Islam: Omar Ghobash’s Letters to a Young Muslim

Omar Ghobash wrote Letters to a Young Muslim while he was serving as the UAE’s ambassador to Russia out of a desire to prevent his son from succumbing to the perils of radicalisation. The book has won critical acclaim for its message of tolerance, writes Nick Leech.

If the level of publicity and media attention associated with the launch of a book is any measure of its success, then the UAE Ambassador’s to Russia, Omar Saif Ghobash, has every reason to be pleased.

Even before his Letters to a Young Muslim was published in January, Time magazine billed it as one of this year’s most anticipated books, alongside non-fiction works such as a memoir by transgender media celebrity Caitlyn Jenner and the latest novel by Paula Hawkins, author of the best-selling Girl on a Train.

Written by the 45-year-old diplomat as a series of informal letters to his teenage son, Saif, Letters to a Young Muslim can be seen as part of a literary tradition that extends back to Rainer Maria Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet (1929).

It also includes more recent examples, such as Christopher Hitchen’s epistolatory blueprint for debate and dissent, Letter to a Young Contrarian (2001), and Ta-Nehisi Coates’ exploration of what it means to be black and American, Between the World and Me (2015).

“It has been very interesting. I’ve spent a long time thinking about these issues and I’ve been very pleased with the response,” says Mr Ghobash.

“The worst thing would have been if it had fallen flat, but the international response has been great.”

Far from falling flat, the book has been reviewed by the The New York Times and The Times of London and has earned Mr Ghobash an in-depth profile in the London newspaper, The Guardian, and appearances on CNN and National Public Radio, The Daily Show with Trevor Noah and the long-running PBS current affairs programme, Charlie Rose.

“People talk about a clash between civilisations but I actually think there is a clash within our own civilisation and within our own Islamic community,” Mr Ghobash told Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jon Meacham on a recent episode of the show.

“I think that’s particularly worrisome, but also tantalising in a way. There are 1.7 billion Muslims, and the kinds of ways that we discuss ideas hasn’t really progressed in the sense that there is a tremendous amount that is kept under wraps.”

The issue of language is central to Mr Ghobash’s analysis of the issues confronting Islam and the contemporary Arab world and provided him with the immediate inspiration for Letters to a Young Muslim, a project born of his desire to prevent his son from succumbing to the risks associated with radicalisation.

“I was listening to my kids coming back from their Arabic lessons and I thought, ‘This is terrible, nothing has changed in the last 30 years’.”

“Soon, you were coming back from school telling me what I had to do to be a ‘good Muslim’. You became a little aggressive and I began to realise that your mother and I were not the only ones bringing you up,” Mr Ghobash writes in his book.

“I had images of you running away to Syria, where people would exploit your good nature. I imagined you cutting yourself off from us, your family, because we were not strict enough Muslims according to the standards that you had picked up from these so-called teachers of yours.”

When his son brought home a book about Osama bin Laden and started to express respect for the founder of Al Qaeda and to defend some of his actions, he knew as a father that he had to act and his book is part of his response.

Creating a space where Muslims of all ages can discuss faith and issues that are often considered taboo, critically and without fear of condemnation, is one of the central tenets of what Mr Ghobash defines as his call for a “post-modern clarification” of Islam.

“I’m trying to legitimise the normal layperson’s approach to the world and to say that people shouldn’t allow themselves to be shamed or put under a spotlight as being a good Muslim or a bad Muslim by people who are simply shutting their eyes to the modern world,” he says. “It’s about having the right to engage in discussion about these very important issues without feeling as if we are children to be pushed around and shouted at if we ask a difficult question.”

In emphasising the importance of personal responsibility and insisting that there is no contradiction between faith and rational enquiry or modernity and tradition, Mr Ghobash’s approach is one that would appear to put him at odds with existing religious authorities.

But it’s a perspective, he insists, that is born of respect and necessity.

“At the moment, as far as I can tell, there are not really many clerics who are trying to accommodate modernity or really trying to understand how globalisation is affecting people’s lives and psychologies.

“And so I think that to ask them to come to terms with that is going to be difficult.”

Central to the accommodation for which Mr Ghobash is looking is a rejection of the certainties offered by extremism of all forms and a version of the faith that allows young Muslims to stay true to the tenets of Islam while navigating the doubts and uncertainties that beset them in the modern world.

