ARAB CONTEMPORARY

Architecture, Culture and Identity

 

In the article Shehab describes and discusses her art pieces shown at the exhibition Arab Contemporary – Architecture, Culture and Identity at LOUISIANA MUSEUM of MODERN ART: ”After spraying the walls and streets of Cairo for the past three years I did not feel the need to create a work of art that is permanent, because everything around me is changing so fast and everything is fleeting, especially memory. (…)The revolution is the realization of where you came from and who you are today, and a growing belief that you have the potential to change your future.”

“Landscape/Soundscape: 20 Minarets from the Arab World” – Arab Contemporary Louisiana Museum of Modern Art – Denmark

Graffiti is a very ephemeral medium and I have grown accustomed to creating works of art that do not survive, that are not forever, that can be easily erased by any passer by or by the power that be if it happened to be pissed off by its message. The themes I sprayed where those of lost heritage and rejection, with the “Thousand Times No” project that originated in a museum and went on to the streets after the January 2011 revolution in Egypt. I kept working on the theme of loss, which continued with the project of the children of Assyuit where I sprayed 51 children who were killed on a train accident because of government’s negligence of public transport in 2012. I painted each child with their names and their dreams all over town in the hope of keeping a part of them alive. In a way my work is part expression part documentation, it is a reaction to what is going on around me. After spraying the walls and streets of Cairo for the past three years I did not feel the need to create a work of art that is permanent, because everything around me is changing so fast and everything is fleeting, especially memory. Since Louisiana’s first request left me the freedom of creation, I decided to paint on their wall a work that will be erased when the exhibition is concluded. This solution was  inline with where I am humanly and creatively; I am still surrounded by the themes of loss of lives and loss of heritage in the Arab world.

On the theme of loss, a serious cultural disaster to our heritage was losing the minaret of the great mosque of Aleppo, which was bombed in April of 2013. Yasser Tabbaa calls the mosque “a continuation of the ancient North Syrian churches and an entirely localized phenomenon, centered mainly in the region between Aleppo and Edessa.” While Ernst Herzfeld calls the architectural style of Aleppo’s minaret “a product of Mediterranean civilization”, the Encyclopedia of Islam confirms that “the minaret was quite unique in the whole of Muslim architecture.”  I am not undermining the loss of over 150,000 lives killed till now in Syria’s civil war, I just want to highlight that what is being lost is not only human lives but also thousands of years of human heritage, history and collective memory. In this exhibition I pay tribute to a very important, somehow forgotten and unfortunately now controversial structure in Europe and the Western world, the minaret.

As a human being living in the Arab world, from one side our heritage is being physically destroyed, and on the other it is being attacked intellectually and labeled as backwards and terrorist by Western countries. In here I site the 2009 decision that was voted on in Switzerland to ban the building of minarets with the famous poster that circulated featuring the image of a woman wearing a black niqab, a face veil while the flag of Switzerland illustrated in the background with Ottoman pencil shaped minarets protruding from it as if they were missiles. It was disappointing to see the Islamophobic and xenophobic side of Europe so bluntly and openly displayed to the world. If it reflected anything, it reflected a culture of fear instead of the culture of tolerance and openness that the West keeps promoting that they stand for.

Throughout history, minarets spanned the Islamic empire from Casablanca to Baghdad. A minaret is an integral part of the urban fabric for most of the cities in the Arab world. It is a monument that can be seen from a far distance, a recognizable feature for travellers to feel that they have arrived to a city where Islam is practiced. It is not  only part of the landscape but it is also by virtue of the “adhan”, the Muslim’s call for prayer, an integral part of the unmistakable soundscape of a predominantly Muslim city.

If you visit one of the old mosques in Cairo it is surprising how quite the courtyard  is. After walking  in  very  busy  loud  streets you  arrive  to  a  serene  peaceful space that is almost noise free. The only sound you hear when you are inside is the call for prayer that is usually emitted from the minaret. In the modern city with all of the noise  pollution,  the  calls  for  prayer  from  the  minaret  are  sometimes  muffled.  The increase  of  small  neighborhood  mosques  that  are  not  supervised  by  the  government  all raising the call for prayer at the same time on cheap sound equipment only adds to the chaotic soundscape of the city. Even in the Arab world the minaret as a symbol has lost its  impact  amidst  the  Islamic  revival  and  its  strange  alliance  with  parasitic  capitalism where  the  idea  of  giving  and  alms  become  associated  with  building  mosques;  and  when urban and city planning became a de facto absence with corruption of officials and so-­- called  city  planners.

