in the Middle East and Beyond, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000.
Jill Beaulieu and Mary Roberts, eds., Orientalism’s Interlocutors: Painting, Architecture, Photography, Durham: Duke University Press, 2002.
Miriam Cooke and Bruce B. Lawrence, eds., Muslim Networks from Hajj to Hip Hop, Durham: University of North Carolina Press, 2005.
Dale F. Eickelman and Jon W. Anderson, eds., New Media in the Muslim World: The Emerging Public Sphere, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003.
Poetry and Prose: Arabic
Saddeka Arebi, Women and Words in Saudi Arabia, New York: Columbia University Press, 1994.
Aida Abib Bamia, The Graying of the Raven: Cultural and Sociopolitical Significance of Algerian Folk Poetry, Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 2001.
The Cambridge History of Arabic Literature, 6 vols., various editors, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984–2008.
Steve Caton, Peaks of Yemen I Summon: Poetry as Cultural Practice in a North Yemeni Tribe, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993.
Salma Khadra Jayyusi, ed., Modern Arabic Fiction: An Anthology, New York: Columbia University Press, 2008.
Salma Khadra Jayyusi, ed., Modern Arabic Poetry, New York: Columbia University Press, 1991.
James T. Monroe, Hispano–Arabic Poetry: An Anthology, Piscataway, N.J.: Gorgias Press, 2004.
Muhsin Jasim al–Musawi, Arabic Poetry: Trajectories of Modernity and Tradition, London: Routledge, 2006.
Muhsin Jasim al–Musawi, The Postcolonial Arabic Novel: Debating Ambivalence, Leiden: Brill Academic Publishers, 2003.
Suzanne Pinckney Stetkevych, ed., Early Islamic Poetry and Poetics, London: Ashgate, 2009.
Suzanne Pinckney Stetkevych, The Mute Immortals Speak: Pre–Islamic Poetry and Poetics of Ritual, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993.
Sabra Jean Webber, Romancing the Real: Folklore and Ethnographic Representation in North Africa, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991.
Poetry and Prose: Persian
Ahmad Karimi–Hakkak, ed., An Anthology of Modern Persian Poetry, Boulder: Westview, 1978.
Minoo S. Southgate, ed., Modern Persian Short Stories, Washington, D.C.: Three Continents Press, 1980.
Soraya Sullivan, tr., Stories by Iranian Women Since the Revolution, Austin: University of Texas Press, 1991.
Ehsan Yarshater and J. T. P. de Bruijn, eds., General Introduction to Persian Literature: A History of Persian Literature, London: I. B. Tauris, 2008.
Poetry and Prose: Turkish
Ahmet O. Evin, Origins and Development of the Turkish Novel, Minneapolis: Bibliotheca Islamica, 1984.
Talat Said Halman, Contemporary Turkish Literature: Fiction and Poetry, Rutherford, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1980.
Nermin Menemencioglu and Fahir Iz, eds., Penguin Book of Turkish Verse, New York: Penguin, 1978.
Poetry and Prose: Urdu
Frances W. Pritchett, Nets of Awareness: Urdu Poetry and Its Critics, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994.
Francess W. Pritchett, Marvelous Encounters: Folk Romance in Urdu and Hindi, n.p.: South Asia Books, 1998.
Ralph Russell, ed., An Anthology of Urdu Literature, Manchester, U.K.: Carcanet Press, 2000.
Qur’anic Chant
Kristina Nelson, The Art of Reciting the Qur’an, Cairo: American University of Cairo Press, 2001.
Music and Song
Virginia Danielson, “The Voice of Egypt”: Umm Kulthum, Arabic Song, and Egyptian Society in the Twentieth Century, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998.
George Sawa, Music Performance Practice in the Early Abbasid Era, 750—932 A.D., updated ed., Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 2004.
CalligraphySheila S. Blair, Islamic Calligraphy, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2008.
Painting and Design
Karin Adahl and Berit Sahlstrom, eds., Islamic Art and Culture in Sub–Saharan Africa, Philadelphia: Coronet Books, 1995.
