When I walk into Denny’s office to interview him for this article, I no longer have concerns about tests or papers. As he finishes off his chocolate milk, I pull up a chair, excited to learn where he came from, how he chose Islamic art, and his impressions of working at the Met. Denny grew up in small-town Iowa where he developed interests in physics, math and music. At fifteen, his father got a Fulbright to teach physics at Robert College in Istanbul, where Denny fell in love with architecture, one building in particular: the Mosque of Rustem Pasha. He found it in a French guidebook, given to him by a friend’s mother. “‘It’s very beautiful,’ she said. ‘You might want to take a look.’” Eight years later, Denny wrote his thesis at Harvard on this very mosque, whose “decoration came at a crucial moment in Ottoman Turkish art in the 16^th century.” Forty-three years later, this fall, he’s doing an exhibition at the Textile Museum in Washington on this same period in which Turkish art changed suddenly.

Although Denny is quick to note, “I wanted to be a teacher since I was two,” he has always divided his time between academia and museum-work. He’s worked for the Harvard Art Museums, the Smith College Museum of Art and, for the last five years, the Met.

Every good art historian has to know something about museums because that’s where the art is. They used to ask the bank robber, Willie Sutton, why he robbed banks and he said ‘because that’s where the money is stupid!’ And it’s true…There’s a group of art historians today that believe that theory is their province and that they shouldn’t have to deal with things and quite frankly that’s an attitude that has come into graduate schools and it’s just as wrong as wrong can be.

Denny travels from Amherst, Massachusetts, to New York every week. His involvement with the Met began nearly five years ago, when a colleague asked Denny if he had a student interested in working on the museum’s Ottoman Turkish art. Denny decided that he himself was interested. He was especially excited to research a particular carpet that had been deemed fake by four art historians and warehoused. He smiles, telling me “It’s one of the greatest carpets they’ve got and in another couple of months it’ll be on display.” (He’ll be giving a lecture on it this week at the museum.) Denny has also worked on the Met’s website, photos, educational materials, tour-guide training and audio guides.

For the new Islamic galleries, he “worked with conservators, designers, helped to write the labels, wall texts and provided photographs.” He’s proud of the galleries’ architecture, which serves to contextualize Islamic art, he feels. The courtyard was made by Moroccan craftsmen and the Damascus room is “a room right out of a palace in the 18^th century.” Generally, it seems that “people really love [these areas].” Although some critics believe museums shouldn’t present architectural reconstructions, Denny defends them. “The museum really told [the craftsmen] what we wanted. That is, we had art historians and professionals do all the planning and then the craftsmen executed it according to what we wanted.” Denny said that “the biggest surprise [he] had was how smoothly things went. There were so many people working on this, so many people on the team and they were so diverse. It was a very nice surprise.”

Denny’s appointment at the Met was originally planned to end with the opening of the galleries, but he was asked to stay, to help rotate the collections. Preserving the objects requires replacing silks every three months, wool every six months, and so on. The museum’s Islamic collection consists of 12,000 works, ten percent on view at a time. Accordingly, the tours, audio, and wall text must also change. So it seems that Denny will stay for years to come, studying the art of his fascination.

I asked Denny if the events of September 11, 2001 changed the museum’s plans for the galleries. As he explains,

They went right ahead with their plans and pretty much what we have there today is what they intended to have all along…I think people are more interested than they would have been, but the Met’s mission is pretty clear. The museum is careful not to have a political agenda and I think it works. These questions were all asked by reporters and Philippe de Montebello, who of course was there when I wasn’t, stated very clearly and unequivocally that this has been in our plans all along. This is not a response to political events. The museum is simply doing what the museum does.

Denny says he hopes the galleries will help to accurately inform people about Islam. He says that the department’s “new mantra is ‘from the Atlantic to the Indian Ocean,’” meaning that Islamic art is not monolithic and exists in many different cultures – “Arabs, Turks, Persians, Indians, all kinds of ethnic groups, all kinds of languages.” He notes that there is secular Islamic art, not just religious, and that despite popular belief there are many human and animal figures. Most importantly, however, is the understanding we gain of the people, who as Denny explains “are just like us. Some of them are fun loving, some of them aren’t, they like to laugh, they like to have a good meal and a good time and even lift a good glass, which they’re not supposed to do. And the art helps to show this.” The galleries have been well received. In their first four months 360,000 visited, an extraordinary number for such a small section.

Still thinking about his year abroad at age fifteen, he tells me toward the end of the interview, “What really astounded me at the beginning was not how different Istanbul was from Grinnell, Iowa, because it certainly was different, but once I got to know people, how very similar they were.”

