The Status of Islamic Art in the Twentieth CenturyAuthor(s): Wijdan AliSource: Muqarnas, Vol. 9 (1992), pp. 186-188Published by: BRILLStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1523143 .

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WIJDAN ALI

THE STATUS OF ISLAMIC ART IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

The phrase "Islamic art" tends to conjure up images of ornate metalwork, intricately woven textiles and rugs, ceramics with calligraphic decoration and stylized floral designs, delicately trimmed glassware, colorful Iranian miniatures illustrating poetic verses, and animated Turk- ish albums testifying to the feats of illustrious sultans. The creation of this kind of classical Islamic art falls be- tween the Umayyad dynasty in the seventh century and the end of the Ottoman Empire in 1924, a span of thir- teen centuries during which empires rose and fell in an area that today extends from Africa to Southeast Asia. They represent a sequence of civilizations distinguished by their unity but also by the diversity of their rich and varied heritage.

At its outset, Islam borrowed motifs and norms from the other artistic traditions with which it came into con- tact, such as the Byzantine, Sasanian, and Graeco- Roman. It achieved universality in a world where the closest and most direct line was sailing around a conti- nent. But as soon as it expanded throughout Asia and North Africa, it developed its own distinctive styles and media, iconography and symbols, forms and themes.

In time empires fell and Western colonial rule fol- lowed, leading to a period of artistic lethargy and cultu- ral stagnation. Artists lost the cultured and attentive patrons who had lavished attention and money on the arts. The occupation of Islamic lands mainly by the French and the British undermined not only their eco- nomic self-sufficiency and ability to govern, but also their art. Western aesthetics and culture overpowered indige- nous artistic traditions. A certain pattern started to emerge to a greater or lesser degree in the development of all modern Islamic countries.

First the traditional arts under colonial rule were abandoned through a feeling of embarrassment among artists and other creative talents toward their own heri- tage, and they began to imitate the traditions of the colo- nizers. This was particularly true on the Indian Subconti- nent where at the beginning of the nineteenth century, after Western political and cultural influence had taken hold, miniature painting was reduced to the production of curios.

In most of the Ottoman Empire, Western colonization did not occur, but the weakening and moral deteriora- tion of the state made it receptive to powerful economic and cultural influences coming from a substantial West- ern presence. Soon local styles and traditions gave way to imported ones, and the sultans themselves introduced European artistic forms into their court. Abdul Aziz (r. 1861-76), who was the first Ottoman sultan to visit Eu- rope, was greatly impressed by Western art and, upon his return to Istanbul, opened up the country to Western artists and held the first art exhibition in the empire in 1874.'

After the Kemal Ataturk revolution in 1924 there was a drastic split with the past in Turkey; the Latin alphabet replaced the Arabic that had hitherto been used to write Turkish. As a result, the Turks of the next generation could only read contemporary literature, while the mil- lions of manuscripts, books, and documents written or printed before 1924 collected dust in libraries and archives.

In Iran the Qajar rulers, like their Ottoman counter- parts and for the same reasons, were enthusiastic impor- ters of cultural influences to the extent that Qajar paint- ing became three-dimensional and totally Westernized. In 1928, following the example of Turkey, Shah Reza Pahlevi passed a law that forbade the wearing of tradi- tional Iranian clothing and required European dress.2

The Arab countries of the Middle East and, aside from Morocco, in North Africa had been under Ottoman rule since the sixteenth century. To them the center of cultu- ral enlightenment was Istanbul, and whatever started there was automatically copied all over the empire. Soon Western artistic influences reached Arab artists, and gradually easel painting found its way into countries like Egypt, Iraq, Lebanon, and Syria, in large part through graduates of Ottoman military and naval engineering schools where it was taught as part of the curriculum.

In the nineteenth century, the French occupied North Africa. After the First World War and the fall of the Otto- man Empire the Arab Middle East and Iran were divided among the British and the French, who exercised their cultural influence along with their rule.

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ISLAMIC ART IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY 187

Since the beginning of the twentieth century, most Islamic countries have undergone an intellectual resur-

gence that has accompanied their political awakening. This has affected their literary and artistic development and generated a cultural revival among their intelligen- tsia. While Islamic traditional arts continued to suffer, Western-style plastic arts benefited from this revival. This flourishing was said to be a renaissance in modern Islamic painting and sculpture, but in reality it caused a loss of cultural identity and created a schizophrenia among modern Islamic artists: their education and train-

ing were totally Western, while their beliefs and convic- tions remained with their Islamic roots and traditional upbringing. The first art school in the Muslim world was the Imperial Academy of Fine Arts (Sanayi-i Nefise Mek- tebi), which opened in Istanbul in 1883,5 followed by the School of Fine Arts in Cairo, established in 1908.4 Both taught painting and sculpture according to classical Western styles. Because there were no Western-trained artists in the country, these schools employed European teachers and instructors to speed the process of catching up with Western civilization. Since then, art schools and academies have been established in Iraq, Syria, Leba- non, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, the Sudan, Jordan, Morocco, Tunisia, and Algeria.