“I’ve heard it from my conversations with young people over the past two years,” he says.

“Uncertainty is right at the heart of everything they do and they are barely holding it together.

“I’ve spent time with ex-members of the Muslim Brotherhood and people with PhDs in the sayings of the Prophet and they’ve all admitted to having to keep things a secret.

“‘I couldn’t tell anybody’, they say, ‘but I can tell you because you seem to be open to these ideas’.”

The failure to address the reality and needs of young people, whose reality has been transformed thanks to the impact of oil and the internet, has resulted, Mr Ghobash argues, in a generational crisis in which parents and children no longer understand one another and in a migration by young people away from the language and traditions of mainstream Islam.

“A remarkable number of Gulf Arab kids from wealthy families don’t speak Arabic any more and the wealthier you become, you migrate out of the region physically, because you spend your time in either America or Europe,” he says.

“You spend your time speaking English and you begin to think in terms that are very different from the structures of the traditional system.

“There is also a growing atheism in the Gulf and in Egypt at the moment but because of the way the Arabic language is so intertwined with religion it’s actually very difficult to pull off speaking Arabic and to be an atheist at the same time.

“So in migrating out of the faith, young people are also migrating out of their language.”

Despite his championing of Arabic and Islamic traditions, Mr Ghobash’s arguments are delivered in a language and a manner that speaks more about his education in England, where he studied at Rugby School, the University of Oxford and the University of London, than of his Emirati and Russian heritage.

But his decision to write his book in English and to pursue opportunities to discuss the issues it raises in the West have been made, Mr Ghobash insists, with a dual purpose.

“My publisher wanted to do an American launch first. From their perspective, that was the most interesting thing, to enter the American debate about Islam,” he says.

“But one of the key things that I really wanted to do was to insert myself, and the Emirates, into the global discussion about these issues,” the ambassador says before his latest local appearances at the Emirates Airline Festival of Literature and New York University Abu Dhabi.

“One of the things that I’ve noticed and still see is that most of the time when the region is discussed, it’s discussed by foreign expats from the region, but I wanted to contribute an Emirati voice.

“I also wanted to get the discussion going in the international Muslim community outside the Arab world and to put the issues of the Arab world and the Muslim community on the table from an Arab perspective.”

Mr Ghobash’s mother was Russian and his father, Saif Ghobash, the UAE’s first Foreign Minister, was killed at Abu Dhabi international airport in 1977 by a terrorist whose target was the Syrian minister with whom his father was travelling.

As well as establishing the Saif Ghobash Banipal Prize for Arab Literary translation in his father’s memory, Mr Ghobash is a sponsor of the International Prize for Arabic Fiction – an award described as the Arab Booker Prize – and serves on the advisory body of the International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation and Political Violence at King’s College London.

“I’m trying to give expression to an approach to the world that I’ve seen in the Emirates,” Mr Ghobash says.

“Obviously, there are elements that come from my personal life and the fact that I’m half Russian and an outsider, in a sense, but otherwise, what I’m talking about is pretty much what I have absorbed from many people here,” he says.

Mr Ghobash is encouraged by the responses the book has provoked among its target audience, Muslim youth.

“One of the things that is really interesting for me is to see the response of young Arabs in particular who are getting in touch with me and saying ‘Thank you for having voiced these issues, thank you for putting the words on my feelings and for giving me something to hold on to’,” Mr Ghobash says.

“I actually think that most people in this age have an awareness of the internal contradictions in the things they are being told and I don’t think that’s a big deal.

“I think that we all have the brain power and the cultural resources to find interesting answers to these questions.”

This article originally appeared in The National in 2017

 

Architecture: Marina Tabassum’s Bait-ur-Rouf Mosque in Dhaka, Bangladesh

One of six winners of the world’s richest architecture prize, the US$1 million Aga Khan Award for Architecture, Marina Tabassum’s Bait Ur Rouf mosque in Dhaka, Bangladesh, has now been shortlisted for the V&A Art Jameel Prize.

On Monday morning, international news journalists, members of the architectural press and representatives from the UAE’s tourism and heritage community gathered at Al Jahili Fort in Al Ain for the announcement of the world’s richest architecture prize, the US$1 million (Dh3.67m) Aga Khan Award for Architecture.

