Bridging The Divide Between The United States And The Muslim World Through Arts And Ideas: Possibilities And Limitations

Session III Art And Social Commentary: Transcendence And Transformation

The third session examined art as a means of spiritual elevation and transformation, and considered whether this should be a primary role of art, as well as what limits religious practice places on certain art forms. Moderator Dale Eickelman, Professor of Anthropology and Human Relations at Dartmouth College, opened the session by offering three examples of the intersection of religious devotion and art. First, he described seeing Qur’anic calligraphy written on traditional mud brick homes in Oman. Second, he recalled attending a Moroccan memorial service, which included three days of Qur’anic chanting as well as the recitation of Sufi poems by local writers. Third, he observed that if one wished to be daring in Oman, one would use poetry to criticize the regime — but only among friends.

Faouzi Skali, Director of the Fes Festival of Sufi Culture and former Director of the Fes Festival of World Sacred Music, spoke on the ways that spirituality influences how some art is produced, the venues in which it is presented, and its reception by audiences. He began by recounting that the Festival of World Sacred Music and later Sufi Culture were founded in response to people around the world seeing negative images of the Muslim world with which Skali himself could not identify. By contrast, the Fes Festivals set out to bring the production and inspiration of Fes to the world, and to bring the world to Fes.

During the Fes Festival of Sufi Culture, an annual event that began in 2006, participants are immersed in Sufi Moroccan culture for five days. Sufism is woven into the fabric of Islamic civilization, Skali stated: its traces can be found from the smallest village and to the most distant metropolis, across the Muslim world. Sufism is about religious devotion, but is also about the production of music; its practitioners include internationally known stars. He then drew a comparison between classical musicians and religious figures, many of whom claim to experience “sudden inspiration.” However, this sudden inspiration takes place in the context of certain ingrained cultural values — with individualism being paramount in the West. He asked: what cultural values have helped define the music of the Muslim world?

Skali noted that the Fes Festival of Sufi Culture also illustrates the multiple factors that converge to form identity in today’s world. Sufism is one of the expressions of Islam, and Islamic culture is in turn inspired by Sufi culture. Furthermore, there are different forms of Sufi culture in different places. In today’s globalized world, Skali asserted, we all belong to multiple groups, multiple traditions, and multiple cultures, which can be combined and fused to create new spaces for art and perhaps even “a new modernity.”

Isaac Solotaroff, a documentary filmmaker, spoke next on the boundaries that religious practices put on particular art forms. Certain cultural expectations are established for art forms seen as closely connected to religious practices, such as calligraphy or tajweed. Other borders are drawn around art forms seen as less connected or at odds with religious practices. Solotaroff has come up against many such borders in his experience as the producer of the recent documentary Wham! Bam! Islam!, an examination of the Muslim world’s reaction to The 99, a comic book series produced by Kuwaiti Dr. Naif al–Mutawa. The series, which spans 23 issues, follows the adventures of 99 superheroes whose names and attributes are drawn from the 99 names of God given in the Quran. The series has also spawned a new amusement park in Kuwait, and a television show that will launch internationally in December 2009.

Solotaroff then screened a promotional reel for the documentary. In one scene, a young boy in Kuwait explained that he loves following the adventures of the characters in The 99. In another, students at a Kuwaiti university were highly critical of the series. In Indonesia, critics of The 99 argued that it is an infiltration of Western ideas packaged with Islamic elements, showing, for example, women dressed in fitted clothing speaking about the wonders of God. Kuwaiti clerics who convened to discuss The 99 declared it in contradiction with Islam, because Islam says that it is God who saves humans, but The 99 depicts superheroes as our saviors. Yet other interviewees stated that they see no contradiction between its superheroes’ good deeds and Muslim faith.

Writers Adel Rifaat and Baghat El Nadi, who both live in France and write together under the pseudonym “Mahmoud Hussein,” then presented a case study of their experience writing their new book, Penser le Coran (Grasset et Fasquelle, 2009). In their remarks, they reflected on how they mediate the cultural and religious boundaries established for writing about the Quran, as well as on the impact of location. They live and write in France, where distribution and reception of their work has been quite different than in other parts of the Muslim world — as have audience expectations.