Metin And, Turkish Miniature Painting: The Ottoman Period, Istanbul: Dost Yayinlari, 1987.
Sheila S. Blair and Jonathan M. Bloom, The Art and Architecture of Islam, 1250—1800, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996.
Walter P. Denny, Oriental Rugs, New York: Smithsonian Institution—Cooper–Hewitt Museum, 1979.
Walter P. Denny and Nazan ölçer, Anatolian Carpets: Masterpieces from the Museum of Turkish and Islamic Arts, Istanbul, Bern: Ertug and Kocabiyik, 1999.
Oleg Grabar, The Formation of Islamic Art, rev. and enl. ed., New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987.
Robert Hillenbrand, Islamic Art and Architecture, London: Thames and Hudson, 1998.
Anthony Welch, Shah ‘Abbas and the Arts of Isfahan, New York: The Asia Society, 1973.
Architecture
Janet L. Abu–Lughod, Cairo: 1001 Years of the City Victorious, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971.
Nezar al—Sayyad, Cities and Caliphs: On the Genesis of Arab Muslim Urbanism, Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1991.
Zeynep Çelik, The Remaking of Istanbul: Portrait of an Ottoman City in the Nineteenth Century, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993.
Godfrey Goodwin, A History of Ottoman Architecture, London: Thames and Hudson, 2003.
Robert Hillenbrand, Islamic Architecture: Form, Function, and Meaning, New York: Columbia University Press, 2004.
Ali Modarres, Modernizing Yazd: Selective Historical Memory and the Fate of Vernacular Architecture, Costa Mesa, California: Mazda, 2006.
Gülrü Necipoglu, et al., The Age of Sinan: Architectural Culture in the Ottoman Empire, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005.
Susan Slyomovics, The Walled Arab City in Literature, Architecture and History: The Living Medina in the Maghrib, London: Routledge, 2001.
Theater and Cinema
Metin And, Karagöz: Turkish Shadow Theatre, Istanbul: Dost Yayinlari, 1975.
Mustafa Badawi, Modern Arabic Drama in Egypt, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988.
Peter Chelkowski, ed., Taziyeh: Ritual and Drama in Iran, New York: New York University Press, 1979.
David Currell, Shadow Puppets and Shadow Play, Ramsbury, Wiltshire: Crowood, 2008.
Hamid Dabashi, Masters and Masterpieces of Iranian Cinema, Washington, D.C.: Mage, 2007.
Gönül Dönmez–Colin, Turkish Cinema: Identity, Distance and Belonging, Reaktion Books, 2008.
M. R. Ghanoonparvar and John Green, Iranian Drama: An Anthology, Costa Mesa, California: Mazda, 1989.
Viola Shafik, Arab Cinema: History and Cultural Identity, Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, rev. ed., 2007.
Richard Tapper, ed., The New Iranian Cinema: Politics, Representation and Identity, London: I. B. Tauris, 2002.
Dance
Najwa Adra, “Concept of Tribe in Rural Yemen.” In Saad Eddin Ibrahim and Nicholas S. Hopkins, eds., Arab Society: Social Science Perspectives, Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 1985, pp. 275—285.
Op. cit., “Tribal Dancing and Yemeni Nationalism.” Revue du Monde Musulman et de la Méditerranée, 1993, 67(1), 161–168.
Azardokht ‘Ameri, “Raqs–e ‘amianeh–ye shahri va raqs–e mowsum be klasik: bar–rasi–ye tatbiqi dar howze–ye Tehran.” Mahour Music Quarterly, number 20, Summer 2003, 24–28.
Metin And, 1959. Dances of Anatolian Turkey. New York: Dance Perspectives, number 3.
Morroe Berger, 1966. “Belly Dance.” Horizon 8 (2), 41–49.
———. “Curious and Wonderful Gymnastic,” New York: Dance Perspectives, number10, Spring 1961.