The award’s director, Farrokh Derakhshani, revealed that a master jury had chosen six winners, whittled down over three years from an initial list of 348 nominations, as projects that not only set new standards in architectural excellence but also make a significant contribution – social as well as cultural – to communities in which Muslims or the heritage of Islam have a significant presence.

In their own way, the success of each project came down not just to the quality of their design but to more profound acts of reinvention.

In Copenhagen, an urban park turned traditional, well-mannered notions of modern Danish design on their head by including elements borrowed from the city’s new ethnic communities, raising questions about contemporary Danish identity in the process.

In Iran a new pedestrian bridge has helped redefine what infrastructure can achieve by doubling as one of Tehran’s newest and most popular open spaces; while in Beijing, the sensitive renovation of a traditional hutong, or courtyard house, recognises the wisdom of including residents’ ideas and existing living patterns in housing design.

Of the six winners, however, the project that engages most directly with the culture and heritage of Islam is the humble and transcendentally beautiful Bait Ur Rouf mosque.

Located on the periphery of Dhaka in Bangladesh, the mosque, which cost $150,000, was funded entirely by private donations, and its flexible design allows the building to act as a school, meeting room and informal playground as well as a place of worship in an area where community facilities are notable by their absence.

“It’s a community mosque that is a space for contemplation and getting closer to God which is cooler, calmer and more comfortable, and it’s location is also interesting,” explains Derakhshani.

“It isn’t in the city centre, it’s on the periphery, and the role and importance of these spaces – urban villages as they are sometimes known – is just starting to be recognised.”

With no dome, minaret or mihrab, the building also stands in contrast to popular notions of what a mosque should look like.

“At the beginning of my design process I wanted to look deeper into the rich architectural legacy of Islam,” says the mosque’s architect Marina Tabassum.

“Domes and minarets are symbolic gestures [and] symbols are not the essence of devotion or faith. At times they can detract from the main essence of Islam, which is about complete submission to one God omnipresent.

“To be in complete communion with God one needs a space that evokes a feeling of spirituality, a space where people can connect with the divine. I find symbols a distraction and I wanted to focus instead on the sense of spirituality.”

A 12-year project, the Bait Ur Rouf mosque, or House of the Compassionate, was more than just another commission for Tabassum. Not only was the architect’s grandmother, Sufia Khatun, the client, but Khatun’s decision to donate land and money toward the mosque’s development was born of a tragedy that affected the whole family.

“My mother passed away in 2002, she was my grandmother’s eldest born, and then the next year she lost another child, my aunt, so she experienced two of her children passing away in two years,” says Tabassum.

“She asked me to design it because I am an architect and she could also sense my suffering. In a way, designing the mosque became a kind of a healing process for both of us.”

By 2005, Tabassum’s grandmother had become very ill, so the architect decided to hold a groundbreaking ceremony for the project even though there was only enough money to build its foundations.

The event took place in September 2006, but by the end of that year, Khatun was dead and Tabassum was left with sole responsibility for raising the funds that would allow the project to be completed, a process that took another six years.

“When we had a good sum of money and we could buy, say, five trucks of bricks or some bags of cement, then we went about doing the construction,” the architect says.

“But you can’t really forecast when you are going to get some fund to keep it going. So, at times we had to stop construction for some months because there was no material to go on building.”

In choosing to use local, handmade bricks, Tabassum used a vernacular material that looked back to a golden age of Bengali architecture, the Sultanate period of the 14th to 16th centuries, but also sought to keep construction and maintenance costs to a minimum, a factor that led to the exclusion of costly features such as extra storeys and air conditioning from the design.

The thinking and research that Tabassum went through in designing the Bait Ur Rouf had a profound influence on a UAE-based project that she embarked on just as the Dhaka building was nearing its completion.

As part of a project team at Hyder Consulting, Tabassum conducted six weeks of research that was used to inform the Abu Dhabi Urban Planning Council’s mosque development regulations.

“My investigation of mosques in Bangladesh and of how it is possible to move from historical models to contemporary designs influenced, to a certain extent, the work that I did in Abu Dhabi,” she says.

“Many different styles were brought into Abu Dhabi in the past decades of its development that were not of the region and had no connection to the early Emirati mosques.

“We suggested a deeper understanding of the local tradition and extract from that what is essentially Emirati to give a contemporary expression through architecture.”

The announcement of the Bait Ur Rouf’s success came at a triumphant week for Bangladeshi creatives.