Rifaat and El Nadi began from the notion that since prejudice against Islam still exists, it was fundamentally important to portray Islam as an innovative and revelatory process, rather than as an inflexible ideology. The idea that Islam was great in the past has gained increasing currency in the West. This is in part because, so far as many Muslims are concerned, the Quran is the very word of God and is literally fixed for all time. Rifaat and El Nadi therefore turned to the Sira—the collection of five biographies of the Prophet Muhammad accepted as authoritative. Through the Sira, they discovered a reading of the Quran that leaves behind this literalism and recreates the freedom the first Muslims experienced when they heard Muhammad’s revelation.

Rifaat and El Nadi spent ten years preparing a synthesis of the five chronicles of the Sira that would be accessible to both Muslim and non–Muslim readers. They wanted their book to offer readers the sense of gradually entering the intimate circle of the Prophet, and experiencing with him the process of receiving God’s revelation. Over the course of their writing, Rifaat and Nadi realized that their own perception of the Quran had changed. They now understood the Quran as connected with a specific time and place; God’s word was addressed to people living in that particular historic context. Their way of life could not be changed suddenly, but only modified gradually. The laws of the Quran were intended to make tribal customs more just: they granted women greater rights, but did not wholly change their place in society; they set limits on slavery but did not eliminate it.

Rifaat and El Nadi also described how the Prophet and his Companions would ask God directly for clarification or revision of certain verses that were either not understood or were considered too harsh by the people. In response, the Sira tells us that God modified some verses, such as the laws dictating that Muslims take arms against an enemy that far outnumbers them. This is an illustration of “derogation” — a departure from previously established rules. In Rifaat and El Nadi’s opinion, the Muslim believer cannot treat all verses as equal and timeless, and as relevant in all situations; to do so would be to challenge the power that God has claimed to change his own declarations. For Mahmoud Hussein, this understanding offers everyone the chance to interpret the Quran in a way that is relevant to his or her own life.

The session discussant, Philip Schuyler, Associate Professor of Ethnomusicology at the University of Washington, began by noting that the Fes Festival of Sufi Culture, like the Fes Festival of World Sacred Music, emphasizes spirituality and what is shared; the word “religion” is not mentioned much. Likewise, in Solotaroff’s film, The 99 confronted issues not just of religion, but of gender, geography, culture, identity, and politics — all of which are intertwined. Schuyler observed that all the presenters share a desire to build a wider understanding of Islam, its history, and its various forms in today’s world. He suggested that participants embrace the complexities of defining “Islamic art,” and cited Indian musician Ravi Shankar, who described raga, the melodic mode of classical Indian music, as a form in which “nothing is fixed, but some things are fixed.”

Schuyler concluded by offering participants two observations to ground the floor discussion. First, he described the relationship between artist and audience as a spectrum rather than a dichotomy. The artist and the audience influence one another: the work of art is completed by the viewer, who adds interpretation. Until the viewer sees, hears, or otherwise experiences a work of art, it remains undefined. In many cases, the audience actually participates in the creation of a work of art; Schuyler cited the audience members who danced onstage during Youssou N’Dour’s opening night concert as one example.

Second, Schuyler observed that the context in which a work of art is exhibited or a performance is presented changes its content. For instance, the Muslim world has a long tradition of erotic poetry, but the poetry itself is not “Islamic”; rather, its creators are people who are Muslim, or who live in the Muslim world. Schuyler recalled two different explanations that he had been given for the presence of this tradition in Muslim culture. In one instance, a Moroccan poet whose works included highly detailed descriptions of women’s bodies explained that he was actually a virgin, and that his poems were manifestations of his love for God. In the second, a Yemeni nashid — a man whose profession is to sing songs in praise of the Prophet — sang a very sexually explicit song at a local wedding. Unlike the poet, the nashid said the lyrics were not metaphorical; he felt it was his duty as a Muslim to instruct the inexperienced groom on his wedding night.

