The Arts of Islam. Treasures from the Nasser D Khalili Collection, edited by J M Rogers, is an elegantly produced scholarly volume which accompanies the recent Abu Dhabi exhibition of the Khalili Collection. Indeed the book is very much more than a catalogue although its ostensible purpose is to accompany the travelling exhibition of highlights from Professor Nasser David Khalili’s Collection of Islamic art. After leaving its previous venue in Sydney, Australia, an expanded version of the Collection was displayed at the Emirates Palace Hotel in Abu Dhabi, under the patronage of HH Shaykh Muhammad bin Zayed Al Nahyan and organised by the Abu Dhabi Tourism, Development and Investment Company (TDIC). The exhibition was on display from January to 22 April, 2008.
The exhibition was not only intended to display some of the most impressive objects ever made by Muslim artists but it was also held in Abu Dhabi with the praiseworthy underlying theme of providing education to the public in the Arabian Gulf on some of the finest examples of Islamic art in existence. The theme of education runs through the catalogue accompanying the exhibition, entitled The Arts of Islam. Treasures from the Nasser D. Khalili edited by Professor J M Rogers, formerly Khalili Professor in the Department of Art and Archaeology at SOAS, University of London.
Professor Khalili, a prominent collector of Islamic art, began in 1992 the process of publishing his distinguished collection with the first of a series of 27 scholarly catalogues on specialised aspects of the Collection is published by the Nour Foundation. The succession of exhibitions that have followed ---culminating in the 2008 Abu Dhabi exhibition --- have reinforced the academic impact of the specialised catalogues that have appeared in the past. The impact in educational terms is further reinforced by the present catalogue, The Arts of Islam.
An Iranian-born Londoner, Professor Khalili has contributed very significant patronage to encourage the study of Islamic art, both through the formation of his own collection and in the furthering of scholarship through endowments to the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) at the University of London and to the University of Oxford. It is therefore no surprise that the exhibition of the Khalili Collection in Abu Dhabi organised with TDIC has so strongly emphasised its educational role in furthering the understanding of Islamic art.
Professor Khalili states in the introduction to The Arts of Islam catalogue that his wish is to educate the greater public about “not only the remarkable beauty of Islamic art itself but also the degree to which it, and the societies which produced it, have enriched the world as we know it.”
The exhibition in Abu Dhabi contained over 500 pieces from the far larger Khalili collection and range from some of the earliest Qur’ans in existence through to very much later works, including Mughal and Safavid manuscripts, a Nepalese crown and Qajar paintings, and enamels, lacquerwork and jewellery of the 19th century.
At first sight, The Arts of Islam catalogue in its elegance of production has the look of a coffee-table book in terms of its production but it is a work of high scholarship and educational intent with excellent illustrations and precise descriptions by Professor Rogers and by a number of other distinguished specialists in the field of Islamic art. One of the main aims of the catalogue is to convey a sense of the breadth and profundity of the Islamic arts and their influence as well as the complexity of their origins and evolution.
The Arts of Islam catalogue is organised with clarity, carefully balancing specialist curatorial expertise and broad popular appeal. The introductory author’s note explains the problems of transliteration of Arabic, Persian and Turkish and is followed by an easy-to-read chronology. The map of the Islamic world is useful but it is a pity that it excludes Islam's extremities in east Africa, Java and China. The main body of the catalogue provides extremely detailed descriptions of the individual pieces, arranged thematically and chronologically.
The introductory discussion of the 'Arts of Islam' section of the catalogue discusses the issue of the definition of Islamic art in terms of ornamentation, Qur’anic inscriptions, courtly arts, the process of production, the issue of innovation and of figural representation. In the main body of the catalogue, Professor Rogers and his fellow-contributors provide detailed entries for almost every object.
