WIDELY regarded as the greatest authority on Islamic art in the world, Prof Oleg Grabar visited Qatar’s Museum of Islamic Art this week and gave a lecture on art and museums, attended by students, museum staff and academics as well as by members of the public.
Introducing him to the audience, Dr Oliver Watson, director of the Museum of Islamic Art, said that he first met Prof Grabar some 35 years ago when travelling in Iran. During the professor’s long and distinguished career at the universities of Michigan and Harvard, said Watson, he has supervised some 70 PhD students.
A native of France, Prof Grabar has spent his working life in the USA. Now an octogenarian, when he began his career in the early 1950s there were few historians of Islamic art in the United States or indeed anywhere. Today there are 35 American universities offering courses in Islamic art and the subject is increasing in popularity.

Prof Grabar said that when he was a student, in many ways it was far easier to travel than in this day and age, when visas are required at every border and security is paramount. One could travel from Damascus to Rangoon without any real problems, and he took full advantage of this, wandering the world and satisfying his thirst for knowledge. By the age of 25 he had met everyone in the field of Islamic art; today that would be impossible.
To take advantage of what scholars had already studied and published it was essential to master several languages beside Arabic: most of the scholarship on Islamic art at that time emanated from Germany, for example, and he had to learn German. Today, he said, it is a paradox that despite the spread of multiculturalism and globalisation, fewer students trouble to master other languages than English than when he began his career, and this puts them at a disadvantage.

Travel was one way in which to learn about Islamic art, and some travellers specialised in collecting and studying inscriptions. Other enthusiasts stayed at home and formed their knowledge through collecting, buying from dealers. Some of the best collectors never left Europe.
The drawback was that some dealers were apt to invent or improve on the backgrounds for certain pieces so that they could more easily tempt a collector with them!
Acknowledging that Qatar’s new museum is the first devoted solely to Islamic art anywhere in the world, Prof Grabar said that in the last two decades there has been a profound change in the way in which the West viewed Islamic art and that this has had an effect on museums and the teaching on the subject at universities.

Only very recently have Western scholars begun to realise, for example, that Islamic art is not confined, say, solely to the area between Cordoba and Samarkand; it is also a product of African nations where there are thousand of Muslims and of other great regions such as China. In Russia Tartar mosques have a very distinctive style and there is a flourishing tradition of art. Malaysia and Indonesia too have rich artistic traditions.

This led Prof Grabar to consider: what exactly is Islamic art? Can it be defined when it covers such vast regions of the earth? In Iran, for example, such art is not considered as ‘Islamic’ but as Iranian. In Spain, Islamic art is known as Andalusian. A case could be made that an object should be studied purely for its intrinsic beauty and not given a label at all.

A museum such as the one in Qatar has a great opportunity to help the general public to appreciate the art that has stemmed from Muslim countries worldwide.
Prof Grabar is the author of 18 books, some of which are on sale at the shop in the museum, and of more than 140 articles. He has received honours from all over the world for his unequalled scholarship, and in 1980 was named the first Aga Khan Professor of Islamic Art and Architecture at Harvard University.
Source: THE GULF TIMES.