The building was one of two Bangladeshi designed and built projects to win this year’s Aga Khan Award for Architecture. The other, the Friendship Centre in Gaibandha, was designed by Tabassum’s former colleague, Kashef Mahboob Chowdhury, of Urbana architects, and on Wednesday, Dubai’s $100,000 Abraaj Group Art Prize 2017 was awarded to the Bangladeshi artist Rana Begum.

Tabassum however, is keen to emphasise the collective nature of her success. “The project wins, not me, I am a part of the project. We’ve had three projects from Bangladesh win the award before and none of those were designed by Bangladeshi architects, and with this cycle now we have two,” she says.

“For the country that’s a great honour, and being part of that makes me proud. The award is also for the community here, as well, and also for my grandmother.”

This article originally appeared in The National

Photography: Yumna Al-Araishi’s tattooed women

Yumna Al-Arashi has been documenting North Africa’s ancient but fast-disappearing tradition of female tattooing

When Zeyna finally travelled to Germany to visit her daughter, the older woman, who lives in the arid mountains of Zeraoua in Tunisia, expected a very different reception from the one she received.

A farmer of Amazigh (Berber) descent, she had given little consideration to the impact her appearance might have on her westernised daughter because Zeyna’s brightly coloured traditional robes, silver jewellery and tattoos are such an inextricable part of her sense of self.

Sadly, after many years studying and working in Europe, Zeyna’s daughter thought otherwise and was clearly taken aback.

“When Zeyna got off the plane her daughter was embarrassed. She told her mother that she looked like a crazy witch and she made her change,” explains the photographer Yumna Al-Arashi, who met Zeyna at the start of the year.

“She also insisted her mother remove her tattoos. Zeyna insisted on keeping the sun tattoo on her hand, because she was a farmer and the tattoo was part of her connection to the land, but she had the tattoos removed from her face.

“But when I met her, she was very adamant about the way she loves her traditions and how she dresses, and now she insists she will never go back to Germany or change.”

Zeyna’s portrait and story is just one of many collected by Al-Arashi, who spent several months travelling through Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia, recording the ancient but fast-disappearing tradition of female tattooing, a practise that was once common throughout North Africa, Arabia and the Levant, with roots that have been shown to extend all the way back to ancient Egypt.

Female facial tattoos most often served as beauty marks, as well as ways of commemorating important life events such as puberty, marriage and childbirth.

Sassiya shares her tattoos in Tamezret, Tunisia. She was one of the few encounters we had in which the women no longer found joy in her tattoos, as well as one of the most heavily tattooed. She claimed that she once loved them, but her children and those around her who were more educated told her that the tattoos would make her go to hell. She says she spends every day praying for forgiveness. Courtesy Yumna Al-Araishi

In some areas, such as the Aurès Mountains of Algeria, girls as young as 5 are known to have received tattoos, often from nomadic female gypsies, known as adasiya, who might accept food, such as eggs, as payment.

In his The World of Tattoo: An Illustrated History, Dutch anthropologist and tattoo expert Maarten Hesselt van Dinter has written about the use of tattoos as a form of pain relief and also as charms to ward against the effects of the “evil eye”, the most effective of which, it was believed, were administered by criminals.

“The Ouled Abderrahman, a Shawiya tribe of the Aurès Plains,” Van Dinter writes, “preferred to have tattoos applied with a murderer’s knife, and if possible, by the murderer himself.”

According to Yasmin Bendaas, who undertook extensive research into North African tattooing traditions for the Pulitzer Centre in Washington in 2012, some of the most-common motifs among the Amazigh include the Sun and Moon, chains, flies and the ain hijla, or eye of a partridge, inspired by the diamond-shaped marking found on a partridge’s face.

Uncommon among younger generations, tattooing is now considered by many Muslims as something forbidden, or haram, although it is not expressly prohibited in the Quran.

For Bendaas, this attitude stems from the Quranic Surah Al-Nisa, which states that Satan “will command them so they will change the creation of Allah”.

Not only has this been interpreted as including tattooing, but as Bendaas points out, the interpretation is also supported by the following saying of the Prophet, recorded in the Sahih Al-Bukhari, one of the six major Sunni collections of the Hadith: “The Prophet (peace be upon him) cursed the one who does tattoos and the one who has tattoos done…”

As Al-Arashi explains, this negative attitude towards tattooing, which has become increasingly prevalent in recent years thanks to improvements in literacy, actually helped when it came to her own research, but does nothing to help tattooed women who often find themselves in an invidious situation.