Learning and creating art according to Western aes- thetics caused an irreparable rupture between the fine arts and the crafts that had never existed before in Islamic culture. The new attitude distinguished between art for art's sake and utilitarian art, leading to the debasement and vulgarization of conventional arts in Islam.

Europe had already gone through its Industrial Revo- lution when the Islamic East stated its race to catch up with the West. In their efforts to gain time, Muslim coun- tries pushed aside all that was thought to hinder the replacement of human beings with machines, including indigenous crafts. Institutions that trained apprentice artisans in traditional Islamic arts such as the nakkayhane in Istanbul totally disappeared; patronage by the state, the ruling classes, and the gentry ceased. Eventually whatever was produced in crafts catered to foreign tour- ists instead of to the local elite. Western materialistic val- ues replaced Eastern spiritual virtues, pushing the youn- ger generations to work in factories where the pay was better instead of apprenticing in the ateliers of their elders; quantity took over from quality; producing com- munities grew into consumer societies; imitation and repetition replaced innovation and creativity, along with careless workmanship, kitch and bad taste. In the plastic

arts, the actual form superseded the essential form, and aesthetics became confined to the surface of the work of art.

Calligraphy was the only art form that to a certain extent avoided this decline. Because it had always been connected with the copying of the

Qurtan, it was able to

retain its original dignity, when the other arts of the book - miniature painting, bookbinding, and illumina- tion - degenerated to near extinction.

The quicker a country industrializes, the faster the decline of its traditional art. Yet even in countries that trailed behind in industrialization, and where as a result craftsmen continued to work, the quality of the tradi- tional arts suffered greatly in terms both of innovation and of ingenuity. The classical concept that a piece of art should serve as a purpose in life was soon replaced by art- for-art's-sake attitudes, on the one hand, and plastic and pyrex objects, on the other. The bourgeoisie and nou- veaux-riches who replaced the old aristocracy and intelli- gentsia required expensive decorative items in silver and porcelain to show off their wealth, but for them a vase imported from Limoges or Murano or a silver tea set from England replaced the lIleddn, the Ceqm-i biilbil sher- bet glasses, and Moroccan silver teaboxes and pots. In poor countries such as Pakistan and Morocco pure silver was replaced by plate.

The one art that remained unaffected was music. Clas- sical Arabic, Persian, Turkish, and Urdu music has kept its original characteristics up to the present day. It might not be as popular as modern Western-influenced music, but it has been able to safeguard its purity against alien impact.

After the end of the Second World War, one by one the Islamic nations regained their independence, gradually recovered their self-confidence, and once again started to realize the significance of, and take pride in, their rich heritage. They were able to shed the notion that all that was foreign was first class, kull Firanji birinji. Through their search for an authentic national identity, they began sporadically to revive the traditional arts here and there. Obviously the damage that had been done since the influx of Western culture was too great to be elimi- nated, or even repaired, overnight. For at least three dec- ades only Western painting and drawing had been taught in every country in the Islamic world where art lessons were part of the curriculum; in some countries this had been so for almost a century. Generation after generation of European-oriented students from Egypt to Malaysia studied the age of the Renaissance, the Impres- sionists, the Expressionists, and all the major art schools

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188 WIJDAN ALI

in the West; they had been taught to appreciate the third dimension in drawing, turn to Picasso and Dali for inspi- ration, and look down on any utilitarian object as base and mundane. Just because people had begun to recog- nize their geopolitical place in the sun did not necessar-

ily mean they could begin immediately to appreciate thirteenth-century Baghdadi painting, to be inspired by Bihzad, or even to look at a hand-blown Hebron glass jug decorated by the contemporary calligrapher and painter Jamal Badran with greater respect. For the Muslim, art had become the practice of the idle for the enjoyment of the rich, not an unreasonable attitude considering the

estrangement that had taken place between the crafts and the fine arts that was totally foreign to the Islamic artistic sensibility.

The ideas and concepts of art that almost all people in the Islamic world, their forebears, and progeny have been educated to believe, cannot be reversed, nor can the techniques and styles learned by artists be totally obliterated. Muslim artists themselves do not even want to go back in time. Today, as the world becomes smaller, international trends and styles move rapidly among nations. Through the exchange of knowledge and tech- nology, art has shed its limited and limiting traits and is

heading toward universality. What most contemporary artists in the Islamic world aspire to is the establishment of an artistic identity which, like their forefathers, would draw on advanced procedures, art media, and styles learned from the West, adjust them to their own beliefs, aesthetics, and convictions, and come up with new for- mulas for modern Islamic art that would contribute to other cultures and artistic traditions as well as to their own. This would create a healthy cultural exchange among nations that would lead to greater tolerance and

understanding among peoples and some day to peace.

Royal Society of Fine Arts Ammam, Jordan

NOTES

1. Giinsel Renda and C. Max Kortepeter, The Transformation of Turkish Culture: The Ataturk Legacy (Princeton, N.J., 1986), p. 230.

2. Roy Mottahedeh, The Mantle of the Prophet: Learning and Power in Modern Iran (London, 1986), p. 234.

3. Renda and Kortepeter, Turkish Culture, p. 230. 4. Liliane Karnouk, Modern Egyptian Art: The Emergence of a National

Style (Cairo, 1988), p. 35.

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