Can the Real Islamic Art Please Stand Up?

Islamic art often lacks clear classification, and the way art galleries treat it reflects that fact.

If I were to walk into any major Western museum, or perhaps any major museum in the world built with Western patrons in mind, I would not be struck to find a section dedicated to Islamic art. I would likely gravitate to it before, say, the Greco-Roman section, and would expect to see ancient Qur’anic manuscripts, jewels meant for Mughal royalty, and other relics over which to marvel. What I probably would not do as I peruse these priceless fragments of history, however, is wonder why they are displayed together.

It isn’t uncommon to find Qur’anic manuscripts, Andalusian ceramics decorated with Qur’anic verses, or beautified prayer rugs grouped together in an Islamic art exhibition: all these objects are either explicitly or implicitly “religious,” and their “Islamic purpose” is presumably clear. But what we often also come across are devotional objects like Qur’anic fragments displayed alongside more “functional” ones—like apparel, paintings, photographs, and textiles—with no obvious “Islamic purpose,” all presented under the banner of being “Islamic.” This may seem peculiar, and in some ways it is, but it is not at all uncommon. Visitors to Istanbul’s Topkapi Palace Museum, for example, can find precisely that sort of arrangement. How should we understand the implications of bringing such diverse objects together under the label “Islamic”? What kind of narrative is being constructed when such varied objects are grouped together under the same religious and cultural marker?

Islamic art often lacks clear classification, and the way art galleries treat it reflects that fact. One gallery may see no issue with jewelry placed next to the Qur’an; another may deem the jewelry “not Islamic enough.” No such issue seems to follow other art forms—we generally have no trouble distinguishing cubist art from that which is “of the Renaissance,” for example. Yet for many of us, the reed flute player, with no accompanying devotional singing, might be as good an example of “Islamic art” as a tile of calligraphy from a Mamluk-era mosque. This reflects a common attitude many of us hold about Islamic art, both inside and beyond art exhibitions, museums, and galleries.

Whether such a perception of Islamic art precedes the work of modern curators is for another essay, but the fact that it exists at all suggests that Islamic art curation proceeds in a largely unscrutinized manner across continents. What both the museum and its visitors seem to be doing is collapsing all artwork made by Muslims (or in Muslim societies) into a single category based on one measure: the proximity of that art to the premodern past. For this reason, while ceramics placed next to the Qur’an might not surprise us, we likely would be surprised to see an abstract painting by a living Indonesian artist placed next to a vase with Qur’anic calligraphy from a living Iranian craftsman.

Art institutions are as confused about what constitutes Islamic art as we are. Take Sotheby’s, the British-founded auction house as an example. In overviewing their Islamic art department, they describe it as:

…a spectrum of classical arts from the Middle East and wider Islamic World, featuring a range of manuscripts in Arabic, Persian and Turkish as well as miniatures, paintings, ceramics, metalwork, arms and armour, glass, jewellery and many other fine decorative objects.

Interestingly, by using terms like “classical” and “Middle East” (which, notably, arrive before the word “Islamic”), this brief description channels the familiar temporal and geographic tropes that have come to constitute our imagination of Islamic art. The description shows no concern for separating between the devotional, functional, or purely decorative aspects of Islamic art; “manuscripts” rest right alongside “arms” and “jewellery.” Later, we encounter the following:

Sotheby’s has been entrusted with the most important private collections of Islamic and Indian art since the inception of the auction category on the market.

Rather abruptly, “Indian art” is now thrust into their classification alongside “Islamic,” with no mention of it in the previous section. It is unclear if they mean that Indian art is Islamic art, or why it has been singled out in this section. What is clear, however, is that modern perceptions of “Islamic art” have very little (if anything) to do with theological iconography or thought. The art industry is unconcerned with Islam as a worldview from which ideas about beauty, theology, and metaphysics emanate; the typically orientalist aesthetics associated with Islam are apparently sufficient to deem something “Islamic.” The terms are not set by Muslims.

It almost seems like there is no way to make Islamic art today, unless it is something explicitly devotional or a replication of the styles you might find at Sotheby’s. As beautiful as those works may be, this conundrum means that contemporary glasswork, jewelry, or poetry that happen to be made by Muslims may not be considered “Islamic.” What they will be considered, more often, is a type of outsider art in which the artist’s “Muslimness” may be referenced in promotional materials. Art made by Muslims in our current time is often seen through the incomplete lens of Islam as a kind of counter-culture and/or ethnic eccentricity—no different to any other identity group under liberalism’s totalizing umbrella.

For much of their history, Muslim societies did not deem the functional or the decorative as realms outside of the sacred. Strict distinctions between the sacred and the profane are arguably alien to the Islamic tradition. Both the prayer mat and the necklace could potentially carry sacred meaning because they were often crafted with what Sherman Jackson calls the “Divine gaze” in mind. Oddly, however, modern uses of the term “Islamic” sometimes have the effect of taking that sacred potential away by reifying a labored distinction between the sacred and the profane. This distinction is further reinforced when artists (Muslim or otherwise) buy into the idea that devotion to God exists only on the prayer mat or in the Mosque walls. Yet if we believe that art is properly “Islamic” only if it is from an ancient time, from faraway or forgone places, or consists in the “explicitly” religious (however that is defined), we will perpetuate the false notion that our cooking, painting, and writing are “worldly” productions which consist in no sacredness.