M. L. Roy Choudhury, “Music in Islam.” Journal of the Asiatic Society. Letters, vol. XXIII, number 2, 1957: 43–102.
Sherri Deaver, “Concealment vs. Display: The Modern Saudi Woman.” Dance Research Journal. Summer 1978: 14–18.
Mary Masayo Doi, 2002. Gesture, Gender, Nation: Dance and Social Change in Uzbekistan. Westport, Connecticut: Bergin & Garvey.
Lois Ibsen Al–Faruqi, 1987. “Dance as a Form of Islamic Expression.” Dance Research Journal. Oct. 2, 6–17.
Sasan Fatemi, 2005. “La musique legére urbaine dans la culture iranienne: Réflexions sur les notions de classique et populaire.” Unpublished dissertation. Université Paris X–Nanterre.
Stavros Stavrou Karayanni, 2004. Dancing Fear & Desire: Race, Sexuality, & Imperial Politics in Middle Eastern Dance. Waterloo, Ontario: Wilfrid Laurier University Press.
Bruce E. H. Koepke, 2003. “Covert Dance in Afghanistan: A Metaphor for Crisis?” in Mohd Anis Md Nor, ed. Asian Music. Kuala Lumpur: Asian Pacific Dance Research Society, 92–107.
Edward W. Lane, 2003 (originally published in 1836). An Account of the Manners and Customs of the Modern of the Egyptians. Cairo: American University in Cairo.
Rudi Mathee, 2000. “Prostitutes, Courtesans, and Dancing Girls: Women Entertainers in Safavid Iran.” In Rudi Mathee and Beth Baron, eds. Iran and Beyond: Essays in Middle Eastern History in Honor of Nikki R. Keddie. Costa Mesa, California: Mazda, 121–150.
Arzu öztürkmen, 2003. “Modern Dance Alla Turca: Transforming Ottoman Dance in Early Republican Turkey.” Dance Research Journal. 35/1 Summer 2003, 38–60.
Magda Saleh, 1998a. “Egypt: Traditional Dance.” International Encyclopedia of Dance, vol. 2, 486–495.
———. 1998b. “Egypt: Contemporary Dance Companies.” International Encyclopedia of Dance, vol. 2, 495–499.
Anthony Shay, 2008. Dancing Across Borders: The American Fascination with Exotic Dance Forms. Jefferson, North Carolina: MacFarland & Co.
———. 2008. “Choreographing Masculinity: Hypermasculine Dance Styles as Invented Tradition in Egypt, Iran, and Uzbekistan.” Dance Chronicle. vol. 31, number 2.
———. 2006. “The Male Dancer in the Middle East and Central Asia.” Dance Research Journal. Summer & Winter 2006, 38/ 1 & 2, 137–162.
———. 2002. Choreographic Politics: State Folk Dance Companies, Representation, and Power. Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press.
———. 1999. Choreophobia: Solo Improvised Dance in the Iranian World. Costa Mesa, California: Mazda.
———. 1995. “Dance and Non–Dance: Patterned Movement in Iran and Islam.” Iranian Studies, vol. 28, numbers 1–2, Winter/Spring 1995, 61–78.
Anthony Shay and Barbara Sellers–Young, eds. 2005. Belly Dance: Orientalism, Transnationalism, and Harem Fantasy. Costa Mesa, California: Mazda.
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Videologue
“Afghan Village.” 1976. Hanover, New Hampshire: American University Field Services.
“Dances of Egypt.” 1991, 2006. Los Angeles: Araf Discs.
“Dances of North Africa.” 1995—2006. Los Angeles: Araf Discs.
“Egypt Group of Folk Dance.” n.d. Los Angeles: Saut wa Soora Co.
“Homage to Mahmoud Reda.” 2005. Spain: Nesma Music. Solfeon, Ltd.
“Ibrahim Farrah Presents Rare Glimpses.” 1998, New York.
“Gharam fi al–Karnak.” n.d. Cairo: Gemal Elleissi Films.
“Raqs–ha–ye mahali–ye Iran” n.d. (Iranian Folk Dances, video). New York: Cina.
