The Metropolitan Museum prefers PC to truth on Islamic art
From the Met’s website description of its Islamic art collection:
To dispel a common misconception: Islam’s supposed prohibition against figural art is confined to the religious sphere. As just one example, many representations of people are to be found in the department’s outstanding assemblage of miniature paintings, strictly secular in nature, from the courts of Iran and Mughal India.
Actually, Islamic tradition on figural art has varied over time, with fundamentalist Arab Islam typically prohibiting precisely what the Met says is allowed. We dealt with the subject previouisly here; the Met’s citing of Persian miniatures and Mughal court painting is a bit of PC sophistry. For PC with a wry touch, we prefer the BBC: “Painting and sculpture are not thought of as the noblest forms of art” in Islam — that’s one way to say it! No doubt the fellows at the Met and the BBC would be able to tell us about the great literary tradition of Islamic fiction, and find the fiction best-seller lists of Saudi Arabia and Egypt as well — we’re still looking.
Islam contains aspects of great beauty, and great ugliness as well, as do most societies. The hyper-educated of the West do themselves no favors by creating a false parallelism to the Western world or by minimizing serious distinctions between our traditions, however. Failing to recognize the unique way that religion suffuses Islamic society and dominates aesthetic standards is both bad art criticism and bad politics.
UPDATE
Via The Religious Policeman, we see what happens at a book signing in Saudi Arabia when the authors are women and the real Saudi religious police show up to harrass them. As for that Saudi best-seller list we were looking for, let’s join Arab News, already in progress: Though her works are difficult to find in the Kingdom, Fawziyah told Arab News that she felt “really great” to be signing her works in her home country.