One has to therefore question the usefulness of “Islamic” as a descriptor. In the Islamic tradition, “Islamic” is a fairly recent lexical addition. Things like “Islamic” dress, “Islamic” food, and other such phrases would be out of place in classical legal texts. And while both dress and food have legal boundaries and are addressed by classical and modern jurists alike, it was generally understood that the particular form of what believers wear or eat would naturally differ across geographies. This is a far cry from something like “Islamic dress” referring to a white khalījī tunic, or “Islamic food” meaning biryani and mutton pilau. So, the term becomes what Muslims happen to be doing somewhat en-masse (which could very well be anything). Islamic art in particular, like Islam more broadly, cannot be limited to “devotional” expressions or attempts at recreating an already contested past. A fully “authentic” Muslim cultural production demands the emergence of a third way in which the artist can use contemporary tools and trends (be they in poetry, textiles, or any other art form) to make work that is beautiful both with and without explicit devotional elements or cultural motifs particular to the “old Islamicate.”

If we leave the term “Islamic” as it is, we risk accepting the assumptions it sits on, namely, that “proper” Islamic art is the domain of the past and a few select geographies. What becomes of the contemporary Senegalese tailor or the American poet, Muslim though they might be? Arguably better is to allow the Muslim tailor—their worldview no less Islamic than the Qur’anic calligrapher—to be seen as equally authentic. This will require a rethinking of what constitutes the “Islamic,” and one way to do this is to treat Islam itself, per Umar Faruq Abd-Allah, as a “colorless water” that takes on the culture of the place to which it meanders. The idea here is that Islam looks Nigerian in Nigeria, and Chinese in China. This metaphor might support a more flexible approach to artistic expression that is authentically “Islamic,” though not without some limitations.

What, for example, does Islam look like in the Western metropole? How does Islam “take on” the culture of the Western cities in which it finds itself, and what impact does that have on artistic expression? Islamic forms of life in a Western city, where the parents of most of the community were born in the Muslim world, potentially complicate Abd-Allah's theory about Islam as a “colorless water.” If we add the religious (and then cultural) influence of modern Saudi Arabia, globalization, Islamophobia, and social media into the mix, an “authentic” expression of Islam in the West—artistic or otherwise—isn’t as neat as simply being British in Britain and French in France. Rather than naturally adapting to its environment, Islam in the West often navigates multiple, sometimes competing pressures, including inherited traditionalism, imposed stereotypes, and reactive identity politics. Yet how we think about Islam’s place in the West matters if only because art’s seat of industrial power sits there, and ideas about what is “Islamic”—born within a Western cultural milieu—can (and often are) easily exported to much of the Muslim world. Institutional and market forces shape global art standards (including “Islamic” ones), and often, those standards are Western.

Perhaps this will strike some as a Western-centric concern. After all, why does it matter what a few million Muslims in London or Brussels are doing, and of what importance is this to the Muslim world at large? I would argue that, when it comes to art, what we often find in Cairo, Karachi, or Beirut is not meaningfully different from what is exhibited in London or New York, especially in terms of underlying curation philosophies. Perhaps more importantly, the arts are becoming as globalized as any other industry, as is apparent in funding patterns, organizational structures, and their flattening impact on taste. Indeed, the themes of institutional art are becoming common across national and continental lines. And as this occurs, there seems to be little interest in Muslim art that exists as an extension of tradition, or which is confident in itself without needing to reference its “otherness.”

What the Muslim artist should realize is that their “difference” does not need to be used solely as a point of analysis with regard to social marginalization and racial subjugation; it can also be a site of deeper reflection on the erosion of their intellectual and spiritual history, as well as what their tradition has to say when it comes to beauty, aesthetics, and art itself. Western art institutions may be uninterested in these reflections for now, but they are worth considering to inform a more confident Muslim artistic community that is as well versed in their context and worldview, including their potential points of tension or contradiction. These sites of contradiction can produce new, thoughtful work that moves beyond both a banal subversiveness of using Islam as a purely political identity, or a nostalgia (shared with orientalists) seeking what Tim Winter calls “our greatly missed dead.”

We therefore cannot ignore the role of commerce in the analysis of Islamic art as an industry. Under capitalism, art operates within an industrial framework, in which corporations, funds, and trusts patronize the work we see in galleries and the pages of our books. Under this paradigm, for an artist to survive they must respond to the cues sent out by these corporations downstream to the gallery. However, it isn’t just that the starving artist is magnetized by the allure of being en vogue. In fact, the art world is full to the brim with the already well-off, who may not be saying the same things as everyone else to put bread on the table, but to stay relevant within circles from which they procure their sense of self—circles whose concerns are quite often wildly out of touch with the people they might claim to represent. The corporate structures around art can lead to situations that would be comical if they weren’t so tragic, like British Petroleum (of all companies) sponsoring an exhibition of artefacts from modern Iraq. This kind of paradoxical relationship is baked into the structures that support art from the outset, and it will continue so long as the funding models remain as they are. Considering these facts, how “Islamic” is Islamic art when funded by forces that are murderous at worst and antagonistic at best?

Imagining the world of art outside of commerciality is a gargantuan task, but it is still something worth pursuing. To build a new model of art shielded from the tentacles of corporatism, secularity, and marginalization, we will need to ask and attempt to answer difficult questions about its public access, hierarchy structures, and the livelihoods of artists themselves. For example, what does an endowment for the arts look like in the age of crowdfunding, and how might an artist produce work freely under the weighty pressure of material need without compromise? These questions need to be wrestled with whether the art is Islamic or not. If the terms, descriptors, and trends are set by global capital, the Muslim artist, without competing structures of their own, will find no avenue for authentic expression. For the most part, the gravitational pull of the artistic industrial complex is as strong in New York as it is in Istanbul. One needn’t read the history of the gallery and the museum to know that they are unlikely to be changed from within, and so the task becomes one of experimentation and world-building that attempts—as best as one can—to produce new methods, networks, and institutions.