“Raqs–ha va Avaz–ha–ye Mahalli–ye Iran.” n.d. Tarzana, California: Pars Video. #125.
1 Saudi Aramco World, 27/3 (May/June, 1976), p. 2.
2 Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, New York: Bradley, n.d., vol. V, p. 423.
3 Ghada Hijjawi Qaddumi, A Medieval Islamic Book of Gifts and Treasures, doctoral dissertation, Harvard University, 1990, p. 69.
4 Stefano Carboni, “Moments of Vision.” In Venice and the Islamic World: 828–1797, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007, p. 28.
5 For a sensible discussion of the King Offa dinar in the context of other Arabic script issues, see www.masud.co.uk/ISLAM/bmh/BMH–AQ–offa.htm.
6 For extensive discussions of a variety of borrowed styles and practices see Rosamond E. Mack, From Bazaar to Piazza: Islamic Trade and Italian Art, 1300–1600, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001; and Venice and the Islamic World: 828–1797, op. cit.
7 See for comparison the work of Pamela Smith, The Body of the Artisan: Art and Experience in the Scientific Revolution, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006.
8 Scholarly debate on this assumption is lively and acrimonious, with some scholars in the West arguing for the Quran being a collection of spiritual literary fragments brought together a century and a half later by unknown compilers in Iraq. For a brief and temperate presentation of the pros and cons of this theory, see Daniel W. Brown, A New Introduction to Islam, London: Blackwell, 2003.
9 See the translation by A. F. L. Beeston, Warminster: Aris and Phillips, 1980.
10 Bukhari, Sahih, volume 7, book 69, number 494.
11 For numerous examples, see Michael Cook, Commanding Right and Forbidding Wrong in Islamic Thought, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001.
12 See, for example, Lois al–Faruqi, “Qur’an Reciters in Competition in Kuala Lumpur,” Ethnomusicology, vol. 31, no. 2 (Spring–Summer, 1987), pp. 221–228.
13 For a good example of his recitation, go to www.youtube.com/watch?v=jeG8Vz7y2PE.
14 A notable exception is a short–lived press operated in Istanbul by Ibrahim Müteferrika (1674–1745) between 1729 and 1743. In addition, European presses did occasionally print an Arabic Quran or texts intended for the use of Christian Arabs.
15 See Medjid Rezvani, Le Theatre et la Danse en Iran, Paris: Maisonneuve et Larose, 1962.
16 Ibid., p. 159.
17 Amnon Shiloah, Music in the World of Islam: A Socio–Cultural Study, Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1995, p. 137.
18 See two works by Anthony Shay, Choreophobia: Solo Improvised Dance in the Iranian World, Costa Mesa, California: Mazda, 1999; and Choreographic Politics: State Folk Dance Companies, Representation, and Power, Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, 2002.
19 See, for example, Nesta Ramazani, The Dance of the Rose and the Nightingale, Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2002.
20 See Jean During et al., The Art of Persian Music, Washington, D.C.: Mage, 1991. Also Sasan Fatemi, “La musique legére urbaine dans la culture iranienne: Réflexions sur les notions de classique et populaire.” Unpublished dissertation. Université Paris X–Nanterre, 2005.
21 Martin Stokes, The Arabesque Debate: Music and Musicians in Modern Turkey, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992.
22 For a detailed history see Peter Chelkowski, ed., Ta‘ziyeh: Ritual and Drama in Iran, New York: New York University Press, 1979.
23 Metin And, Karagöz: Turkish Shadow Theatre, Istanbul: Dost Yayinlari, 1975.
24 Richard W. Bulliet, “Pottery Styles and Social Status in Medieval Khurasan,” in A. Bernard Knapp, ed., Archaeology, Annales, and Ethnohistory, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 75–82.
25 Jonathan Bloom, Paper Before Print: The History and Impact of Paper in the Islamic World, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001.
26 These are respectively the Arabic and Persian words for “market.”
27 For the story of this development see Richard W. Bulliet, The Camel and the Wheel, Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1972.