“The women were actually pretty surprised that somebody of my age who was an Arab was interested in them,” she says. “Nobody really talks about the tattoos anymore because the younger generation think that they represent an old, backwards tradition.

“In general, the women I met were very strong-minded, sassy and opinionated. When they were younger, they were so happy to have them, they even waited to be able to get them.

“But now that they are older, many have children and grandchildren who have gone to school and read the Quran, and who tell them that they will go to hell, which makes some of them feel stupid and ashamed.”

For Al-Arashi, an Arab-American who was born and raised in Washington, the research trip was more than a photographic assignment; it was a way for her to engage with her own heritage.

“My family is from Yemen and Egypt, and my great grandmother, Aisha, who was born in Aden, had these tattoos on the sides of her lips, and from what I’ve heard from my family members, her tattoos were symbols dedicated to Fatima, the Prophet’s daughter,” she says.

“A lot of the time people would say: ‘Most of these women are already dead, you’re not going to find too many’, but in the end they weren’t too difficult to find,” she says. “There’s still a strong tradition of having an open door and welcoming strangers and enjoying people’s company.”

Although Al-Arashi refuses to choose any favourites encounters or images, one of her most-memorable meetings was with a Tunisian woman, Brika.

“I asked what her tattoos meant and she told me that she has the Sun and the Moon tattooed on her cheeks because they were the most beautiful things that her eyes had seen and they had guided her life,” she remembers. “And because of her ability to read the stars and the Sun and the Moon, it gave her the power of her land. She kept saying: ‘I don’t know how to read and write, but I know my land better than anybody.’”

Al-Arashi would like to continue with her research by writing a book, but admits that the other parts of the Middle East where female tattooing was prevalent – Syria, Kurdistan, Yemen and Iraq – are too dangerous.

“I wish I had been able to explore the rest of the generation,” she admits. “But I’m afraid that by the time I get to those places, the women there may no longer be alive.”

The beauty of Al-Arashi’s meetings with women such as Zeyna and Brika are reflected in her photographs, which are also tinged with the sadness the photographer feels toward the loss of this matriarchal tradition.

“Some of the women tell their children that they wouldn’t have brought them into the world if it hadn’t been for the tattoos, because no man would have looked at them without them,” she says. “There is a very strong sense that they made these women feel grown up and connected to the earth and to their own womanhood. And you can’t change a woman’s love for the way she expresses herself.”

Visit www.yumnaaa.com or @yumnaaa for more details

This article originally appeared in The National

Art: Zarah Hussain’s Numina gives traditional Islamic patterns a digital overhaul

If all goes well, September 1 will be a day that gives Zarah Hussain reason to celebrate.

An artist whose work combines the traditions of Islamic geometrical design with the very latest digital technology, Hussain discovered at the end of July that one of her installations, Numina, had been selected for the Lumen Prize longlist.

An international award that celebrates and promotes digital art and creativity, the Lumen Prize recognises projects that occupy a space where art, research and technology meet, which seems like a pretty good fit for Hussain’s work, sitting as it does at the intersection of science and spirituality, drawing and coding.

This year’s longlist will become a shortlist on September 1 and the winners across 12 categories will then be announced on September 20 in London before embarking on an exhibition tour that will include the Brighton Digital Festival, London’s Winter Lights Festival and Cyberfest 11 in St Petersburg, Russia.

Numina is one of 11 projects competing in the prize’s 3D/sculpture award category alongside projects such as The Storm by Ithaca, an interactive, LED-filled cloud and Seb Lee-Delisle’s The Mindfulness Machine, a robot that makes doodles that are determined by external stimuli such as the number of people watching it, the temperature, the weather, and its own virtual bio­rhythms.

Despite longlisting 93 projects from across the world for the 2017 Lumen Prize, Hussain’s is the only one to relate to the tradition and culture of Islam.

Numina was commissioned by The Barbican Centre in London to accompany its 2016 Transcender season of ecstatic, hypnotic and devotional music, which included performances in the spirit of the Sufi poet Rumi, featuring the Iranian female singer Parissa and the Meshk Ensemble, a group of Turkish dervishes, as well as an evening of Moroccan music from the Master Musicians of Jajouka led by Bachir Attar and the young vocal virtuoso, Marouane Hajji.

