Book Review: Islamic Art by David Talbot Rice

Islamic Art by David Talbot Rice
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This is a classic and much-reprinted primer on the highlights of Islamic art. I got the 1975 revised Thames & Hudson edition for free at a library giveaway (yippee!) so this is the edition I'm reviewing. I found the text clear and wide ranging. While it didn't go into as much detail as I would have liked, this is meant as a short introduction to a huge subject and does that quite well. I've studied Islamic art in a casual way for 25 years now and I still learned a lot from the text.

My main complaint is that the illustrations aren't up to par. Most are in somewhat grainy black and white and don't do these magnificent works of art justice. Even some of the images of illustrated manuscripts are in black and white. There are several color plates in this book but they are not of terribly good quality. I recommend this book for anyone looking to learn more about one of the world's great art traditions, but suggest that you look for a later, better illustrated edition.

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Travel Tuesday: Mohammed's Birthday Parade in Tangier

When I was in Tangier last month, the Muslim world was celebrating the birthday of the prophet Mohammed. While it's an important holiday, in Tangier it doesn't come with as many celebrations as New Years or Ramadan. A few shops were closed and there were groups of young men going around my neighborhood pounding on drums and singing religious songs like they do for every holiday. The main public celebration that I saw was this parade, which went down one of the main streets in the new city.

These are students from a local madrasa, a religious school. The plaques are a traditional way to practice writing out the Koran. When you graduate you get your diploma on one.

I stumbled upon the parade by accident so I only had my phone with me, not my main camera. It was hard to get good shots because Moroccans, just like Europeans, always crowd around anything interesting and start snapping pictures with their phones. Some even took selfies! Yeah, the selfie is an international phenomenon. Oh well. So I missed getting some shots of some of the marchers in the parade and the bull being led to the slaughter, later be eaten at a feast in the prophet's honor. Here are the shots I did get, in the order the parade passed me.

"Where are the women?" my wife asked. Well, there were these little girls all dolled up in the back of a pickup. They were the only ones.

These musicians were pretty cool. I'm not sure what region they were from, probably in the Atlas Mountains. I've never seen costumes like this before. There are still large sections of Morocco I need to see!

Muslim Depictions of the Prophet Muhammad

Considering recent events, this is a good time to point out that the ban on depictions of the Prophet Muhammad are not universal in Islam. There have been eras in the past where Muhammad was depicted in visual form, and he continues to be depicted in parts of the Muslim world today.

The above picture is taken from the Siyer-i Nebi: The Life of the Prophet, written in Cairo circa 1388 and illustrated in Constantinople (modern Istanbul) in 1595. The book contains several images of Muhammad. This one shows him and his followers marching on Mecca accompanied by angels. In all of the images the prophet's face is covered. More illustrations from the book can be seen at the website for Bilkent University in Turkey.

The University of Bergen also has a webpage of Muslim art show Muhammad. One of them is this Shia image from Iran. Most Persians have never followed the belief that Muslims are forbidden to create images of humans, and this has extended to including Muhammad in their art. Most Sunni believe that such depictions are wrong, but as the Ottoman image proves, this hasn't always been the case.

Midlist Writer Awards Spirit21 the Premio Dardos Award

Last week Donna over at Donna's Book Pub awarded me the Premio Dardos Award. The award is given in recognition of cultural, ethical, literary, and personal values transmitted in the form of creative and original writing.

By accepting the award, I must follow two rules:

1) Accept the award by posting it on my blog along with the name of the person that has granted the award and a link to their blog.

2) Pass the award along to blogs I find worthy of this acknowledgment.

I'm passing the award on to Shelina Zahra Janmohamed at the Spirit21 blog. Shelina is a leading voice in moderate Islam in the UK. Her work appears in the Guardian and other media outlets. She spends a lot of effort on encouraging Muslim women to speak out for themselves. It's interesting that the Western media spend so much time saying Muslim women need a voice but so rarely give them a chance to have one. Shelina has broken through this barrier and her blog and articles are well worth reading. I don't agree with everything she says (otherwise there would be no point in reading her) but her posts always give me something to think about.

The Jewel of Medina: Worth the Controversy?

I recently stumbled across the blog of very cool Muslim commentator Shelina Zahra Janmohamed, who gives her fiercely independent (and often hilariously snarky) opinion on her religion and its place in the world. In her latest post she takes on The Jewel of the Medina, that supposedly "controversial and banned" novel about Aisha, Muhammad's child bride. While I didn't need a Muslim to tell me it's a cheesy Orientalist romance novel (the excerpt on the book's official website does that quite well enough) it was interesting to read about all of its historical inventions and errors.

To Shelina's credit, she doesn't call for the book to be banned. Interestingly, Random House got cold feet and pulled the plug without having been threatened, as is made clear in a Wall Street Journal article by old friend Asra Nomani. Random House should have shown more guts and published it, or shown more taste and rejected it when it first appeared in their slush pile. Since then, a few radical clerics have expressed their usual ire, and three men have been arrested for a firebombing allegedly linked to the British edition, but I doubt they actually read it.

And no, I haven't read the whole thing either. The turgid prose in the excerpt was a sufficient waste of my time, thank you very much.