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00:00A collection of artifacts from the Muslim world is about to be put on show at the British Museum.
00:11They tell the story of the Hajj, the Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca, strictly forbidden to non-Muslims.
00:18Much of the beautiful artwork on show conforms to the religious rules which inspire the rich visual language of Islamic culture, past and present.
00:28I can only pray, inshallah, that this exhibition will be a source of education, of understanding and of delight.
00:39In Islam, depictions of God and the prophets are prohibited.
00:44But, to many Muslims, so too are any human depictions or any living creatures.
00:50One group would say, any depiction is not an out. Then there is the other school would say, it's not a big deal.
00:56But on show at the British Museum are images from Muslim history which appear to break the present day understanding of the rules of Muslim art.
01:05In the modern period, people take this prohibition in a much more literal sense than they might have taken it in a pre-modern period.
01:13Included here are portraits, depictions of human figures and whole tableau showing pilgrims performing the most important pillar of the Muslim faith.
01:23There is nothing in the Quran that says, figural art is not permitted, but idol worship is not permitted.
01:32So, if human depiction is the source of such controversy, how come art displayed here shows a tradition of figurative art at the heart of Islam for century after century?
01:46I'm fascinated to see how the artistic traditions of Islam has navigated this through the centuries.
01:53Sometimes they have been at odds with the clerics. Sometimes visual depiction has led to violence, crisis and destruction.
02:00There's been no public controversy over the inclusion of these images in this exhibition, supported by the country overseeing the sacred sites of Mecca.
02:09But why? Have the rules changed?
02:12I'm setting out to get to the bottom of what forms of art are acceptable for a Muslim and why this artistic tradition has thrived in the hidden art of Islam.
02:22To understand the origins of the Muslim approach to visual art, you have to understand the significance of this place.
02:50It was here, at a cave overlooking the city of Mecca, that Muslims believe the Prophet Muhammad received his first revelation from God.
03:02These revelations continued throughout his lifetime and formed the Quran, the Muslim holy book.
03:09And it made Mecca the center point of Muslim worship.
03:13It's the place people strive to reach in their lifetime, pray towards five times a day and the direction in which they are buried when they die.
03:31At the heart of Mecca is the Grand Mosque and at its center, this, the Kaaba.
03:40In essence, the most beautiful thing about Mecca is the Kaaba itself and its beauty is in its simplicity.
03:47It's a black box and it's a black box which people circumambulate.
03:53And it is just so divinely simple and yet so divinely beautiful.
03:57Muslims believe that the Kaaba was built by the Prophet Abraham under divine instruction as a focal point of a simple message that there was one God, not the many gods of the pagan past.
04:11But by Muhammad's time, the Kaaba had been taken over by pagan Arabs and somewhat ironically had been festooned with icons of their tribal gods.
04:24Until in 630 AD, after years of persecution, exile and warfare, Muhammad and his followers took over leadership of Mecca.
04:33He destroyed the idols at the Kaaba and re-established it as a simple house dedicated to the one God.
04:42This act defined this most sacred site in Islam as a place where the one God should not be depicted.
04:50The Kaaba is just something which is the house itself, the way it was built.
04:54This is the meaning in Arabic.
04:56But in fact, it's the symbol of God's house.
04:59He's not here, but this is the symbol of his presence on earth where the Muslims have to go and there is no images, nothing there to represent him because we should not represent God.
05:10So it's a place without a physical presence, but a spiritual presence.
05:18The depiction of God himself or the prophet or any of the figures that are religiously associated, any prophets for that matter, or the angels, are prohibited.
05:27This is to keep the sanctity of God who is beyond a depiction, God who is beyond an object.
05:36The prophet Muhammad, when he takes Mecca, destroys the idols in the Kaaba and it's a very strong iconoclastic nature of that.
05:46The fear is that if something is made, it may become an object of worship.
05:51People will produce, for example, sculptures, which could also double up as idols.
05:58The simplicity of the Kaaba itself provides a constant reminder to Muslims of why there should be no depiction of God or the prophets.
06:07A message most profoundly underlined when any Muslim completes the pilgrimage of the Hajj, the fifth pillar of Islam.
06:14I've been to Hajj myself and I tell you one of the greatest journeys of any human's life is Hajj.
06:26What was the most awesome experience was looking at the house of God.
06:31But as well as the visual meaning attached to the Kaaba, there is a further reason why artists from the Islamic world have been discouraged from creating depictions of any human likeness if they are in religious settings.
06:45In the Koran, there are 99 different names for God, each of them signifying a characteristic.
07:04There is al-Rahman, the beneficent, al-Rahim, the merciful.
07:07One of those characteristics is al-Khaliq, the creator.
07:12And it's the reason why so many Muslims believe that when an artist shows the human form or the form of any creature, they're putting themselves in the role reserved for God.
07:23And it's the reason why over the centuries clerics and artists have debated what is acceptable and what isn't.
07:31It's also left room for interpretation as to what could be deemed to be realistic or not.
07:37Some would say this saying of the prophet or sayings of the prophet around prohibition of human being or living entities, a drawing of them is clear and absolute.
