Islamic Art at the Louvre

(Content note: This is basically pictures and captions, not a review.)

The new Islamic art galleries at the Louvre are fantastic. It's a bit of a TARDIS in there, with a small upper gallery and what looks like a small lower gallery that actually opens up and ends up being much bigger on the inside than it looks from the outside. Most of the collection is Iranian, but there is a good variety, and very thoughtful display. The one surprising thing was the lack of works on paper.

Book Review: Habibi by Craig Thompson

I was brought a copy of Craig Thompson's graphic novel, Habibi, by a dear graduate school friend of mine. (If you're at all interested in archaeology, technology, sci-fi and fantasy or comics and graphic novels, she's a prolific and really interesting tweeter to follow @girlarchaeo.) I had seen the book and had been hoping to read it, but had apparently missed out on the (perhaps predictable) critical storm surrounding it. She filled me in and said she'd be curious what I'd think about it as both an Arabist and a habitual reader of graphic novels. So here goes:

The short answer is that as a slightly misanthropic Arabist, I love the way in which the book honors and beautifies the language and the script.

I know that it speaks much to my failings as a lay reader — that is, when I've taken my critic hat off and am simply reading for the pure hedonism of it — and to the one-dimensionality I sometimes inadvertently permit myself that I find the musings about writing to be so tactilely pleasurable that I'm not sure I care about the sexualization of the female character or the orientalization of the made-up kingdom; but that sort of reaction is also the fault (whether you want to understand that as a good or bad thing) of the author/artist. In a way the objectification of the female protagonist within the story is merely an allegory for her objectification in or reduction against the notion of book-as-thing or book-as-art. If the written word is the ultimate art form, then why do we need the three-dimensional beauty of the human form? Look at what man has wrought. Hubris, perhaps, but still... it's there on the page.

Where a certain brand of orientalism does bother me, it is in the idea of a writer copying out words he does not understand: Several published interviews have reported that Thompson learned the Arabic script but nothing else. It is not a problem without historical precedent, though: In the course of my academic work, I have read accounts of eighteenth-century debates at the Spanish Royal Academy of History over whether the inscriptional heritage of the country would be better documented by someone who did or someone who did not read Hebrew or Arabic; they debated whether someone who didn't know what he was looking at would render the inscriptions more faithfully than someone who could read and might then represent what he thought he was recognizing. It also dovetails really beautifully with questions about why Arabic calligraphic decoration is placed so high up in building as to render it illegible, or why it is sometimes rendered as simple squiggles, even for an Arabic-literate population.

The Guardian recently published images from Thompson's sketchbook:

(Click to enlarge; follow the link above for more.)

In a way, these drawings are as evocative to me as a student of Arabic as one of my dissertation texts, in which a Hebrew translator marvels at the strange rules of Arabic grammar. ("Sometimes when we would use the plural, they use the singular feminine," my translator half-marvels and half-complains.) There is a strong kinship among all of us who have struggled to learn the language — and this one is always a struggle. But at the same time, these words are all art for Thompson. He draws Arabic rather than writing it. The book becomes, at once, a glorification of literacy and a total strike against it.

Listserv as Text

A request from a scholar at a British university went out over one of the listservs a few weeks ago for American literature that deals with Iran or the Persian and Persianate world in some manner. I wasn't particularly impressed with the request, which rather explicitly made it seem as if the individual were compiling the text corpus for his forthcoming project based entirely on what "teh internetz" had to say, but that's really none of my business. Suggestions have flown across the listserv, and I've paid only minimal attention, keeping one ear to the proverbial ground in case there was anything I might be interested in reading.

The query was informally closed today, when the questioner sent out a list that he had compiled from the responses received, with a message that included the sentence:

Although I was looking for American texts, amongst your replies were many hyphenated works produced by the émigré community of Iranians all over the world.

At first, I understood this to mean that he wasn't interested, for example, in Marjane Satrapi, a French-Iranian writer and artist; I thought that American literature could include the Iranian diaspora in America, but not the diaspora in other countries. All fine up to this point. But upon consultation with the list, it became clear that his distinction between "American" and "hyphenated" people and their works was, in fact, that white Anglo writers of Northern European heritage fell into the one category and everyone else fell into the other; Iranian-Americans are not considered to be Americans in this grouping.

If you want to write about Anglophone, Europeanish people writing about Iran, or people with no personal connection to Iran writing about Iran, then define the project in terms that reflect that goal. Perhaps that is all made clear in this scholar's project. But from the limited perspective of the listserv, and reading sola scriptura, by the text alone, the definition of this corpus struck me as an elaborate performance of a sort of time-release colonialism in the purported service of dismantling the rhetoric of Orientalism. It's not to say that British scholars shouldn't work on American topics, just that I hope that when they (or anybody else, Americans included) do so, that there is more that underpins their work than a few declarations, seeming ex nihil, about the validity of the hyphenated American. This sounds more like a parlor game to be played spoken through the nose at the expense of some former colonials than it does scholarship.

How much is worth explaining or delineating within a listserv post, though? To what extent should subscribers see it as a text, or as something else? Is it fair to critique a project description promulgated in this informal way for its lack of a thoughtful theoretical or textual or historical  or anthropological (or sensible) framework?

***

Postscript: I've been thinking about this idea of the Listserv as text for the last month or so, when there have been two conversation threads that have promulgated some really misguided ideas about transliteration and the relationship between Arabic and Persian

Post-postscript: I'd have added Davar Ardalan's My Name is Iran to that list.

From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler

I took my students to the Met today. On the right is the sticker to show that I had permission to explain things and gesticulate wildly in the medieval and Islamic* galleries. On the left is the cover of the new museum map in Arabic.

* At the desk, the girl who was filling out the info said, "That gallery has such a long name. I hope "Islamic" is PC enough."

The Week in Links (Art of the Arab Lands, Turkey, Iran, Central Asia and Later South Asia edition)

Two reviews of the new galleries at the Met that opened this week:

A New Vision for Islam in Hostile Times

A Cosmopolitan Trove of Exotic Beauty

Photos of the installation, including the re-installation of a muqarnas ceiling:

Behind the Scenes: Building of the Moroccan Court

Historically, it has been a huge challenge to display non-Western art in ways that befit an art museum rather than an anthropological or natural history museum. I particularly like that in this interactive feature the Times juxtaposes Islamicate art with Western European art. It forces the reader away from the very pervasive idea that Western art is Art and Islamicate art is simply craft:

At the Metropolitan Museum, a New Wing, a New Vista

And from across the pond:

New York's Met Museum Showcases a World of Islamic Treasures

I'm hoping to go myself two weeks from now, so my own impressions will follow then. Yes, I am just about falling over in excitement.