The Image and the Orient (Part II)

ARABICITY: CONTEMPORARY ARAB ART, edited by Rose Issa and Juliet Cestar. London: Saqi Books, 2019. Pp.160. ISBN: 9780863566882.

THE IMAGE DEBATE: FIGURAL REPRESENTATION IN ISLAM AND ACROSS THE WORLD, edited by Christiane Gruber. London: Ginko, 2019. Pp. 240. ISBN:L 9781909942349.

WHAT IS ISLAMIC ART? BETWEEN RELIGION AND PERCEPTION, by Wendy M. K. Shaw. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019. Pp.366. ISBN: 9781108474658.

If Orientalist paintings were popular in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in the west, the kind of mass-produced, popular ‘devotional art’ in the form of posters and ‘bazaar art’ have flooded the market in both the Indian continent where many are made to the rest of the Muslim world, including the west from the mid-nineteenth century up to the present day. Nothing wrong with a bit of kitsch: from fluorescent-coloured prayer rugs to plastic rosaries, digitised renditions of Makkah and Madinah or al-Buraq are ubiquitous and accessibly priced. But taking a closer look at these representations of well- known and dearly loved monuments and figures of Islam, a different picture emerges: the same gold thread embroidery of the black Kiswah used to cover the Ka[bah appears in a poster of Disney’s Cinderella on her sky blue and white cloak. If that were not enough, on the image of the Ka[bah is superimposed the dome of the Prophet’s Mosque in Madinah with a rendition of one of its minarets; below the two most venerated cities of Islam are three roundels two of which contain a tomb of a local saint and the third is a totally unrecognisable depiction of the Bayt al-Maqdis in Jerusalem. This pastiche is complete with a garland of pink, blue and yellow roses against a black ‘starred’ sky with a tacky red digital ‘Allah’ and ‘Muhammad’ inside a five-pointed star—a far cry from the artistic mastery of the seventeenth century calligram also from India in the form of a bird of prey.