07:48Well, that is not true because if it was absolute, why would there be so many others who would say it's not?
07:53I don't think human beings have the capacity to draw anything real.
07:57Whatever I draw can never be real, though it may be a replica of what is real, but it is not real.
08:04And therefore I sit quite comfortably, not worried about anyone competing with God and winning.
08:09You can't win with God.
08:10At the British Museum, they are unpacking a unique parcel.
08:24In it is a carefully wrapped Quran dating back to the 8th century, one of the first examples of a written Quran.
08:32Muslim scholars accept that this Quran is from the Hejaz region of what is now Saudi Arabia, a region which includes the holy cities of Mecca and Medina.
08:48The text is written on parchment in an early style of Arabic script called Ma'il, which means sloping, in this case to the right.
08:59It also lacks any marks or symbols that usually distinguish letters of a similar shape.
09:04It was this, the Arabic script, its shape and design that led to the first and most enduring elements in Islamic art.
09:25If it was generally agreed in the early Islamic community that there shouldn't be figural art in religious settings,
09:30then the early artists and calligraphers were faced with what to do with the Quran.
09:37Because after all, they were part of a tradition where the Bible had been illustrated sumptuously,
09:42and so there were models for what religious books should look like.
09:47But the Quran, if it wasn't going to have figural designs in, what was it going to have?
09:52And so illumination was developed and geometry, geometric designs, were something that they'd inherited from late antiquity,
09:58and so the early artists and calligraphers adopted it, used it for illumination.
10:05And so you get frontispieces of early Qurans which are geometric,
10:10because that's a non-threatening type of decoration which adds great lustre to the items concerned.
10:16There are three fundamental aspects behind Islamic art.
10:21You have geometry, which is the foundation, then you have Islami, which you might know as arabesque,
10:27which is the floral, vegetative aspect of Islamic art.
10:31And at the top of the hierarchy you have the calligraphy, because that's the word of God.
10:35Islamic artists built on the Arabic saying purity of writing is purity of soul.
10:42They experimented with the shape and design of the Arabic letters,
10:49using the flowing Arabic language to express the beauty they perceived in the words of the Quran.
10:54I've been doing calligraphy for probably about ten years now.
10:59It started off as an exploration of essentially the written word.
11:02Rualam is a young British artist.
11:03He studied the art of calligraphy in Cairo under one of the most well-known calligraphers today.
11:11Arabic calligraphy began with two fundamental sources.
11:12One, the Quran, the Holy Scripture.
11:14And the Arabic calligraphy began with two fundamental sources.
11:16One, the Quran, the Holy Scripture.
11:17And the prohibition against depicting figurative work in Islam.
11:34The prophet Muhammad peace out of Torah,
11:40and the prohibition against depicting figurative work in Islam.
11:45The Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him,
11:48the first word that was revealed to him by the angel Gabriel was iqra, meaning read.
11:55This was the foundation for seeking knowledge for Muslims.
12:00But also the verse continues, it continues to teach Muslims
12:05that knowledge was taught to man by the use of the pen.
12:09And therefore, transmission of knowledge was key.
12:14Calligraphy binds both knowledge and penmanship in one.
12:21These are a few of the letters that are found in the Holy Qur'an,
12:27which in fact nobody knows the meaning of.
12:31These are the mysterious letters that are found at the beginning of certain chapters of the Qur'an.
12:38And that mystery of not knowing what these letters represent is in itself beautiful.
12:51Calligraphers were given precise rules for how they should write letters from the medieval period,
12:58and particularly with respect to how they copy Qur'ans.
13:03The interesting thing was how you should write a certain ligature, for example in one brush stroke,
13:10how the size of a ligature was related, say, to the proportions of the eye, the eye which is seeing it,
13:18how the dots, the noktas related to the ligatures and so forth.
13:23So there's elements of proportion which were very mathematical and very precise, which are laid down.
13:28And the idea was that you could produce something which is beautiful using these rules.
13:34The way the letters were used, even though they may not seem as decorative right at the beginning,
13:45and between the eight to ten centuries, even then there was a very specific geometry used,
13:50and there was a real harmony in the way that the letters were fitted to the page,
13:55and the way that certain letters were elongated,
13:59so that each line, the margins would be even on both sides and they'd be justified.
14:05As Islam spread, the art of calligraphy developed, reaching its peak, among other places,
14:12here, in Turkey, under the Ottoman Empire.
14:29Calligraphy is also integral to the decoration of the world's great mosques.
14:34The words come from the Qur'an or are names of the Prophet Muhammad.
14:51At an Istanbul art gallery, there is the largest collection of contemporary Turkish calligraphy.
14:58It is put together as a homage to the Prophet Muhammad.
15:01In this work, art and belief go hand in hand.
15:07Muhammad Rasulullah. Bismillahirrahmanirrahim.
15:12It's amazing. It's fantastic.
15:16Do you have any particular feelings when you're writing verses from the Qur'an?
15:23When you look at the art forms in the world, you will see that the only divine form is the art of calligraphy,
15:31because we are putting the words of God on paper and hence enable people to read it.
