By Robert Irwin
Published: July 13 2007 18:48 | Last updated: July 13 2007 18:48
A friend of Dr Johnson once told him that he had wished he could become a philosopher, “but I don’t know how, cheerfulness was always breaking in”.
A similar remark could be made about Islamic culture. The Koran can be read as forbidding the representation of living things. It also inveighs against poets. Many Muslim authorities condemn all forms of music.
So one might have expected an Islamic art that strove only for the severe, the abstract and the monumental. A few minutes walking round the Spirit & Life exhibition that has just opened at London’s Ismaili Centre will disabuse anyone of that expectation.
Here are scores of miniatures featuring princes feasting and hunting and dervishes dancing and singing. Here are anthologies of poetry and collections of fantastic stories presented in delicate calligraphy. Here are musical instruments intricately inlaid with mother of pearl.
The books, instruments and other artefacts are the products of a confident Islam. They were produced in an age when most Muslims lived under the protection of great Muslim empires – among them the Fatimid, Safavid and Ottoman empires.
Spirit & Life is a glittering display of some 165 masterpieces of Islamic art collected by the Aga Khan, drawn from a larger collection ultimately destined for a museum of Islamic art that will open in Toronto in 2010. The Ismaili Centre, where the exhibition is housed, is just across the road from the Victoria and Albert Museum, in which a display of Islamic art opened last year in the Jameel Gallery. This is the new home for such masterpieces as the Ardabil Carpet and the elaborate wooden minbar, or pulpit, of Qa’itbay, which were originally acquired to fulfil the V&A’s 19th-century remit to raise standards of design among artisans, manufacturers and packagers.
There are no manuscripts on display in the Jameel Gallery but Mamluk artefacts produced in late medieval Egypt and Syria feature prominently. By contrast, the Ismaili Centre’s exhibition is more aesthetic in its orientation.
It is a celebration of the past glories of Islamic culture, with an emphasis on manuscripts, mostly of Korans or illustrated Safavid and Mughal texts. And although the Fatimids, Ottomans, Safavids, Qajars and Mughals are accorded special displays as being “Great Historical Courts”, the Mamluks fail to make the grade.
That the Fatimid caliphs, who ruled in Egypt from the 10th to the 12th centuries, should be preferred to the Mamluk Sultans is perhaps understandable, for the Fatimids ruled as Shia Ismaili caliphs. Today the Aga Khan is the Imam, or spiritual leader, of the worldwide community of Ismaili Muslims. A medieval catalogue of the treasures of the Fatimids in Cairo has survived into modern times but not one of the thousands of items in it has. However, other Fatimid artefacts displayed here – crystalware, jewellery and textiles – are impressive enough.
There are plenty of other exciting and curious finds in Spirit & Life: the ninth- or 10th-century Tunisian blue Koran, for instance, in which the technique of chrysography was used to produce a text in which the letters were compounded of a liquid glue and ground gold; or the travelogue of a Chinese Muslim philosopher with its schematic Far Eastern version of the holy enclosure at Mecca; or the Tasrih of Mansur, an anatomical treatise in which the calligraphically-coated body of a man resembles a visitor from another planet; or the various paintings of the Simurgh, a giant bird (which according to some authorities had a name but no body); or the 17th-century Persian miniature of a woman making burn marks on her lover’s arm to test and record how much he loved her; or the 16th- century large-leaf Falnama, a prediction manual whose fantastic painted images were props for prophecy in the court or marketplace.
In the foreword to the exhibition catalogue, the Aga Khan writes about “the cultural threads that weave through history binding us all together”. For late 19th- and early 20th-century Britain, the discovery of Islamic art had a strong influence on the arts and crafts movement, art nouveau and art deco. In today’s Middle East, architects, weavers, calligraphers and others have been returning to traditional Islamic forms and techniques for inspiration.
Yet what is likely to strike any visitor to the exhibition who has never looked hard at Islamic art before is the delightful unexpectedness of much of what is on display. The wonderful is always breaking in.
‘Spirit & Life’ is at the Ismaili Centre, London SW7, until August 31, tel: +44 (0)20-7581 2071
Robert Irwin is editor of ‘The Penguin Anthology of Classical Arabic Literature’ (Penguin 2006)
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2007
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