As I‘ve likely mentioned in this space before (when you reach my age, confidence in one’s memory is evanescent), in our class at city college on “comparative world religions” I suggested at the beginning of the term that my students look up images of the art in the religions we were studying as a secure port of entry into these worldviews because this art is relatively free of the sorts of things found in religious doctrines and history that rub (at least some) people the wrong way (their biases, prejudices, and conclusions in this regard may be owing to inadequate knowledge, mistaken beliefs, or simply closed-mindedness, but in the course of a semester it’s not likely such obstacles will be overcome). As our class was in the philosophy department, and we had so much material to cover (seven religious worldviews!), we did not have time to look, literally and figuratively, at artistic production within these worldviews (which invariably evidenced cross-cultural borrowing, ‘stealing,’ and influence, in other words, ‘appropriation’ such that it was assumed that people within these traditions did not possess anything remotely like ownership rights to what today we call their ‘art’). Throughout the semester I would occasionally mention various examples of this artistic heritage to remind them (experience taught me that anything said in the first few weeks of classes was soon forgotten) of my suggestion (e.g., Eastern Orthodox iconography, Tibetan Buddhist thangkas, Islamic calligraphy and mosques …) but I always lamented the fact that we could not even cursorily examine such material. However, on those (precious few) rainy days when I could (or would) not ride my bike to school, I brought books of religious art from home for their viewing pleasure. Of course this just provided the barest—and second-hand—“taste” of such art, albeit with the pedagogue’s hope of whetting their aesthetic appetite.
All of which brings us to Kenan Malik’s latest post on the Süleymaniye Mosque in Istanbul (as Malik notes, ‘Sinan’s masterpiece is the Selimiye Mosque’ in Edirne, Turkey).
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