Unlike war, the “outpouring of creativity and intelligence” and “nuance and ingenuity” of Islamic art and architecture endures. So goes the argument of the new PBS documentary Islamic Art: Mirror of the Invisible World.“Islamic art puts a face on a lot of the uncertainties Western society has about Islamic culture, and also it sheds light on some shared histories between western culture and Islamic culture, and shows a continuity rather than a break,” says Afshan Bokhari, assistant professor of art history at Suffolk University in Boston, Mass., at the end of the 90-minute film.
The documentary will air on 330 PBS stations nationwide on July 6, including PBS Houston, where it will run at 9 p.m. on July 6 and 2 a.m. on July 10.
The 14 centuries of Islamic art covered in the film, which is narrated by Susan Sarandon, span Europe, the far east, and Africa.
Scholars and arts professionals — including the late Oleg Grabar, formerly of Harvard University and Institute for Advanced Study, to whom the film is dedicated — discuss the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem — which has an Arabic inscription declaring God unique, rather than threefold, which is “clearly a rebuttal to Christianity,” says Sheila Blair, a Boston College professor — the Umayyad (Great) Mosque of Damascus (with its “forest of columns”), the Great Mosque of Córdoba, the Taj Mahal in India, and the Alhambra in Granada, Spain.
[Read more about Grabar.]
While those mosques avoid representational art that might be considered an idolatrous representation of the divine, they are heavily decorated with bright colors, arches, and dramatic light. But the Great Mosque of Djenné in Mali, which also appears in the documentary, is a very different design.
The largest adobe (Arabic for brick, or mud-brick) building in the world, the Djenné mosque “redefines our conception of what a mosque is,” says Mohammad al-Asad, director of the Center for the Study of the Built Environment in Jordan, in the film. The mosque’s soaring ceiling is supported by 99 columns (one for each name of God), and there is scaffolding built directly into the walls (to facilitate the constant upkeep and repairs that the the adobe requires).Other highlights of the film include reflections from renowned Arabic calligrapher Mohamed Zakariya, a convert to Islam. While other experts expressed the awe they experienced when dwarfed by grand Islamic architecture, Zakariya waxes poetic talking amount small things, like the nibs of Islamic calligraphers’ pens in centuries past.
“We don’t even know what angle their pens were cut, and it simply takes your breath away,” he says.
But despite the film’s solid organization around five Islamic art themes: word, space, ornamentation, color, and water, it takes nearly 40 minutes for a discussion of figurative representation in Islamic art to surface. “One of the greatest misconceptions about Islamic culture is that figurative art does not exist,” says Kjeld von Folsach, director of the David Collection in Copenhagen.
The conversation stops at identifying the one of the great misconceptions, however, and viewers may be left wanting more of an explanation why some Islamic traditions embraced the possibility and permissibly of even veil-less portraits of the Prophet, while others shunned such iconography.
[Read Kate Shellnutt’s Believe It or Not blog post “Islamic Art movie premiere to feature local artists.”]
Blair, of Boston College, suggests that one of the great things about Islam is that its adherents saw things in different ways throughout history. That is surely true, but is also something that could be said about many faiths. And Amy Landau, associate curator of Islamic art and manuscripts at the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, Md., notes that Islamic art treasures, such as some of the ones in the documentary, “can be the bridge between one world and another.”
“Translucent glass is beautiful regardless of your religious background. Mosaic sparkles and dazzles the eye regardless of what time in history you are in. Monumental, tall domes that stretch overhead like the heavens themselves are awesome whoever you are, whether you walk in there to pray, or walk in their with a camera as a tourist,” she says.
She’s right of course, and particularly since many of the mosques and much of the art in the film may be inaccessible to many viewers, the film is all the more vital, despite its agnosticism on some of the larger questions of figurative Islamic art.