Oleg Grabar, professor emeritus of the School of Historical Studies at the Institute for Advanced Studies, and Aga Khan Professor emeritus at Harvard University passed away this morning at his home in Princeton, NJ. Recently awarded the Chairman’s Award of the Aga Khan Award for Architecture, Grabar transformed the fields of Islamic art, architecture and archaeology through his myriad scholarly works, general textbooks, and through training and inspiring many generations of undergraduate and graduate students at the University of Michigan and at Harvard. He was the noted author of more than 50 books and innumerable articles. Among his best known works are Formation of Islamic Art, Illustrations of the Maqamat, The Alhambra, Great Mosque of Isfahan, Mediation of Ornament, Mostly Miniatures, and Shape of the Holy, Dome of the Rock, Penser l’art islamique, and Masterpieces of Islamic Art: The Decorated Page from the 8th to the 17th century. Working alone, or in collaboration with students and colleagues, he directed excavations, developed exhibitions, inaugurated professional associations, administered academic departments and research institutions. His impact has been felt worldwide, from the level of the undergraduate classroom to circles dealing with cultural policy and politics.

Writing in 2006, David Carrier called Grabar “the doyen of Islamic scholars.”

It will also serve as a research center, an exciting prospect for the regional arts community … The inaugural exhibition, titled, “Sajjil: A Century of Modern Art,” will include works culled from Mathaf’s permanent collection of over 6,000 pieces, all of which were donated from Sheik Hassan’s private collection. “We are not trying to present some sort of new canon,” Wassan al-Khudairi, acting director and chief curator of Mathaf, told Babylon & Beyond. “This is why we stress multiple modernities and multiple narratives.” … Mathaf is one of several major art institutions that have opened or will open in the next few years in Qatar and the neighboring United Arab Emirates.

A number of recent books attempt to survey modern and contemporary art in the Middle East. Hossein Amirsadeghi, Salwa Mikdadi, Nada M. Shabout have edited New Vision: Arab Contemporary Art in the 21st Century. Jérôme Sans has written The Arab World … Now. I haven’t yet had a chance to peruse those two, alas. Also, businessman and “patron of the arts” Saab Eigner, an adviser to the British Museum’s 2006 show Word into Art: Artists of the Modern Middle East, has just published Art of the Middle East: Modern and Contemporary Art of the Arab World and Iran. In his preface, Eigner writes:

Art and artists need benefactors, and it is encouraging to see such a relationship developing in the Middle East … There remains, however, a lack of sufficent expertise, courses and research about modern art of the Arab world and Iran, reflecting the absence of this subject from the curricula of history of art departments in many of the leading universities around the world … [This book] is intended as a tribute to the many artists of the region, who have kept alive an avant-garde culture, even when this has sadly required personal sacrifices, including persecution and exile … In a world filled with misunderstanding, there can be nothing more fulfilling than to engage – even in a small way – in dispelling some of the stereotypes and prejudices that cloud people’s judgement.

Each chapter bears a short introduction followed by a plethora of illustrations, each image receiving a paragraph of explication. The chapters are “Sacred Scripture,” “Literature,” “Music and Performance,” “Politics, Conflict and War,” “History and Identity,” “Portraiture and the Body,” and “Nature and the Land.” Eigner writes, “The book’s thematic approach will, it is hoped, show how modern and contemporary art has reflected the strong cultural and religious ties that link these various countries.”

[A panel] hosted by the British Council at the Sharjah Museum of Islamic Civilisation … struggled to reach a conclusion as to the nature of what defines Islamic art … [Emirates Foundation arts director Salwa Mikdadi] said the theoretical framework of Islamic art had been defined by the West. “The imposed categorisation of art in the region is new to me. In the 1970s [artists] were all just Arab, then they were defined by their countries and then by their religion … Auction houses like Christie’s and Sotheby’s have more influence on what is Arab and Muslim art than any researcher because we don’t have museums or art historians to provide other discourse.” … Elisabeth Kendall, a senior research fellow in Arabic and Islamic Studies at Pembroke College in Oxford, said it was important only to recognise the framework within which artists were working … “Throughout history, art has taken elements from the different traditions it has encountered and we can choose how we define our artists as long as we always recognise the process it takes to get there.”

This recalls Oleg Grabar’s 2008 review of History and Ideology: Architectural Heritage of the “Lands of Rum,” edited by Sibel Bozdo?an and Gülru Necipo?lu:

[The book] argues that the adjective “Islamic” is not appropriate for the arts and cultures of many different places and times, and that it was imposed, or at least propelled, by the “bad” Orientalism, the one that implied Western domination and that must be differentiated from the “good” Orientalism based on a careful knowledge of languages and of history.

