Word: islamize
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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While Quraeshi believes it unorthodox to use contemporary art to a humanizing anthropological end, such is a necessary gesture to accurately depict the many facets of Islam to a Western audience...
Next semester, Asani will be teaching a General Education class that will serve as an introduction to Islam and Muslim culture through the arts. The class will explore a wide range of Muslim art forms, including the architecture of mosques, poetry, Koran recitation, devotional song, and calligraphy. “We will study them and try to understand them for their own aesthetic value based on the culture they’re coming from and use those art forms as lenses to understand Muslim culture,” Asani says. Students will then have the opportunity to design a mosque...
Despite the highly personal nature of her art, the work has broader social implications, namely to add nuance to what she sees as a typically monolithic portrayal of Islam. In conjunction with her new book published by the Peabody Press—“Sacred Spaces: A Journey with the Sufis of the Indus,”—the pieces on view portray the multiplicity found in Sufi traditions. “This book and exhibition is a personal and artistic act of resistance against those forces both within Islam and outside of it that seek...
...despite her efforts to inform the Harvard community about Sufism, Quraeshi does not want to be considered an Islamic artist. “It’s a sensitive subject because of all of the horrible things being done in the name of Islam,” she says. “It’s sort of like calling a woman a female artist. You are either an artist...
This emphasis demonstrates Quraeshi’s nuanced approach to Islamic culture; her rejection of broad categorizations and the accentuation of the personal in her art sensitize her viewers to the complexities of an important world religion. Ultimately, this even-handed approach—balancing accessibility with personal aesthetic value—is important for a responsible ethnological presentation of Islam...