15:37That's why I can't describe or compare the feeling I have doing calligraphy.
15:43Actually, it is said that the heart can only be happy with the mention of God.
15:47The same feelings apply to us when we deliver Qur'anic verses in calligraphy.
15:51But we are happy with Allah's zikri.
15:54We also hear these feelings in the Qur'an.
15:56We are happy with Allah's zikri.
16:06Alongside calligraphy, the exquisite precision of traditional Islamic design,
16:11seen in arabesque and geometric patterns, has maintained its appeal in contemporary design studios.
16:17It's a language of symmetry, which was first developed by the Greeks,
16:24but then extrapolated and developed upon within the Islamic tradition.
16:29So often what you will see is an underlying geometric pattern,
16:32which you might find in Euclid.
16:35And then on top of that you will find the Muslim craftsmen would elaborate more complex geometric designs,
16:41which would appear on top of that grid, and then they would hide the underlying grid.
16:46The idea is that these patterns are there to engender a contemplative state.
16:53And the repetitions that one sees within Islami patterns and geometric patterns
17:00allow the mind to think upon the repetition of pattern within nature.
17:06And the idea of the infinite weave and the infinite movement and repetition of form
17:11that one sees within the natural world.
17:13So this is an example of Islami, or arabesque.
17:17And to complete a composition like this, you'd start off with the geometry.
17:21That's the structure.
17:22So you'll draw your square.
17:24And then inside this square is a dynamic square here.
17:28And then that houses these linear shapes, which we call Kapala.
17:34And they're the structural shapes.
17:36So you have four of those.
17:37Here, here and here.
17:39And then you have overlaid four spirals.
17:43And they're the structural lines.
17:46Once you have those, you can add the motifs.
17:49And this particular motif is called a rumi motif.
17:52It's not named after the poet.
17:54Both the poet and the motif are named after the city, Rome, or Asiatic Rome,
17:59which is in Anatolia, the capital of Anatolia.
18:02And the original examples of this in Seljuk carvings of birds and animals.
18:10And as they adopted Islam, they lost the representation.
18:14And it became this abstract art motif.
18:18It's often said that Islamic art is like a meditation upon the invisible.
18:23So you can see that there's, as well as structural principles here,
18:26there's a symbolic language in operation also.
18:30The fundamental link between proportion and beauty.
18:33That's at the heart of it, the principle of Islamic aesthetics.
18:38Exactly the same notion of proportion between different shapes,
18:43between the horizontal and the vertical, between the different dimensions.
18:48Everything is quite precise.
18:50Of course, sometimes they get things slightly wrong.
18:53And certainly the traditional argument is that if the proportion is slightly off,
19:00then you can, through your aesthetic sense, notice it's wrong.
19:05But the fundamental thing was if you got the proportions right,
19:09you would produce a work of beauty.
19:11And that's quite important.
19:13Early Islamic art and architecture also tried to depict the Quranic description of paradise,
19:21a concept of beauty on earth with gardens, flowing streams, geometric arches.
19:28There's a verse in the Quran where God says that we have taught you how to calculate.
19:33We have taught you the science of computation about the stars and the moons and the planets.
19:40We have given you the knowledge so that you can navigate your way through the seas by creating compass.
19:47All of these indicate to one particular science.
19:51That's called mathematics.
19:53And if you look at Islamic history, the garden, the mosque, the minaret, the mihrab, the pulpit,
19:59every part of an Islamic architectural depiction have always been geometrically perfect.
20:06The way the ventilations have been designed, they're all geometrically perfect,
20:11always correlating with one another, often depicting the five pillars of Islam,
20:17often depicting the articles of faith, depicting the heavenly presence,
20:24depicting the gardens of paradise, the water, the fruit, the palm tree.
20:29All of these are geometrically put in and inspired by the very notion of maths from the Quran itself.
20:36The artistry and the aesthetics of the Islamic world,
20:40born out of the constraints about depicting humans and other living creatures in religious settings,
20:45have become part of global taste in art and design beyond the Muslim context in which they were created.
20:54Many outside of the Islamic world have not recognized what inspired these increasingly familiar motifs.
21:01Ah, this is an amazing thing.
21:06As part of the Kiswah archive, this gives you the photos, literally like little passport photographs,
21:17of the people who were actually making the sacred textiles.
21:22To be a Muslim artist has traditionally meant that whether you were a painter, or an architect,
21:29or working with textiles, your palette was made up of calligraphy, arabesque and geometry.
21:35And it's just completely wonderful to be able to put a face to these people whose job it was to make the sacred textiles.
21:42These particular craftsmen deployed the traditional Islamic artistic approach to the creation of textiles for use around the Ka'bah.
21:53The mahmal was an ornate cloth brought annually for many years from Egypt to adorn the Ka'bah at the time of the Hajj.
22:01It would be placed next to the black cloth that covered the Ka'bah throughout the year called the Kiswah.
22:06So what we've got here are objects from a very, very important archive of all sorts of documents that are to do with the making of the Kiswah in Cairo.
22:19The Kiswah being the covering for the Ka'bah.
