The contributions gathered in this volume are based on original papers presented at the conference From Malacca to Manchester: Curating Islamic Collections Worldwide, which took place from 22 to 24 February 2017 at Manchester Museum (part of the University of Manchester), Manchester, UK.1 This conference, and its associated workshops and visits, was the flagship public event within a wider ongoing programme known informally as the Ellerman Project after the John Ellerman Foundation which generously funded it.2 This project aimed to improve the understanding of the religion of Islam as well as Islamic culture, history and contemporary Muslim identities among staff at Manchester Museum, the Whitworth Art Gallery and Manchester Art Gallery, collectively the Manchester Museums Partnership.3 Welcoming attendees and speakers from across the globe, this conference was a timely opportunity for both a critical examination of current practices in the presentation and interpretation of Islamic material culture and also to hear more about plans for upcoming permanent installations, including those of the British Museum (now open, as of October 2018) and the Pergamon Museum/Museum of Islamic Art in Berlin, Germany (opening scheduled for 2026).4
The 18-month Ellerman Project also included dedicated specialist cataloguing and research into art and material culture from the Islamic world across the Manchester Museums Partnership, for the first time; the organisation of training events and seminars on topics including Islamic history and visual culture as well as community engagement and education; and group and individual visits to significant collections of Islamic art in the UK and further afield.5 While primarily directed at curators, this programme embraced staff across the Manchester Museums Partnership, as well as representatives of Muslim communities and other cultural and educational institutions in Manchester and north-west England.
Like many smaller collections in the UK and elsewhere, those of the Manchester Museums Partnership are highly eclectic assemblages encompassing metalwork, ceramics, coins, carpets, textiles and clothing, lacquer and woodwork, and arms, armour and archery equipment, as well as domestic and equestrian materials. Most of the objects date to the seventeenth century and later, an era often excluded from traditional Islamic art historiography and museology on the grounds of its supposed inauthenticity and corruption by Western aesthetic and industrial developments. The collections, furthermore, are not blessed with a wealth of archival material to help trace their arrival in Manchester, still less any collecting rationale behind their formation. While different in character from many major, traditionally conceived Islamic art collections around the world, they are in fact highly representative of a less well-explored but widely encountered body of materials. Curators increasingly recognise that such neglected and less glamorous assemblages nevertheless deserve attention due to the intrinsic interest they may hold for local audiences,6 and that aesthetically, materially or socially more humble objects can also tell a wealth of tales that in many respects are accessible and appealing to audiences for whom an incessant focus on historyâs â1 per centâ can be off-putting (Appadurai 2013). Much work remains to be done with Manchesterâs Islamic collections and particularly their online accessibility, but it is hoped that future activities will benefit from the more intimate understanding of the collections, and the cultures that produced them, among Manchester staff.
The Ellerman Projectâs programme was designed in response to the growing awareness that institutions like Manchester Museum have a real responsibility to give greater attention to their Islamic collections, to acknowledge and explicate their origins and provenances, to commit resources to specialised curatorship of these collections, and to work harder to include, at every level, audiences who do not fit a traditional profile. This aim for Islamic collections is emblematic of a broader refocusing of museumsâ remits, in a climate in which previously dominant narratives are increasingly being interrogated and deconstructed, even while Islam and Muslims are still all too often misunderstood. Increased connectivity and social awareness means that majority demographic groups can no longer ignore the moral imperatives of inclusivity, recognition, respect and equality, not least in the ways publicly funded culture and heritage are produced, described and consumed. The ongoing reassessment of the politics of representation in public and community spaces, and not least by museums, is demanded by various current social and political trends. These include the continuing global migrant crisis and its socio-political ramifications, a maturing approach to processes of decolonisation in the museum, increased recognition of the barriers to access encountered within the museum profession by specific socio-economic and ethnic groups, and the greater readiness of curators of Islamic art to admit the validity of subjective interpretation by Muslims as at least one aspect of their presentation.
The themes addressed in this volume encompass these and further issues. Discussion on curating Islamic art is an ongoing process, most recently addressed at length in Islamic Art and the Museum: Approaches to Art and Archaeology of the Muslim World in the Twenty-First Century (Junod et al. 2012). The Manchester Museum conference was in part conceptualised as an update to that landmark publication (itself the outcome of a conference).7 In this volume, we also seek to include more contributions from outside the European and North American context to broaden the terms of the discussion. But what has changed over the decade since then?
Ground-breaking projects in the West have continued: in 2012, the Louvre opened its new galleries of Islamic Art,8 while the Aga Khan Museum in Torontoâone of the only institutions in the West exclusively concerned with displaying Islamic material heritageâopened its doors in 2014.9 Other developments are detailed herein. Meanwhile, however, many of the areas from which Islamic art objects originated have descended into revolution, armed struggle and civil war; governments and strongmen have fallen and been replaced by yet others; while precious cultural heritage including buildings and museum collections have been caught, disastrously, in the cross-hairs. As well as numerous sites in Syria, these include the Museum of Islamic Art in Cairo which (along with the National Library of Egyptâs remodelled exhibition gallery) was severely affected by a car bomb explosion in January 2014, having only reopened in 2010 after extension renovation. In other cases, Islamic material heritage has been deliberately co-opted for political ends or simply sidelined by more urgent concerns. Furthermore, the world continues to deal with the consequences of global recession, the European political grouping is shaky, separatist and right-wing movements are active the world over and the USAâs political discourse has lurched to the right, with funding for cultural activities severely cut and civil liberties increasingly undermined. It appears that the critical examination and understanding of individual and collective identities is more pertinent than ever, and as ever for some, Islam and Islamic culture are totemic for all that is feared and resented.
Curators , scholars and educators still return relentlessly to the familiar and apparently abstract questions which were also discussed in Manchester and in this volume: what is Islamic art? What is artistic about it and what is Islamic? Who may define its significance? Do attempts to streamline the messages conveyed in exhibitions help to enhance understanding, or simply invite the critique of over-simplification? Does Islamic artâs co-option by high-level cultural diplomacy actually work? Why is it still the subject of so much misinformation and lack of understanding? In a world full of suffering, why should we care? Unsurprisingly, the concepts underlying these questions continue to evolve and definitive answers do not exist.
In Part I, âTheoretical Approaches to Exhibiting and Interpreting Islamic Artâ, Nancy Demerdash-Fatemi addresses the question of empathy sensitively and robustly in Chap. 2, âObjects, Storytelling, Memory and Living Historiesâ. Curators in Europe and North America should care very much about reaching out to audiences from the Muslim world, who may have been physically displaced and psychologically traumatised, in recognition of the responsibility to shape public spaces to involve and acknowledge the specific subjectivities of different audiences and the emotional and spiritual resonances of materiality in processes of identity-construction generally. Demerdash-Fatemi furthermore demonstrates that when it comes to conveying narratives and facts meaningfully and powerfully, experiential methodologies recently employed in attempting to convey migrantsâ experiences within the exhibition context have been demonstrably effective and consequently may have wider, transferrable applications in curatorial practice.
During discussions in Manchester, the only consensus was the impossibility of consensus. Different and novel approaches are fair game, at least in the short to medium term, in addressing the complexities presented by the infamously âunwieldy fieldâ of Islamic art (Blair and Bloom 2003) vis-Ă -vis the practicalities of di...