Re: Not-so-small 'miniatures' evoke artistic past of Islam

Date: 12 Feb 2003 17:09:25 -0800
Newsgroups: alt.religion.islam,uk.religion.islam,aus.religion.islam,alt.politics
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"SosaEscobar" <email-address-deleted> wrote in message news:<3e47a269$0$80662$email-address-deleted>...
[snip]
> Instead Samad works from his imagination, and most of the 30 or so paintings
> on display at the Goethe Institute show everyday scenes from an unspecified
> Middle Eastern past ­ guests take refreshments, robed men sit in a boat,
> horsemen apparently ride to battle.
Robed men? Horsemen? That's figurative art. That's unIslamic isn't it?
If he's referring back to an Arabic artistic tradition I'd lay odds
it's one older than 1,500 years.
If such a tradition existed, where are the great works of Arabic art
to compare with European, Indian, Oriental, even African art? What
could possibly have so stifled the creativity of an entire peoples
that it loses its artistic traditions?
The same goes for literature: the 1001 Arabian Nights, though
originally Indian, is in its Arabic re-write a wonderful work of
literature, which appears to belong to a tradition of story telling
similar to the Greek and Indian myths. What happened to that
tradition? Where are the equivalent works of romantic Arabic
literature from the last 500 years? All we have is a few ballsachingly
tedious and pious love poems.
Save for the very recent, western/oriental school of design, where are
the developments in Arabic architecture over the last 500 years? Where
is the Arabic music? Drama? Sculpture? Science? Sport? And on and
on... This is a reputedly highly creative community we're talking
about, after all.
And not just the Arab world - where are the artistic developments in
Turkey, Pakistan, Indonesia ... many of these societies have rich
artistic traditions, yet something seems to have frozen them in the
past. It's almost as if someone has told them all that a single work
of art exists - a book, say - which is so 'perfect' it makes any
further artistic creation pointless. And for some inexplicable reason,
they all believed him - even though no such book exists.
Very strange. Unfortunately, the Goethe institute is too far away for
me to find enlightenment.