Hussain’s response was to create a tessellating sculpture that measured about 9 metres by 7 metres and combines this with a looping and morphing digital laser projection and a sound installation composed by students from the nearby Guildhall School of Music and Drama.

Numina was exhibited in The Barbican’s foyer between October 2016 and January 2017.

“The Barbican wanted to transform the space so that no matter what you were doing there you would have an artistic experience one way or the other,” Hussain tells me, speaking from London.

“They had absolute faith in me, which from an artist’s point of view was an amazing experience. They said ‘come up with your idea and we’ll support you in doing it’.”

The artist Zarah Hussain. Courtesy Zarah Hussain

In many ways, Numina was the culmination of the many separate projects that have defined Hussain’s artistic career.

This began when she first started painting patterns as a teenager in Macclesfield, near Manchester, developed after her studies at the Prince’s School of Traditional Arts in London and then progressed when she first decided to start animating her designs, all of which stem from Hussain’s faith and love of traditional Islamic patterns and geometry.

“I have always loved art and I have always been interested in grids and numbers and lines and maths – visual mathematics. But when we did art at school, I always thought that there were sections of the world that we did not get to see,” she says .

“Despite this, my art teacher would always try his best to inspire me and one day he brought in a book of Moroccan patterns for me and I immediately thought, ‘that’s it!’.”

Before long, Hussain was trying to deconstruct the patterns she loved in order to recreate them: “I felt that it was part of my cultural tradition and part of where I was from and it really resonated,” Hussain adds.

Unfortunately, when it came to her university career, the pressure of being a child of immigrants, forced the teenage Hussain in a very different direction and she ended up studying English and History before embarking on a career in television.

“After that I started working for the BBC, writing articles and working on their website, which is when I was asked to write about Islamic art,” she says .

“In the course of my research I came across the Prince’s School [of Traditional Arts] and a course that would teach me how to create the patterns that I loved.”

Hussain was accepted into the school on the strength of a portfolio of work that she had produced all the way through her university and TV career. A world-renowned centre for the study of traditional and faith-based arts and crafts, the school was established by the Prince of Wales in 2004 and is one of his core charities and has even held classes in the UAE.

Despite studying with influential geometers and experts in sacred design such as Keith Critchlow, who established the school’s forerunner, the Visual Islamic and Traditional Arts Programme at The Royal College of Art in London in 1984, Hussain experienced a conservatism that was at odds with the experience of digital animating and editing technologies she had gained from working in the media.

“There was a lot of negativity around technology, there was a lot of negativity around contemporary art, conceptual art and modernity,” Hussain says .

“I think there is value in knowing how to draw and paint and to construct geometry by hand but at the same time I think technology is wonderful. Tradition is good and it is a way in and an understanding but it can also ossify and become stagnant and I think it has to evolve,” she says .

“You have to keep pushing the boundaries of what you can do and I like to think that I have kept to the principles and values of the tradition but that my work is also moving it forward.”

Taking its name from a Latin word that associates beauty with a sense of divine presence, Numina is just such a project.

The installation combined an 8-minute long sequence of animated 12-fold geometry inspired by the patterns on an Egyptian minibar, and projected these over a sculpture composed of 42 rhomboids with a simpler hexagonal geometry.

Thanks to the changing light conditions in the Barbican Centre’s foyer, the result was an installation that combined digital animation and laser projection, sound and ambient daylight to a hypnotic effect.

“There were lights in the foyer that could not be turned off and so the installation had to work in a way that was sympathetic to the environment and the context of the Barbican’s brutalist architecture, even when nothing was being projected onto it,” Hussain says .

As visitors who took the time to engage with Numina reported at the time, the effect of the installation was calming and almost trance-like, an effect that was achieved in part by geometry’s the slow and kaleidoscopic progression as it played out over the underlying 3-dimensional shapes.

“For me it is about the experience of being in a space and it being immersive. If you go to the Alhambra or if you look at the muqarnas [honeycomb-shaped vaults] … you walk into these spaces and you draw a breath and you cannot help but feel something,” Hussain says .

“You do not have to be a Muslim, but I think all beings are spiritual beings and everybody has an aspect of their personality that cannot be explained rationally. I am not shoving it down anybody’s throat, I’m just saying come and experience this and see what you feel,” she adds.