22:24Well, we talk about the Kiswah, but it's also, which is the black covering, but it's also all the other textiles that went with it.
22:29There was a special workshop in Cairo where all of these wonderful textiles were made.
22:36And what's wonderful about this piece here is that this is the template for the design of the bag.
22:45So the bag that was made to carry the precious keys of the Ka'bah that were given as gifts, in order to get the correct design, they made little holes through it.
23:00And in order then that you could be able to work out the design on the textile.
23:06The mahmal has had its share of politics.
23:09The Mamluk and Ottoman rulers of Egypt started a tradition of sending this heavily decorated textile to Mecca, accompanying the pilgrim caravans to the Hajj.
23:19It would stay on the Ka'bah and then come back to Cairo.
23:28To the Egyptian and Turkish rulers, it was a symbol of their protective rights over the Ka'bah.
23:34But to the Saudis, it was a symbol of territorial control and religiously heretical.
23:39In 1814, followers of a Saudi cleric, Ibn Wahhab, tried to stop it.
23:45And in 1926, the practice finally came to an end.
23:51Many of the traditions which are around the Hajj were stopped because, partly because it was an assertion of their power.
23:59But also because they didn't necessarily want people to associate sanctity with objects.
24:10So, for example, if you have this annual commemoration where special cloth is made or weaved for the Ka'bah,
24:18and its use of gold thread, very nice velvets and silks and so forth,
24:24then their understanding was that this was about veneration of a cubic building.
24:30Whereas, of course, everyone else understood that traditionally this was about the beauty of the place.
24:38It was about the celebration of the Ka'bah because it was a central focus of the Hajj.
24:42It wasn't about the worship or veneration of a building.
24:46It was about beautifying it because it was the centre of the rituals.
24:53Through history, the rulers of the Islamic world held secular power as well as religious faith.
25:00Some faced the dilemma when these twin forces pulled in opposite directions.
25:04Little more than 50 years after the death of the Prophet Muhammad, such dilemmas were being faced by one of the earliest Muslim heads of state whose rule began in 682 AD.
25:18If you're an emperor, or a king, or a queen, what image do you put on your coins?
25:26Byzantine and Roman emperors put their portraits on it.
25:29Khalif Abdul Malik, one of the first Muslim rulers of the Umayyad Empire, wasn't so sure.
25:34In the late 7th century, he was faced with the problem of introducing a new coinage for the Islamic community.
25:40And he had to choose, he had the Byzantine coinage or the Sasanian-Iranian coinage, and both had figures of kings or emperors on them.
25:51And he tried putting a figure of himself on a coinage, but then he rejected that, having issued it, and he developed a completely new coinage, which was solely epigraphic.
26:03That means it was covered in inscriptions on both sides, Quranic inscriptions and later historical inscriptions.
26:09So figural imagery was discarded at that point for the coinage.
26:13Now that is a very significant moment in Islamic history, because that means from then onwards,
26:19the identity of the Islamic community, the Islamic empire, was focused on coins which had no images on them, simply the calligraphic inscriptions.
26:32But other Muslim rulers, as they grew in power and wealth, wanted art to reflect their lives.
26:39In their palaces and private spaces.
26:43They asked their artists to draw pictures of them, of their lives, holding court, hunting, or just looking good.
26:52Paintings of this kind illustrate the luxurious lives of Muslim monarchs.
26:58These rulers were not bothered by what Islam allows and what it doesn't allow.
27:02What stimulated them was voyeurism, power, greed, and absolute chauvinistic lifestyle that they led.
27:10Almost varying onto, or edging onto, hedonism that we see in the modern world.
27:15In fact, maybe mutation of hedonism in a much more graver manner.
27:24Artists in the Islamic world faced a serious dilemma.
27:28On the one hand, they were being asked to produce work that showed the human form,
27:33but to do so would invoke the wrath of the clerics.
27:35What they did to try and overcome this was to strike a balance between these two very conflicting demands.
27:43Some artists, as a means to compromising between the clerics and the rulers,
27:51did depict the monarchs, the emperors, in one dimensional pictures.
27:55So you actually can't make a real feature of a human being or a person,
28:00they all would look very similar because it's one dimensional.
28:04That was a compromise.
28:06They did not want to become known in the eyes of the clerics as aiding the heretic,
28:11and they did not want to be killed by the emperor for rebelling and being called treacherous or traitors.
28:18And they came up with these one dimensional pictures.
28:20Bending for themselves, animals gaining independence next in David Attenborough's life story here on BBC4.
28:32They were unhappy about the king drinking wine, right?
28:36But we also know for most of history they tolerated it perfectly well.
28:40Things ebb and flow.
28:42Sometimes what happens in the modern period is that we assume there is a basic relationship between the clerics
28:47and those in political power, and that this relationship has been fixed throughout time.
28:54And this is clearly not the case.
28:56For most of history those in power basically were in charge.
29:01So what they said, the values that they established, the aesthetics they established,
29:06the court culture they established, was far more significant than any rules that any clerics would put down.