For my artwork I wanted a sound installation that negates all of the above, a sound that represents a new perspective on the region. The first person in the history of Islam to raise the call for prayer was Bilal. The Prophet chose him because he had the most beautiful voice. Only 100 years ago the adhan was chanted in the Hussien area of Cairo to different musical scales on every day so the people could tell which day of the week it was. Just like red roses were hung outside a sick man’s door to tell the street sellers and the passers by to keep their voice down because there is a sick man in this house. The noise of the city was controlled to provide comfort to it inhabitants. I kept looking for a call for prayer from the old recordings of the old master reciters to reflect the beauty of the adhan to my audience. But after going through many recordings I discovered that what I am looking for could not be found in the past but had to be  created in the present. I decided to have the call for prayer raised by the voice of a woman instead of a man. Mai Kamal is a 21-­-year-­-old mezzo soprano training at the Cairo Opera House. After several working session we were able to produce a new call for prayer, the one that is currently playing at the Louisiana ARAB CONTEMPORARY exhibition. For the past 1400 years only men have been raising the calls for prayer all over the Arab world; I felt that it was time for the feminine to raise their voices with the same chant calling for people “to hasten to worship and to hasten to success” using Mai’s melodious young strong voice.

The work for Louisiana features 20 minarets from different cities in the Arab world illustrated in proportion to each other, starting with the smallest minaret from Mogadishu and ending with the tallest from Abu Dhabi. The Aleppo minaret stands where it should have been in the lineup, but as rubble. After painting the minarets it became evident that the structure, when compared on face value just by placing it in terms of height next to its cousins in the different countries of the Arab world, lent some interesting  findings.

The height of the minaret became an indicator to the economic status of its hosting country and its marginality economically and culturally within the Arab world. It is logical that the countries with the most economic strength will want to prove their piety and adherence to Islam by building higher and higher structures, thus we find that the tallest minarets in the Arab lands lie in countries where there are monarchies in the government seats. The tallest minaret in the Arab world can be found at the mosque of Hassan II in Rabat – Morocco standing at 210m. Its height is almost double that of the second highest minaret in the Arab lands which is in the Sheikh Zayed Mosque in Abu Dhabi - United Arab Emirates at 107m in height, which I chose to feature in the artwork. Because Morocco historically has had a long history in building durable high minarets I decided to feature a historic tall minaret from Morocco, which can be found at the Koutoubia Mosque in Marrakesh standing at 77m. The line-up of minarets also yielded another interesting finding in regards to a country like Lebanon, which has the sixth highest minaret in the line- up even though economically and in terms of population the country is very small. Mohamad al-Amin Mosque with a 72m minaret was build by the now assassinated Prime Minister Rafiq el-Hariri in Beirut with support from the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia who has the second highest minaret in our line up with the minaret in Medina at the Masjid al - Nabawi standing at 105 m. All of the tallest minarets in the Arab world were built in the twentieth and the twenty-first centuries except for Morocco’s which was built in 1199 CE and which stands as the fourth in my line up, interestingly build almost nine hundred years ago.

But just as the line-up reveals the powerful states, it also highlights the marginalized ones. The shortest three minarets lie in Arab countries that are in the African continent, Mauritania, Somalia and Sudan. It was very difficult to find exact dates for the minarets in these countries and a tentative by century date was assigned, there is very little documentation or study on these minarets. They are marginalized even in the collective memory.

As an artists and a historian I tend to look at works of art not just historically but also esthetically and it cannot be denied that Arab countries that are republic states currently host the most beautiful minarets in terms of design. Whether the malwia minaret in the Great Mosque of Samarra which was built in 851 CE, or the minaret at al-Azhar mosque built by the Mamluk Sultan al- Ghrui in 1509 CE with its double mibkhara. The richness in design and variety of the minarets in Palestine, Iraq, Syria, Tunis and Egypt cannot be denied. It also cannot be ignored that these countries all went or are still going through political turmoil. Palestine is being systematically erased as a state to be replaced by Israel, Iraq was invaded by the United States of America and had a lot of its cultural heritage looted, Syria is suffering a civil war and Egypt and Tunis are in the midst of revolutions. These countries have paid the price in lives and heritage. The Egyptian thinker and political analyst Mohamad Hassanian Heikal estimated that in the past 60 years nearly 2 million Arabs have lost their lives in the attempt of eliminating the state of Palestine, the civil war of Lebanon, the invasion of Iraq and Libya, the different revolutions in Egypt and Tunis and currently the civil war in Syria.