Floor Discussion

One participant, an artist who works with Muslim themes, observed that Muslim communities today have difficulty accepting work that challenges Islam or Muslim practices, even if done humorously and from within the community. This reaction is sometimes based in legitimate fear since many Muslim communities feel themselves harshly and unfairly criticized, and have adopted a defensive posture in response. The participant suggested that engaging Muslim communities in a real way requires first understanding this fear and then working to earn their trust so that they see artistic critique as meaningful rather than merely hostile.

In reference to Wham! Bam! Islam!’s depiction of the gathering of clerics in Kuwait for a “fatwa conference” and their deliberations on The 99, one participant asked where the line determining what is permissible is drawn, and by whom. There is no definitive way to establish the legitimacy necessary to determine this line and the absence of absolute authority in Islam — as opposed to, for example, the centrality of the Pope’s authority in Roman Catholicism — is central to a discussion of Islam and the arts. One result is that Muslim artists may choose not to produce art that could be seen as controversial since any debate is inherently unsolvable.

One participant recalled seeing a comic book for sale in Saudi Arabia in the 1980s that featured a blonde heroine in a miniskirt, and concluding that it had escaped censorship because no one considered children’s books significant. Yet comic books require a certain amount of subversiveness to be attractive to children. The participant asked Solotaroff to comment on how The 99 is positioned and what kind of impact it has had around the Muslim world. Solotaroff responded by observing that The 99 outsells Batman and Robin slightly, for example, but overall sales are relatively small. He believed the real test of The 99’s popularity will come when the animated television series launches globally in December 2009. The 99’s creator, Naif al–Mutawa, hopes that by accepting the realities of and joining the global marketplace, he can help spread a different image of Islam to the non–Muslim world, as well as to give children in the Muslim world, and particularly in the Middle East, better role models.

Another participant asked Rifaat and El Nadi to discuss how reactions to Penser le Coran had varied in different countries and among different audiences. The authors answered that while the book has not yet found an Arabic–language publisher, it has become a bestseller in France. The French edition has also been well received in Morocco, among other places. The authors believe that only the most orthodox of Muslims could possibly have trouble with their book’s message. Another participant echoed that Penser le Coran reflects the openness of Islam’s early scholars and only seems controversial today because media coverage of the Islamic world focuses on extremists who speak for very few of the religion’s followers.

A third participant pointed out that the session’s focus on the intersection of art and spirituality belies that “purely spiritual” art still has a political context — by virtue of its very decision to turn away from politics or political Islam. Mahmoud Hussein’s “interpretive” approach is also political, he claimed, in its decision to open the debate from a defensive point of view rather than addressing the current situation directly.

In response, El Nadi explained that he and Rifaat were Marxists until they discovered the Islam of the Sira, which led them to engage more actively with their religion. They had been surprised at how little the French people knew about Islam, despite France’s culture of learning. Upon further investigation, however, it turned out that even Muslims were ignorant of their own history. The authors hoped that their book could address this knowledge deficit both within Muslim communities and outside them.

One final comment emphasized the importance of distinguishing between artists from Muslim–majority cultures and those who are members of a Muslim minority elsewhere. Several panelists, including Rifaat and El Nadi, Huzir Sulaiman, and Sabiha al–Khemir, had commented on the effects that moving from one type of society to the other had on their relationship to their faith and to their art. This is in part, the participant felt, a reaction to the expectations that majority cultures have of what it is to “be Muslim.” The participant asked the floor to reflect on how spirituality emerges for members of Diasporan, minority cultures, and how this may differ from the role that spirituality played in their Muslim–majority cultures of origin.

The session concluded with closing responses from the panelists. Skali agreed with the participant who had stated that, when discussing Muslim arts, the political context cannot be avoided. Politics affects economics, culture, and spirituality — it cannot be separated out. For Solotaroff, the political message of The 99 might be “if you can’t beat them, join them,” but its real aim is to project a new image of Islam within the Muslim world, which has been hijacked by the people “who make the most noise.” Rifaat and El Nadi said that for them, the critical issue with respect to religion is to encourage freedom of thought. Schuyler closed by noting that while everything does have a political dimension, this does not mean that everyone is or must always be politically engaged. He suggested that the message of The 99 is not “if you can’t beat them, join them,” but rather, “if you can’t beat them with the tools in your hand, infiltrate.”

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