29:12We never find in later Islamic art the sort of three dimensional plastic arts, you know, sculpture, images of the ruler in three dimensions.
29:26And also there's a tendency in the figurative art, in miniature painting for example, not to represent volume.
29:32And I think that's probably something to do with an avoidance of giving life to pictures so as you're rivaling God.
29:42Muslim artists use form and colour in a particular way.
29:47The composition does not have any perspective.
29:51There is no light or shade.
29:52The paintings are never naturalistic.
29:56They do not temper the edges of their coloured areas with reflections or shadows.
30:01There are no atmospheric colour effects used to convey depth or sense of distance.
30:08Brightly coloured animals and plants which are supposed to be lying in the far distance are depicted as large and as clearly as those on the foreground.
30:18My surmise would be because it all began with wool paintings.
30:23And wool paintings tend to have areas of flat colour because that's the way they've traditionally been painted.
30:32The earliest wool paintings we have from the Near East or Middle East are from Sogdia.
30:36That's 6th, 7th century AD up in Central Asia.
30:42And they show the stories of Rustam in polychrome but in different flat colours.
30:49And I think probably what's happened is that those have got translated into miniature painting in books originally.
30:56And so that idea of flat colours side by side is the way it developed.
31:04I think it's a popular misconception that Islamic art is either geometric or floral or calligraphic.
31:14The Great Courts produced artworks that are surprisingly varied and include a plethora of figural imagery.
31:27But whilst the Great Courts may have produced a plethora of figurative images, over many centuries that did not always mean that the controversial nature of such artwork diminished.
31:37In fact, one artefact in the British Museum exhibition provides evidence of what happened in the 14th century when the tastes of secular power collided with a more orthodox outlook.
31:51The court of a Mongol ruler dispatched this candlestick as a present to the city of Medina in modern day Saudi Arabia, the city where the Prophet himself is buried.
32:01When it was originally produced, it had figures that went all around it.
32:08And if you look closely at it, you'll see that the faces have been rubbed off.
32:12They would have been inlaid and they would have popped out when you first looked at them and they would have been a very prominent band across the candlestick base.
32:21And now they've been muted.
32:23But these controversies and sensibilities over what can be depicted have not been observed in the same way by one important branch of Islam.
32:42The great schism in Islam between the majority Sunni and the minority Shia is also reflected in the development of Islamic art.
32:49While art in most of the Sunni Muslim world had this tension between the rulers' desire for figurative paintings and the clerics' dislike of it,
32:58art for Shia Muslims developed in complete contrast.
33:04Shia theology includes the veneration of members of the Prophet's family, down in the case of Twelva Shiaism, which is the dominant religion in southern Iraq and Iran.
33:17It has the veneration of those imams, members of the Prophet's family, in a way which doesn't happen in Sunni Islam, in Orthodox Islam.
33:30Shia Islam traces its beginnings to the Battle of Karbala in modern-day Iraq, where in 680 AD the Prophet's grandson Hussein was killed,
33:38a conflict over the leadership of the expanding Muslim community.
33:43The origin that Shiites claim is the Battle of Karbala at the end of the 7th century when Hussein, the grandson of the Prophet, is killed by the Caliph's forces.
33:54And that becomes the excuse, the reason, the moment to which Shiism looks back perpetually.
34:05It won't forget, it won't forgive, and that becomes the driving force for Shiism in the future.
34:10Now then, that narrative is about people.
34:15And so you have in Shiism a motivation for showing what those people were like.
34:24Just as in Christianity you had a narrative about Jesus as a man, as well as in Christian belief as the Son of God,
34:31so in Shiite Islam you have a narrative of the death of Hussein at Karbala and of the other members of the family.
34:40And that, I think, is what's behind the use of imagery in Shiite Islam.
34:46Just a few weeks ago I was in Iraq and I picked up a poster depicting the battle at Karbala with quite a lot of blood.
34:56You know, sort of heads have been chopped off, arrows in the eye and so forth.
35:00And it's supposed to be a scene which evokes sort of sorrow and pathos.
35:07The function of a lot of the art which is associated with Karbala is reminding people of what happened
35:15and it's a vehicle to encourage them to cry and to grieve over what happened.
35:24Such depictions are at odds with the Sunni tradition which is followed by most Muslims.
35:30And yet, some of the items on display here show that even within this tradition,
35:36the orthodoxy surrounding human depiction in religious settings is not always followed,
35:42especially when the epic Hajj journey of a Muslim ruler becomes a historical event in its own right.
35:48Mansa Musa, the ruler of Mali in West Africa, made his pilgrimage in 1324.
35:59His procession reported to include 60,000 men and 12,000 slaves.
36:05Mali was the source of West African gold, immensely wealthy.
36:12And he carried with him something like 80 camels loaded with gold dust.
36:18And when he reached Cairo, he started buying trinkets.
36:23And the Cairo historians record that the whole economy went completely berserk.
36:29Inflation went up sky high and it took about ten years for the economy in Egypt to recover.
36:37The depiction of his Hajj journey is among the earliest artistic example, not just of the inanimate features of Mecca,
36:45but of the human figures arriving into this undeniably religious setting.