… I am aware of the paradox inherent in adopting linguistic models for a book that champions the value of material culture. I am also aware that, in doing so, I am to some extent swimming against the tide. The dominance of a linguistic model in the social sciences has sustained recent criticism from a number of scholars, among them the art historian David Summers, who has argued that whereas language is conventional, works of art ‘are embodied under certain conditions, and these are only secondarily conventional” … my own conceptual framework is a bricolage of ideas drawn not only from scholarship on other premodern frontier regions (notably Anatolia, Armenia, Spain, and Sicily) but also from a myriad of disparate disciplines, including art history, anthropology, history, postcolonial studies, and linguistics … [I]mplicit in my use of contemporary theoretical work is a rejection of any notion of a ‘return to the object’ as if it were preexistent or self-subsisting. A subsidiary aim of the book is, therefore, to contribute to a negotiation of the (often-marked) boundaries between empirically driven and theoretically informed scholarship on pre-modernity …

A number of recent incidents suggest that our long-standing commitment to the free exchange of ideas is in peril of falling victim to a spreading fear of violence. Not only have exhibitions been closed and performances cancelled in response to real threats, but the mere possibility that someone, somewhere, might respond with violence has been advanced to justify suppressing words and images, as in the recent decision of Yale University to remove all images of Muhammad from Jytte Klausen’s book, The Cartoons that Shook the World.

Violence against those who create and disseminate controversial words and images is a staple of human history. But in the recent past, at least in Western liberal democracies, commitment to free speech has usually trumped fears of violence. Indeed, as late as 1989, Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses continued to be published, sold, and read in the face of a fatwa against its author and in the face of the murder and attempted murder of its translators and publishers. In 1998, the Manhattan Theater Club received threats protesting the production of Terrence McNally’s play Corpus Christi, on the ground that it was offensive to Catholics. After initially canceling the play, MTC reversed its decision in response to widespread concerns about free speech, and the play was performed without incident.

There are signs, however, that the commitment to free speech has become eroded by fears of violence. Historical events, especially the attacks of September 2001 and subsequent bombings in Madrid and London, have contributed to this process by bringing terrorist violence to the heart of liberal democracies. Other events, like the 2004 murder of Dutch film director Theo Van Gogh in apparent protest against his film Submission, and the threats against Hirsi Ali, who wrote the script and provided the voice-over for the film, demonstrated how vulnerable artists and intellectuals can be just for voicing controversial ideas. Under such threats, the resolve to uphold freedom of speech has proved to be lamentably weak: in the same year as Van Gogh’s murder, Behzti, a play written by a British Sikh playwright, was cancelled days after violence erupted among protesters in Birmingham, England on opening night.

In response to rising concerns about fear-induced self-censorship, in 2005 the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten published an article, “The Face of Muhammad,” which included twelve cartoon images. The cartoons became the focus of a series of violent political rallies in the Middle East in February 2006 and a subject of worldwide debate pitching free speech against “cultural sensitivity.”

For all the prominence of Islam in such debates, threats of violence against words and images are not the sole province of religious extremists. In 2005, a politically controversial professor’s scheduled speech at Hamilton College in Clinton, NY was cancelled in response to alleged threats of violence. In 2008, the San Francisco Art Institute closed a controversial video exhibition in response to threats of violence against faculty members by animal rights activists. Later that year, the University of Nebraska-Lincoln canceled a speech by former Weatherman and education theorist William Ayers, citing security concerns.

The possibility of giving offense and provoking violence has entered the imagination of curators, publishers and the public at large, generating more and more incidents of preemptive self-censorship: in 2006, for instance, London’s Whitechapel Gallery declared twelve works by Surrealist master Hans Bellmer too dangerous to exhibit because of fears that the sexual overtones would be offensive to the large Muslim population in the area; and publisher Random House canceled the 2008 publication of Sherry Jones’ The Jewel of Medina because “it could incite acts of violence.” The suppression of images in Jytte Klausen’s book is the latest, but not likely to be the last in the series of such incidents.

Words and images exist in complex socio-political contexts. Suppressing controversial expression cannot erase the underlying social tensions that create the conditions for violence to begin with, but it does create a climate that chills and eventually corrupts the fundamental values of liberal democracy.

A Call to Action

The incident at Yale provides an opportunity to re-examine our commitment to free expression. When an academic institution of such standing asserts the need to suppress scholarly work because of a theoretical possibility of violence somewhere in the world, it grants legitimacy to censorship and casts serious doubt on their, and our, commitment to freedom of expression in general, and academic freedom in particular.

