Last month, Martin Amis added yet another such elegant tirade about September 11 and his precious civilisation.Īs the skies darken, some of us hope the arts can make the hard lines dissolve. Many in the liberal intelligentsia have enlisted to fight for occidental values they feel are threatened by hoards of uncivilised Muslims. In his book Islam in Britain 1558-1685, Nabil Matar wrote: "Muslims, through their Arab-Islamic legacy, were part of the religious, commercial and military self-definition of England." Not any longer, now that a new deadly global crusade is upon us. Never has it been more important to open up the rivers of words, ideas, knowledge and beauty that have criss-crossed for centuries between the notional East and West.
The V&A did itself proud with Encounters: the meeting of Asia and Europe 1500-1800, and this museum now houses the Jameel Gallery of Islamic Art, a magical space paid for by an Arab businessman to project the entrancing face of our faith, he says. The recent Word into Art at the British Museum showcased contemporary Middle Eastern artists who work creatively with the written word, some with transformative calligraphy and derivations, others who dare to go beyond the purely beautiful and turn ink on paper into protest. There have been successful (admittedly more ambitious) exhibitions on East-West encounters and on Islamic aesthetics that have charmed the public and overturned perceptions.
Rather than proving a sense of East meeting and complimenting the West, the very layout emphasised the chasm between them." "The effect is one of jarring fragmentation. "The choice of objects was truly bizarre and without any coherent sense of continuation, progression or unity," she said. A Muslim intern helping me to research this piece, the Oxford undergraduate Nussaibah Younis, went to see for herself. Some Muslims, like Deuchar, find the intervention delightful, among them the academic Yahya Birt, the convert son of John Birt. He enthusiastically defended the project for its "boldness" and "lightness of touch", and saw it as an amuse-bouche leading temptingly to the big British Orientalist exhibition scheduled for 2008. The impact is slight, the timidity underwhelming.
I don't get the point, I told Deuchar (someone I rate highly). It supposedly connects with similar female images painted by Pre-Raphaelites. One example: a small painting of a reclining, apparently post-coital Iranian lady languidly looking at a dog drinking wine from a bowl. Spread across several rooms, objects and texts are placed as if for a children's treasure trail, only they stay lost. It is the display that is more dismaying.
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