36:50Century after century, the pilgrimage is depicted and the pilgrims.
36:54There's a very clear line between the religious context and the secular context.
37:03And so, in secular context, in people's homes or in palaces,
37:09it was quite often the case that you could have figure representation on the walls of houses and so on.
37:16It's a very different story when you get to the religious context,
37:19because Qurans are never illustrated in the same way that Bibles are,
37:25that in mosques you never get figural representation.
37:29And so, that's actually a very, very clear distinction.
37:34Hajj is obligatory only to those Muslim men and women who have the financial means to do it.
37:41Before setting out, they have to settle all their debts.
37:44The date for Hajj is set through the Muslim lunar calendar.
37:47Before getting to Mecca, pilgrims meet at specified places to get into a state of ihram or purification.
37:55Men need to wear two white seamless cloths.
37:59Women can wear normal clothes, but most wear white.
38:03And they need to keep their faces uncovered.
38:08They then make their way to the Grand Mosque and to the Ka'bah that stands inside it.
38:13They circumambulate around it seven times before going on to carry out other rituals that take place over the next five to six days.
38:25Now, imagine I had to tell this story of the pilgrimage without actually seeing any pilgrims.
38:38It's a situation that must have faced the most religious of Muslim leaders.
38:41And yet, time and again, the need to tell the powerful story of the Hajj overcame any reticence about showing the human form.
38:53These are my absolute favourite objects within the exhibition.
38:57They're paintings that accompanied a pilgrim guide called the Anis al-Hujjaj.
39:02And they show pilgrims coming from India.
39:06And you see the little pilgrim boats here.
39:08And, of course, they would have set off on these ocean-going dows.
39:11And you can imagine in those days, you know, it was really terrifying going on these journeys across the sea.
39:17And here we see the pilgrims who are described as crossing the Sea of Oman.
39:21So this is what we know as the Arabian Sea.
39:24And so here you can see larger ships and then smaller ones because once they got close to the coast,
39:31often they needed to be guided by these special sea captains.
39:36Here, before they reached Jeddah, they would stop at Moqa in Yemen.
39:43And again, this lovely sort of schematised image of Moqa in Yemen.
39:51There is one place in the Muslim world where paintings of pilgrims have flourished
39:56without the patronage of wealthy rulers.
40:01Many of the houses here are decorated with paintings depicting the Hajj journey.
40:06It's a centuries-old tradition.
40:08And it shows the ways pilgrims travelled there,
40:11the people who did the Hajj, and the familiar sights of Mecca.
40:15The ordinary Egyptians who are commissioning these paintings certainly have very little in common with the wealthy rulers who are commissioning their works of art on the Hajj centuries ago.
40:39Their status are different, as is the modes of transport which took them to Mecca.
40:44But what's important to bear in mind is that this tradition that I'm witnessing here is a continuation of the figurative depiction of the pilgrimage to the Hajj that was started centuries ago.
40:56400 miles south of Cairo, this area is now part of the expanding city of Luxor.
41:10My guide here is Khaled Hafez, a well-known Egyptian artist and a Muslim who has worked with local painters here and knows their work and style well.
41:20These types of Hajj paintings are only to be found in this part of Egypt.
41:24This is a beautiful example of how Hajj paintings are.
41:28What I find here phenomenal is that it actually documents just like ancient Egyptian painting what happened.
41:34So it says, it states the pilgrim, Mohammed Kanawi, did visit the Holy House of God and he visited the grave of the Prophet with his wife in this year, 2007.
41:50Okay, amazing.
41:51But what I find amazing is that it's the first thing you see, the journey of the Hajj is on the face of the house, which is extraordinary.
41:59There is some sort of a recipe to every Hajj painting that you find, you know, like in different arrangements.
42:06So you have the element of the Kaaba and then here we have an image of a mosque.
42:12Of course, it signifies here the Prophet's Mosque in Medina or the Mosque of El Kaaba in Mecca.
42:19The calligraphy is done by a professional calligrapher.
42:23Right.
42:24And he uses a type of calligraphy called tholuth, which is the king of all calligraphy types.
42:29Right.
42:30What is the calligraphy saying?
42:31Is it a verse from the Quran?
42:32It says that a good pilgrimage only is the way to heaven.
42:38Right.
42:39And then himself, the Hajj, we know that this Hajj has a beard.
42:43Yes.
42:44The artist did his best to sort of like portray it.
42:47Right.
42:48And he's dressed in the white cloth that you wear when you go to the Hajj.
42:52Absolutely.
42:53Given the sensitivities in Islam about the showing of the face in art, do people object in these paintings, the display of the face?
43:04No.
43:05Not, you know, like to the locals in Luxor and the practitioners of Hajj paintings on their walls.
43:12There is no objection to that at all.
43:15So this idea of prohibition or refiguration does not exist in Hajj paintings.
43:21Why do you think people to this day still want to make such a statement like this?
43:35Yes.
43:36I think that with the introduction of Islam to Egypt, what went very well is this idea of documenting, of reading and writing and documenting everything on walls.
