Tuesday, August 04, 2015

Islamic art in museums

This morning NPR broadcast an interview with the curator of the recently reopened and enlarged Islamic art galleries in the south wing of the Metropolitan Museum here in NYC. She acknowledged the omission of Indonesia, the largest Muslim-majority country, which is documented only elsewhere in the Museum (chiefly with works of Buddhist and Hindu provenance). 

A more serious omission is the obscuring of the fact that some of the art actually displayed is not of Muslim origin but is at best "Islamicate," being made by Christian and Jewish craftspeople. As everyone knows, or should know, the Jews have been expelled from the Arab Islamic countries, with the Christians now following them in the current program of ethnic cleansing. 

While figural arts were not forbidden by Islam (except in mosques and other sacred spaces) artists were assigned a low status. Hence the task fell largely to people of other heritages - just as wine, for example continued to be made and sold by Christians. Moreover, it is not always realized that there was a vibrant Jewish art tradition that flourished in figural mosaics and frescoes executed in synagogues right up to the time of the Islamic conquest.