“So how do you take those principles and make it modern, or how do you recreate it in art gallery so that people can experience something similar? That’s the idea.”

If Hussain succeeds in making it to the Lumen Prize shortlist on Friday, she will have done so by combining modernity with spirituality to create an artwork that takes its audience to a numinous place, a transcendent journey that’s normally associated with the work of artists such as Mark Rothko and Bridget Riley in gallery spaces and with the detachment of Sufism in Islam.

“When I first started out people would say to me ‘but they’re just pretty patterns’, but I think that is Orientalising and diminishing of a whole series of Muslim cultures that have developed over time,” Hussain tells me.

“But it is not just mathematics. I do believe there is a spiritual way of life underpinning this art that stems from Islam.”

For more details on the Lumen Prize, visit www.lumenprize.com

This article originally appeared in The National

 

Photography: Ahmed Mater’s Makkah Journeys at the Brooklyn Museum

In Learning from Gulf Cities, the exhibition of urban photography that recently opened at New York University Abu Dhabi, the show’s curators insist that rather than being exceptional, the cities of the Arabian Gulf are merely particularly extreme examples of widespread global trends.

If that is the case, then similar rules would also seem to apply when it comes to Makkah, the city on the other side of the Arabian Peninsula that occupies an exceptional place in the hearts and minds of 1.8 billion Muslims worldwide.

With an estimated population of 1.5 million, Makkah is the product of forces that combine the local and the global, modernity and tradition, and the sacred and the profane, in ways that are ostensibly unique. More than 1.8 million Muslims performed Hajj in 2016 and, according to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia’s Vision 2030 plan, more than 15 million Muslims are expected to perform Umrah annually by the year 2020 and more than 30 million by the year 2030.

Last year, more than 8 million visitors performed Umrah during the holy month of Ramadan alone.

The result is not only landmark projects such as the Abraj Al Bait, a cluster of seven skyscrapers that culminate in the 601-metre-tall Makkah Royal Clock Tower, but the development of informal settlements that are estimated to house approximately 40 per cent of Makkah’s total population, large numbers of whom are pilgrims who have remained in the city and now constitute a significant proportion of migrant labour.

Both sides of this remarkable urban transformation have been recorded by the Saudi artist and photographer Ahmed Mater since 2008, in a series of works that are about to go on display in an exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum.

“What started as a desire to show only the changes taking place has ended with a full and exhaustive depiction of a site that can be accessed only by those of the Islamic faith,” the artist explains in statement that accompanies Ahmed Mater: Makkah Journeys.

“This collection of images, with their diverse and extreme points of reference, represents the deliberately experimental, meandering, and serendipitous nature of my journey to the heart of Makkah. They are testaments to the cultural and political conditions of contemporary Saudi society.”

Featuring large-scale photographs from his 2016 project Desert of Pharan: Unofficial Histories Behind the Mass Expansion of Makkah, the exhibition also includes more intimate portraits of the city’s diverse inhabitants, workers and migrants, who are drawn from more than 80 nationalities, while chronicling the influx of wealth that is transforming the city.

As is so often the case in the history of urban photography, it is often the seemingly extraordinary visions of a culture that end up being the most enduring and formative, and it seems that Mater’s photographs will come to define how the public see and understand Makkah at this pivotal moment in its history.

As Makkah is inevitably transformed in the coming decades, Mater’s haunting shots of the city’s traditional backstreets will surely perform a similar role to the images of old, pre-Haussmann Paris that were created by the photographer Charles Marville in the 1860s, which simultaneously captured the disappearance of one way of life and the emergence of others.

“I need to be here, in the city of Makkah, now, experiencing, absorbing, and recording my place in this moment of transformation, after which things may never be the same again,” states Mater, a trained physician who abandoned his career in medicine to become a full-time artist.

“It has become important for me to identify with this place and to understand how this constellation of change, as well as the forces that are shaping it, will affect the community of which I am a part.”

In documenting its specific patterns of wealth and luxury, migration and labour, the artist shows that even in this most unique of cities it is the familiarity and commonality of the urban experience that is the true revelation. Extreme, yes. Exceptional, certainly, but Mater’s vision of Makkah is also undeniably humane.

Ahmed Mater: Makkah Journeys runs at the Brooklyn Museum from December 1 to April 8 2018. For more details, visit www.brooklynmuseum.org

This article was originally published in The National