The reader of The Arts of Islam catalogue in effect is invited to compare the simultaneous development of the Islamic arts in all of these media. Objects made of similar materials from the same period are juxtaposed next to one another page by page with detailed information about their provenance, date and publication history, with a critique of each piece from an art historical perspective. This method of structuring the catalogue encourages the reader to compare contemporary developments in different media and in so doing breaks across the traditional sub-division of the record of the arts of Islam by media alone. In so organising The Arts of Islam catalogue, Professor Rogers has given the reader a historical overview of the development of the Islamic arts as whole, rather than a medium-based perspective. In the layout and ordering of its descriptions of the objects, The Arts of Islam catalogue also provides a geographical outline of the progression of Islam and its arts as the religion spread through Asia and Africa.
The exhibition and The Arts of Islam catalogue have evolved in their emphases and impact. Edmund Capon, the Director of the Art Gallery of New South Wales, where this exhibition was previosly displayed on a smaller scale, wrote that this was “an exhibition of art of a secular nature and purpose.”
However, the new Abu Dhabi exhibition and the revised catalogue stresses both the religious and the secular. While it reminds us that Islam has a rich and deep secular art history but it also addresses the spiritual essence of the arts of Islam with its great emphasis on the arts of the sacred, the arts of the book and above all the Holy Qur'ân. Very impressive examples of the Holy Qur'ân include a single folio of a mâ'il Qur'ân from al-Hijâz (Catalogue 1) from the first century of the hijra and a number of fine 'Abbasid period Qur'ans from al-'Iraq and North Africa as well as many other fine examples of Arabic calligraphy.
A bifolio Qur'an (Catalogue 62) attributed to 12th century Syria has an extraordinary crowded gold thuluth script. The eighth part of a thirty part Qur'an for the wazir of Ozbeg (Catalogue 62), the last atabek of Azerbaijan has a wonderful muhaqqaq script of very great beauty.
While the earliest periods of Islamic art are covered by very impressive objects, the later secular material really also deserves attention. The later period described in The Arts of Islam catalogue as ‘Phoenix Rising’ covers the Ilkhanid, Mamluk and Timurid periods and deals with the aftermath of the massive destruction of the Mongol invasions of the 13th C. and the revival of the arts of Islam in the very different context of a new post-Mongol invasion world.
This section of the collection demonstrates just how far-reaching was the influence of Islam in this period. Among the most interesting pieces in the collection are gold horse trappings and saddle fittings from Central Asia of ca 1200 CE (Catalogue 211) and a damascened saddle dated to ca 1400 (Cat. 219), also attributed to Central Asia. Both arise from the horse-riding nomadic culture of the steppes. These deserve special attention.
The gold saddle fittings (Catalogue 211) are decorated in Chinese style and either date from the migrations that followed the collapse of the Liao dynasty in north China in the early 12th C, or, as Professor Rogers suggests, could be attributed to the Mongol empire of Jenghiz Khan.
The gold saddle fittings appear to have been found in Central Asia or in Iran. This is interesting for two reasons. Firstly it demonstrates the far-reaching influence of Islamic culture, just as Professor Khalili pointed out in the introduction to this volume. Secondly, it shows that some of the ‘arts of Islam’ in the collection might have less to do with Islam than with the people Islam came into contact with. These horse trappings, for example, do not demonstrate the influence of Islam on Chinese art and decoration, but rather show the reverse, that Islam incorporated Chinese art into its canon.
The impressive collections of Mughal and Safavid paintings is another highlight of The Arts of Islam catalogue, described in the section of the Abu Dhabi catalogue entitled The Age of Empires: Ottoman, Safavid, Mughal & Qajar Periods. The objects described offer many fine examples of the influence and hybrid nature of Islamic art in Iran, India and Turkey in this later period. For instance, the traditional Indian forms of story-telling are transformed by joining with the Islamic tradition of miniature painting, especially with the production of illuminated books under the Mughals and other Indian courts.
