Islam and Heritage in Europe

Pasts, Presents and Future Possibilities

Katarzyna Puzon, Sharon Macdonald, Mirjam Shatanawi, Katarzyna Puzon, Sharon Macdonald, Mirjam Shatanawi

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000369205
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Museum Studies

Islam and Heritage in Europe provides a critical investigation of the role of Islam in Europe's heritage. Focusing on Islam, heritage and Europe, it seeks to productively trouble all of these terms and throw new light on the relationships between them in various urban, national and transnational contexts.

Bringing together international scholars from a range of disciplines, this collection examines heritage-making and Islam in the context of current events in Europe, as well as analysing past developments and future possibilities. Presenting work based on ethnographic, historical and archival research, chapters are concerned with questions of diversity, mobility, decolonisation, translocality, restitution and belonging. By looking at diverse trajectories of people and things, this volume encompasses multiple perspectives on the relationship between Islam and heritage in Europe, including the ways in which it has played out and transformed against the backdrop of the 'refugee crisis' and other recent developments, such as debates on decolonising museums or the resurgence of nationalist sentiments.

Islam and Heritage in Europe discusses specific articulations of belonging and non-belonging, and the ways in which they create new avenues for re-thinking Islam and heritage in Europe. This ensures that the book will be of interest to academics, researchers and postgraduate students engaged in the study of heritage, museums, Islam, Europe, anthropology, archaeology and art history.

The Open Access version of this book, available at www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (see also http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/).

Part I

Embodied heritage and belonging

Chapter 1

From postcoloniality to decoloniality, from heritage to perpetuation

The Islamic at the museum

Wendy Miriam Kural Shaw

The Sassanian Emperor Anoushirvan once went hunting with his vizier. They rode their fine steeds through lush woods and sunny vales. Eventually they came to a clearing no less full of birdsong than the woods, full of beautiful buildings lying tragically in ruin. Two owls sat on a broken vault. The emperor turned to his trusted advisor and, knowing that he understood the language of the birds, asked him what they were saying.

‘Forgive me, my king, for I will only convey what I hear with no balm for your ears’, said the vizier. Curiosity overtook pride as the emperor agreed to lay anger aside.

The younger owl has asked the hand of the daughter of the older owl. This father-in-law is shrewd: requesting a dowry, he asks no more than one ruined town, a perfect kingdom for owls. Yet his son-in-law is shrewder. He says: ‘if the king maintains his careless rule, I will give you a thousand towns such as this!’

Anoushirvan wept as they departed. In the following years, the justice of his rule won him glory. And to think, it came all from the wisdom of owls, sitting where hens should have roosted (Würsch, 2005, p. 281).

Figure 1.1 Mirak the painter, ‘Anoushirvan and the Owls’, Khamsa-i Nizami, British Library OR 2265, f. 15v. (1539–1540).

What do we learn? Representation remedies absence. It invents the very malady that it aims to cure.

The notion of representing ‘the Islamic’ presumes an externally definable and thereby absent entity called ‘Islam’; that this ‘Islam’ might achieve presence through some action, such as the presentation of objects, performances or lectures; and that this presence would accrue added value beyond that of ‘Islam’ itself. This desire to re-present Islam structures the nature of its representation. If we conceive of Islam solely as an engagement with or a making present of the divine, then individual prayer would suffice. Perhaps we would need a place for the bowing to the divine, s-j-d¹, essential to the embodied ritual of Islamic prayer; perhaps we would need a place for the congregation of such bowing, the m-s-j-d.

Yet this is not the type of making present to which we refer when speaking of museums or heritage. This making present relies on a disembodiment, a bringing together of products surrounding the s-j-d, to which they may or may not be related. What is made present at the museum is not the greeting, s-l-m implicit in Islam itself – the greeting of the divine, which also constitutes peace – so much as the greeting of its by-products, a hall of mirrors in which the verbal noun of greeting the divine is not there.² This slippage, from the embodied act of greeting the divine towards representing the act in its by-products, centralises the worldliness (the secularity) of the museum. The making-present structurally repeats and underscores absence, rendering the ‘unfortunate marionette that the history of the unheeded subaltern must unfold’, by separating the misapprehension of darstellung as vertreten (Spivak, 1999, p. 259).

What does it mean to represent Islamic heritage in the museum? The very question undermines its possibility. Islamic thought refuses the distinction at the core of the museum: the premise that Islam is elsewhere. Islam cannot be reconstituted from its by-products in a passive construction, where the by-products are made to fit into a pre-existing matrix of making meaning. Rather, if Islam is to genuinely inhabit the museum, it can only emerge if these by-products actively bring forth their intrinsic expressions of Islam. This paper will argue that despite the best of intentions, the drive towards heritage preserves the coloniality of collection within the post-coloniality of heritage. It reproduces the marginalisation of Islam that it attempts to cure. Instead, this essay proposes a model of perpetuation that draws on Islamic concepts of embodied knowledge, resonating with those articulated by Plato, to enable tangible and intangible entities of Islamic culture to articulate Islam by constructing their own matrices of meaning.

With the best of intentions: from coloniality to post-coloniality

What do we do with the mess that the nineteenth century bequeathed to us? Capitalism, industrialisation, racism, resource depletion, globalised inequity… and folded in all that, the legacy of rapacious materialism enshrined in the museum. Do we just give everything back? That has been the call for some time now: to return the booty of colonialism lingering in museums to its rightful owners… After all, the logic of public display in glorified warehouses no longer functions as well in an era of virtual access, social distancing, and an absence of leisure time. But what will they do when the objects are returned? It is not like the people over ‘there’ have the time and space that we lack. It is not as though they haven’t been creating living cultures in the meantime. We may be able to give things back across space, but not across time. If you stole something from my great grandmother and return it to me, I may want it. I may also very well have no use for it. Once a thief, always a thief. Once we wrest objects out of the processes of life, they acquire new life in new processes.³ There is no redemption.

The museum houses an afterlife, as Theodor Adorno famously pointed out in his 1955 essay, ‘The Valery Proust Museum’:

The German word, ‘museal’ [‘museumlike’], has unpleasant overtones. It describes objects to which the observer no longer has a vital relationship and which are in the process of dying… Museums are like the family sepulchers of works of art. They testify to the neutralization of culture… Once tradition is no longer animated by a comprehensive, substantial force but has to be conjured up by means of citations because ‘It’s important to have tradition’, then whatever happens to be left of it is dissolved into a means to an end… That the world is out of joint is shown everywhere in the fact that however a problem is solved, the solution is false.

(Adorno, 1967, p. 175)

This world is out of joint in that it continually murders objects to manufacture meaning out of them, transforming mourning into pleasure (Crimp, 1987). Adorno’s rendering the near homonymy between museum and mausoleum depends on a negativity surrounding death, which Adorno identifies as particularly German, on...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Heritage, Islam, Europe: Entanglements and directions. An introduction
• Part I: Embodied heritage and belonging
• Part II: The nation-state and identity formations
• Part III: Categories, connections and contemporary challenges
• Index