The failure to stand up for free expression emboldens those who would attack and undermine it. It is time for colleges and universities in particular to exercise moral and intellectual leadership. It is incumbent on those responsible for the education of the next generation of leaders to stand up for certain basic principles: that the free exchange of ideas is essential to liberal democracy; that each person is entitled to hold and express his or her own views without fear of bodily harm; and that the suppression of ideas is a form of repression used by authoritarian regimes around the world to control and dehumanize their citizens and squelch opposition.

To paraphrase Ben Franklin, those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety, will get neither liberty nor safety.

If you would like to be considered as a signatory to the Statement of Principle, please email us signatory@muhammadimages.com. You may add a brief comment, if you would like.

(via The Volokh Conspiracy)

Are representations of the Prophet Muhammad permitted in Islam? To make or not to make images of the Prophet: that is the question I will try to answer … Yale’s decision [recently to excise representations from a book about them] is certainly a denial of free speech, though of course the argument can be made that a possible danger to people may compel restrictions in the expression of opinions and of facts. I am not persuaded by this argument about this book. And the deletion of the images is also–a far more important criticism in this instance–a gratuitous betrayal of scholarship, since many other books (including at least four published by Yale, two of them by me) do show images of the Prophet … In the past, and still today, pictures of the Prophet Muhammad have been produced, and are still produced, by Muslim artists for Muslim patrons … there can be no doubt that, especially from the thirteenth century onward, the Muslim world accepted the existence of representations of the Prophet. This iconography was not common, and was usually restricted to the accompaniment of a narrative text, or to serve as pious reminders of an exemplary life … To the extent that the argument against the so-called cartoons has centered on the legal propriety or impropriety of representing the Prophet Muhammad, it has been a pointless argument. Of course it is possible to question the Danish caricatures on grounds of taste, or social or political intent; but the lack of taste is not a legal category, and mischievous or even evil intent is difficult to discern in the absence of clearly stated moral and philosophical principles. The only certain lesson to draw from the sad story of the Danish cartoons is the almost universal prevalence of ignorance and incompetence–and that everyone, from writers and pundits to the leaders of mobs, should learn more before making a judgment or starting a riot.

In a quiet, windowless room deep inside the Walters Art Museum, a digitization specialist places a 900-year-old Quran into the cradle of the Stokes Imaging System … It’s painstaking work, photographing one of the most important collections of Islamic manuscripts in North America, and slow. But scholars say the two-year project has put the Baltimore museum at the vanguard of a movement that is transforming the study of ancient texts. Working with a $300,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Walters is placing its entire collection of Qurans and other Islamic pieces online, where high-resolution images of the roughly 230 often richly illuminated or illustrated pieces may be viewed free of charge by anyone with an Internet connection …

“It’s very important to remember that Islamic art is a very nascent field,” [Walters curator Amy Landau] says. “It’s not like Renaissance art history that’s very well developed. We’re just really beginning. People are now trained in the languages. There’s more material documented. So there’s still so much more to do in the field, and it’s digitization projects such as this that make that possible. It’s going to be a huge push forward.” Persis Berlekamp, an art historian at the University of Chicago, says the still-nascent movement has transformed the field. As recently as the early 2000s, when she was pursuing her doctorate at Harvard, research could be a hit-or-miss affair, involving expensive and time-consuming travel that might not yield useful results.

Jonathan Bloom can rightfully be considered the foremost authority on Fatimid art and architecture, having produced a steady stream of articles on the subject over the past twenty-five years. He is thus in a perfect position to produce a synthesis, and this is indeed an excellent survey of the material. Time and again he is able to cut through conflicting bodies of opinion and produce authoritative interpretations or offer new insights into problematic material.

The book discusses art and architecture, organizing it both chronologically and by material in a way that is appropriate and easy to follow. The writing style is aimed at the general reader, but for the specialist there is a suitable scholarly apparatus of footnotes. It is published in association with the Institute of Ismaili Studies, which in an anonymous note at the beginning disclaims official sanction of the author’s views. It is to Bloom’s credit that he makes no concessions to his patrons in discussing the murky origins of the Isma‘ili movement …

I should emphasize that the areas of scholarly controversy mentioned above do not detract from the author’s achievement. To cover a range of two and a half centuries of art and architecture from Tunisia to Cairo and beyond in a balanced format that judiciously selects some for detailed treatment and with broad sweeps fills in the big picture elsewhere is an extremely impressive achievement. We are fortunate that this gap in scholarship has been authoritatively filled.