A quite extraordinary item in the collection of paintings of the ‘Age of Empires’ section is the ‘Judith with the severed head of Holofernes’ (Catalogue 313) dated to ca 1680 CE and attributed to Muhammad Zaman who worked at Isfahan under the Safavids. This water-colour exemplifies the syncretic and cross-cultural character of art from the Islamic world and also the complex circumstances of Safavid Iran with its close contacts with Portugal, Holland and Britain.
The painting attributed to Muhammad Zaman is dated to a period when contacts with Europe were already well established. It depicts the story of Judith killing the Assyrian Holofernes in Palestine, a story from the Book of Judith. The Book of Judith was one of the ancient Deutorocanonical scriptures of Judaism accepted by the Roman Catholic Church at the Council of Trent in the 16th C. The Judith story became a major theme in European art in the decades that followed and the composition used by Muhammad Zaman is described by Rogers as being “after a print by the Bolognese artist Guido Reni” which explains the Italianate style.
In its degree of Europeanization, the Muhammad Zaman "Judith and Holofernes" contrasts sharply with other paintings in the Khalili Collection that include Christian and Jewish references, especially the Falnamah of ca 1610-1630 (Cat. 316-326), attributed to Golconda in the Deccan. In the Falnamah, the Christian and Jewish themes are executed entirely in the traditions of the art of the Iranian Islamic world, albeit executed in India. The comparison could not be more extreme between the "Judith and Holofernes" and the Falnamah's "Jesus raising the dead" (Cat. 321), "The Building of Noah's Ark" (Cat. 323) and the "The Last Judgment" (Cat. 319).
The Western features of the figures in the Muhammad Zaman "Judith and Holofernes" are precise, shown in the characterisation of the figures, the post-Renaissance realistic depiction of their movements, the billowing drapery and the Italian countryside that forms the background. However, the Catalogue description leaves tantalizingly unsaid how Muhammad Zaman came across this print and why he decided to reproduce it. It is subject deserving of further research.
The hybrid nature of the art of the later Islamic world becomes apparent elsewhere in the later material in the collection. The rising preference for lacquerwork in later Islamic art, as Professor Rogers notes, was indebted to the impact of Chinese lacquerwork. He writes: “it is no accident that for centuries lacquer painters continued to give prominence to a repertoire of chinoiserie monsters and floral motifs”.
The later Islamic period lacquer paintings of the Qajars– gaudily coloured and overflowing with baroque excess – are clearly indebted not just to the Chinese for the technique, but also to European styles and fashion, including dress and sometimes subject-matter. The extent of this exchange between the Islamic world and the West becomes clear in a lacquer piece from the Collection, which shows Mary and the Christ child in a manger, replete with cow and an admiring crowd (Cat. 467). It is from Isfahan, signed by Muhammad Baqir and it is dated to 1187/1772. Professor Rogers writes in his description that “the decorative repertoire was extended to include ‘Christian’ subjects, sometimes through the intermediary of Armenian painting”. The Virgin and Child subject in Cat. 467 underlines his point very well and the Armenian connection through the Armenian churches at New Julfa in Isfahan was a very important conduit for such western influences.
The exhibition of the Khalili collection is extensive and impressive, with examples from nearly all the principal typologies of Islamic art and geographical regions, covering the whole Islamic period. The Arts of Islam catalogue like the exhibition has been very successful in its goal of demonstrating to the public the great diversity of Islamic art, in conveying the consequences of the expansion of Islam and its culture and the evolution its art over time. However, The Arts of Islam catalogue is less successful in conveying the influence of Islam on Europe and the West, although it certainly demonstrates the growing impact of Europe on the Islamic world in later times.
Of the whole enterprise of the impressive exhibition which ended in April, The Arts of Islam catalogue will be the lasting legacy of the event for scholarly research and for students of Islamic art. One can only admire what has been achieved by Professor Khalili in Abu Dhabi and the exhibition's success in educating the public, Muslim and non-Muslim, of the impact of Islam in the formation of its distinctive spiritual and secular art.
Muneera Mohammed Al-Khulaifi is conducting studies at the Department of Art and Archaeology, School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London