43:47Egyptians never lost this trait since the ancient times.
43:51Actually, we never lost the figuration in our world.
43:54And I think here there is this always controversy between, you know, figuration, non-figuration.
44:00In Islam.
44:01In Islam, yeah.
44:02But Islam never abolished the cultural specificity of some parts.
44:05Right.
44:06What came before?
44:07So Egypt, for instance, it was a visual culture and a verbal culture.
44:12The communities where Islam originated were principally the desert communities are more of verbal cultures.
44:19It's also, you know, like bragging that we did visit the Prophet.
44:24This positive type of bragging existed since the ancient times.
44:32Mustafa, tell me, why did you want your house to be painted like this?
44:37Because the people who want to know my father, he been to Mecca.
44:42After his finish as a trip from Saudi Arabia, Hajj.
44:47After that, he came here to see his house, his painting.
44:54Because you want everyone to see that you've been to Hajj.
44:57Yes, yes.
44:59The paintings that you find on the houses in this part of southern Egypt don't have the elaborate style with which one associates the Islamic art around the world today.
45:09In fact, you could describe these paintings as being quite crude.
45:13But that is to miss the points.
45:15Because what these paintings show is that even in the poorest parts of the Islamic world, people are willing to use figurative art to tell the story of how powerful this spiritual journey, the Hajj, is.
45:27But that they are also willing to use art to tell the whole world this story as it has been done for centuries.
45:34It seems to me that there's always been artists working in the Islamic world throughout history who have produced figurative art, but many have tried to avoid the realistic depiction of humans because it might be seen as putting them in direct competition with God, the creator.
46:01The closest they've come to such figurative art in religion is when they've portrayed the epic journey of pilgrims to the Hajj in Mecca.
46:11But one rule has remained constant. Such figurative art has never appeared in mosques or in the Koran.
46:18As interest in Islam increases worldwide, so does understanding of its artistic traditions.
46:27In recent years, auction rooms and galleries around the world have moved away from calling it Islamic art and is more careful around terms such as Muslim artists.
46:37Instead, this work is increasingly known by Sotheby's and others as art of the Islamic world.
46:44At the same time, auction houses have seen a boom in interest in art in the Islamic tradition.
46:49We've seen an explosion of interest in the auction world.
46:56It's partly pride on the part of Muslims, pride in their own heritage and a desire to own important artworks produced by Muslim craftsmen and Muslim patrons over a period of 1400 years.
47:13The interest also comes from other quarters, from non-Muslims. We have private collectors all across Europe and North America and the Far East indeed.
47:26And then there are institutional projects, new museums who are looking to build collections of national and international importance.
47:37The buoyant market means galleries like this one in London are thriving, showing the work of a new generation of artists in the Islamic tradition.
47:46It's intriguing to see how they interpret figurative depiction and to see the kind of imagery they are choosing.
47:53This is one of my personal favourites, because what's quite magical about the piece is you have the alif and the laam and the mean, but it also looks like a musical note.
48:04Rida al-Sala runs an art gallery in central London. It showcases works of many contemporary British Muslim artists.
48:11I think post 9-11 there was a political shift towards understanding Islam, whether that was a negative or positive context, there was an interest there.
48:24That has had an impact on wider international and national Muslim identity communities and has impacted also art being produced by artists that are living in the Western world and their interpretation of sort of geopolitical sort of trends.
48:40So there's been a surge in the amount and quality of art being produced around that whole dialogue.
48:50Glimpses of the human figure can be found, but they don't dominate this gallery.
48:54They appear to respect the inheritance of an audience of Muslims who prefer its art to steer away from depicting people with any kind of realism.
49:03One artist whose work consists of modern interpretations of calligraphy is reluctant to show her own face.
49:12I don't want it to be about me. I want my art to speak for itself and I don't want to be forefront of my art.
49:19So I believe that my art should be good enough to speak for itself without me speaking.
49:23This artwork is all about breaking down barriers and overcoming your fears and not allowing your fears to stand in the way of what it is that you may want to achieve.
49:36How I've made a hole in the canvas, it connotes the idea of breaking through and not allowing that barrier to stand in the way.
49:45The kapa in this painting represents an unseen reality just as the kapa in reality does.
50:01For me it represents going back into my own heart.
50:04There's a Suthi master from Morocco and he wrote, surely we are all meaning set up in images.
50:14That's something that's always affected all of my work.
50:23At the exhibition at the British Museum, this instinctive respect for the non-figurative tradition is also evident in the choice of composition, materials and imagery,
50:33being used by the contemporary artists, showing their work inspired by the Hajj.
50:40Idris Khan's painting of the kapa invokes the transformation the journey to Mecca is supposed to bring about.
50:47The shape itself is based on the mosque in Mecca.
50:51I like this explosion of words out of an essential sort of form.
50:55The idea is to try and capture an emotional response to what it was like to leave the journey of Hajj, essentially.
51:06The actual structure of the piece is made up of different sentences.
51:09And I guess, in a way, in the back of my mind, I was trying to find out what people leave Mecca with and what they're asking themselves.
