Points about Western influence on Islamic arts

Shafaqna English– The Muqarnas has published the paper “The Status of Islamic Art in the Twentieth Century” written by Wijdan Ali in 1922.

According to Shafaqna, this paper explores the status of Islamic art in the twentieth century. The phrase “Islamic art” tends to evoke images of ornate metalwork, intricately woven textiles and rugs, ceramics with calligraphic decoration and stylized floral designs, delicately trimmed glassware, colorful Iranian miniatures illustrating poetic verses, and animated Turkish albums testifying to the feats of illustrious sultans.

The creation of this kind of classical Islamic art falls between the Umayyad dynasty in the seventh century and the end of the Ottoman Empire in 1924, for thirteen centuries during which empires rose and fell in an area that nowadays extends from Africa to Southeast Asia. They represent a sequence of civilizations distinguished by their unity as well as the diversity of their rich and varied heritage.

The history of Islamic art and the findings are mentioned below:

1. At its beginning, Islam borrowed motifs and norms from the other artistic traditions with which it had dealings with, such as the Byzantine, Sasanian, and Graeco-Roman. It achieved universality in a world where the closest and most direct line was moving around a continent. But once it expanded throughout Asia and North Africa, it developed its own specific styles and media, iconography and symbols, forms and themes.
2. Eventually, empires fell and Western colonial rule followed, leading to a period of artistic lethargy and cultural stagnation. Artists lost the cultured and attentive patrons who had spent attention and money on the arts. The occupation of Islamic lands mainly by the French and the British weakened not only their economic self-sufficiency and ability to govern, but also their art. Western aesthetics and culture dominated indigenous artistic traditions. A certain pattern started to emerge to a greater or lesser degree in the development of all modern Islamic countries.
3. In most of the Ottoman Empire, Western colonization did not occur, but the weakening and moral deterioration of the state made it receptive to powerful economic and cultural influences coming from a substantial Western presence. Soon local styles and traditions were replaced by imported ones, and the sultans themselves introduced European artistic forms into their court.
4. Ottomans and the Qajar rulers in Iran were enthusiastic importers of cultural influences. The Arab countries of the Middle East and, apart from Morocco, in North Africa had been under Ottoman rule since the sixteenth century. To them the center of cultural enlightenment was Istanbul, and whatever started there was automatically copied all over the empire.
5. Since the beginning of the twentieth century, most Islamic countries have gone through an intellectual resurgence that has accompanied their political awakening. This has been effective on their literary and artistic development and created a cultural revival among their intelligentsia. While Islamic traditional arts continued to suffer, Western-style plastic arts benefited from this revival. This flourishing was said to be a renaissance in modern Islamic painting and sculpture, but actually it brought about loss of cultural identity and generated a schizophrenia among modern Islamic artists: their education and training were totally Western, while their beliefs and convictions remained with their Islamic roots and traditional upbringing.
6. Learning and creating art according to Western aesthetics brought about an irreparable rupture between the fine arts and the crafts that had never existed before in Islamic culture. The new attitude distinguished between art for art’s sake and utilitarian art, resulting in the debasement and vulgarization of conventional arts in Islam.
7. When the Islamic East stated its race to catch up with the West, Europe had already undergone its Industrial Revolution. Muslim countries tried to gain time to ignore all that was thought to impede the replacement of human beings with machines, including indigenous crafts. Institutions that trained apprentice artisans in traditional Islamic arts such as the nakkayhane in Istanbul totally disappeared; patronage by the state, the ruling classes, and the gentry stopped. Eastern spiritual virtues were replaced by western materialistic values, pushing the younger generations to work in factories where the pay was better instead of apprenticing in the ateliers of their elders.
8. Calligraphy was the only art form that kept away from this decline to a certain extent. Because it had always been connected with the copying of the Quran, it could retain its original dignity, when other arts of the book- miniature painting, bookbinding, and illumination- declined to near extinction.
9. Music was the one art that remained unchanged. Classical Arabic, Persian, Turkish, and Urdu music has kept its original characteristics until now. It might not be as popular as modern Western-influenced music, but it has been able to protect its purity against external impact.
10. The ideas and concepts of art that almost all people in the Islamic world, their forebears, and progeny have been educated to believe, cannot be reversed, nor can the techniques and styles learned by artists be totally destroyed. Muslim artists themselves do not even want to go back in time. Nowadays, as the world becomes smaller, international styles and trends move quickly among nations. Through the exchange of knowledge and technology, art has shed its limited and limiting traits and is moving toward universality.
11. What most contemporary artists in the Islamic world wish for is the establishment of an artistic identity which, like their forefathers, would draw on recently developed procedures, art media, and styles learned from the West, adjust them to their own beliefs, aesthetics, and convictions, and propose novel formulas for modern Islamic art that would contribute to other cultures and artistic traditions and also to their own. This would create a healthy cultural exchange among nations that would result in greater tolerance and understanding among peoples and some day to peace.

Source: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1523143

Featured image: Roof of Hafez tomb in Shiraz, Iran – Wikipedia. 

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