51:17After having prayed in a certain direction for so many years of your life to this incredible, emotional black cube,
51:26what is it like when you're there and then you leave? Does it change you?
51:30Especially when they're walking around an exhibition like this also, you know, they're looking at these incredible works and about the journey of Hajj.
51:37So as they come here into the last piece, maybe they're asking themselves those very questions like,
51:43do I want to go to Hajj? What have I learned while I've been here in this exhibition?
51:47And somehow to try and capture that emotion in this drawing.
51:50There's something very nice in the repetition of picking a stamp up and stamping the wall directly.
51:57With the sentences, each time you're stamping, you're almost trying to trace the steps of perhaps someone walking towards the Kaba as well,
52:05you know, starting the center and moving out.
52:08And that creates a credible energy to the center, which is, you know, what the Kaba is.
52:12You know, this flow of emotion, this flow of people around it and towards it all the time.
52:21Ahmed Mathir, a Saudi artist, has conceptualized this in his installation, which he is setting up at the exhibition.
52:30A concept which is brilliantly simple and profound.
52:35This is about to represent the Kaba.
52:43It's where all of the people play. It's magnetic.
52:46The idea is coming from when our grandfathers and the fathers, when they go to Hajj and they came back.
52:54They told us we feel something, attraction, for us to one place, to this cube.
53:00That's stuck in my mind. And after that, I think about something that has a magnetic to pull you to the place.
53:06This drawing or attraction is not just only physical, it's also from inside, spiritual.
53:22It's an old, every children have it in the school.
53:25It's simple, very simple. Everyone can do it in their home, but it has a lot of concept, a lot of meaning for the concept of the life.
53:32I build a field of magnetism.
53:42So I put the cube magnet above the table here.
53:48I put two magnets underneath the table.
53:50So this will give you something like Earth's magnetic field.
53:57It's like a spiritualising thing when you come with millions of people around together to one place.
54:05So this is the concept.
54:07It is simple art that reflects the profound nature of the Kaaba.
54:17This simple building that continues to be an inspiration to countless artists and attracts more Muslims than ever.
54:25Muslims are no longer so dependent as they once were on depictions in figurative paintings to capture this enduring experience.
54:33It's what I find incredibly moving, that that same spirit of wanting to go there and to touch that sacred place and the renewal and all of that, I find incredibly moving.
54:47And that it just literally doesn't seem to have changed at all.
54:52You know, you may have been coming by camel at one point and by aeroplane now, but actually it really hasn't changed.
54:57The essence of it hasn't changed.
54:58The essence doesn't appear to have changed at all, but that's just looking at it from my perspective.
55:02Over the centuries, the artistic traditions of Islam have embraced a wider range of art forms than has been generally recognised.
55:15And throughout Muslim history, this has included figurative art not usually associated with Muslims.
55:21It's revealing to see which of these visual styles emerge most commonly in the work of today's contemporary artists.
55:28The most common recurring image is of the very place that first defined the Muslim approach to visual art.
55:41In some way, the Kaaba itself is almost like a modernist sculpture in its form.
55:46This solid black box.
55:48I made steel cubes. The dimension of each cube is the dimension of the Kaaba.
55:57But chopped into 49 cubes.
56:01Seven times by seven times, exactly.
56:04Of course, you know, as one walks around the Kaaba, they have to walk around seven times.
56:08It's made from steel, made from blue steel, and then it's lacquered to give it a really shiny quality, or like a jewel-like quality, which I wanted.
56:18And then I sandblasted the daily prayer, the Salat prayer, into each cube five times, because obviously you're supposed to pray five times a day.
56:27Each cube is unique. They're done with five different segments of the prayer.
56:31You have to look at it in three different ways. You have to look at it aesthetically, I think.
56:36You have to look at it where it changes the way you think about a certain environment.
56:40And also whether it actually transports you back to a certain place.
56:45For me, it's about transporting you back to a certain time in my life.
56:47So therefore, you know, when you're entering an incredible space like this, and you see 49 steel cubes that are shaped in the same way as the Kaaba, which the show is based on, essentially.
57:01You're asking them to think about making links between now and then.
57:06Restrictions on acceptable forms of art, seen by many as limiting the output of artists in the Islamic tradition, appear here to be doing no such thing.
57:17The artists we've encountered are not constrained in expressing their artistic intentions within a framework that sets out clear boundaries.
57:26The rules they understand around figurative representation are informing, not constraining them.
57:33Today, artists in the Islamic tradition are creating art which has as much power as that of any artist.
57:39But now in Mecca, the surroundings of the Kaaba are changing.
57:47The Grand Mosque and its environment are part of a huge redevelopment of the city as visitors reach record numbers and are set to rise even more in the years to come.
57:56But will artists of the future still continue to find inspiration here when the Kaaba itself appears to be on the verge of being dwarfed by its surroundings?
58:07Will these changes put at risk that simple beauty of this most important building, the Kaaba, carrying as it does so much influence over the beliefs, the practice and the art of Islam?
58:18Fending for themselves, animals gaining independence next in David Attenborough's life story here on BBC4.
58:33On BBC4.
58:34.
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