- 07/07/2025
Documentary, The Hidden Art of Islam
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00:00A collection of artefacts from the Muslim world is about to be put on show at the British Museum.
00:10They 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.
00:29I 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.
00:43But, 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.
01:26There's nothing in the Quran that says, figural art is not permitted, but idol worship is not permitted.
01:33So, 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?
01:45I'm fascinated to see how the artistic traditions of Islam has navigated this through the centuries.
01:52Sometimes they have been at odds with the clerics.
01:55Sometimes 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,
02:17and 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.
03:15It's the place people strive to reach in their lifetime,
03:22pray towards five times a day,
03:27and the direction in which they are buried when they die.
03:32At the heart of Mecca is the Grand Mosque, and at its center, this, the Kaaba.
03:41In essence, the most beautiful thing about Mecca is the Kaaba itself, and its beauty is in its simplicity.
03:48It'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.
03:58Muslims believe that the Kaaba was built by the Prophet Abraham, under divine instruction,
04:04as a focal point of a simple message, that there was one God, not the many gods of the pagan past.
04:12But by Muhammad's time, the Kaaba had been taken over by pagan Arabs,
04:18and 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.
04:34He destroyed the idols at the Kaaba and re-established it as a simple house dedicated to the one God.
04:41This act defined this most sacred site in Islam as a place where the one God should not be depicted.
04:49The Kaaba is just something which is the house itself, the way it was built.
04:54This is the meaning in Arabic. But 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,
05:04and 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,
05:24any 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,
05:41and it's a very strong iconoclastic nature of that.
05:45The 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
06:03of why there should be no depiction of God or the Prophets.
06:06A message most profoundly underlined when any Muslim completes the pilgrimage of the Hajj,
06:12the fifth pillar of Islam.
06:18I've been to Hajj myself.
06:20And I tell you, one of the greatest journeys of any human's life is Hajj.
06:25What was the most awesome experience was looking at the house of God.
06:31But as well as the visual meaning attached to the Kaaba,
06:36there is a further reason why artists from the Islamic world
06:39have been discouraged from creating depictions of any human likeness
06:43if they are in religious settings.
06:45In the Koran, there are 99 different names for God,
07:00each of them signifying a characteristic.
07:03There is al-Rahman, the Beneficent, al-Rahim, the Merciful.
07:07One of those characteristics is al-Khaliq, the Creator.
07:11And it's the reason why so many Muslims believe that when an artist
07:16shows the human form or the form of any creature,
07:19they're putting themselves in the role reserved for God.
07:22And it's the reason why, over the centuries,
07:25clerics and artists have debated what is acceptable and what isn't.
07:30It's also left room for interpretation
07:32as to what could be deemed to be realistic or not.
07:37Some would say this saying of the Prophet
07:39or sayings of the Prophet around prohibition of human beings
07:43or living entities, a drawing of them is clear and absolute.
07:47Well, that is not true, because if it was absolute,
07:49why would there be so many others who would say it's not?
07:52I don't think human beings have the capacity to draw anything real.
07:57Whatever I draw can never be real,
07:59though it may be a replica of what is real.
08:02But it is not real.
08:03And therefore, I sit quite comfortably
08:05not worried about anyone competing with God and winning.
08:08You can't win with God.
08:14At the British Museum, they are unpacking a unique parcel.
08:18In it is a carefully wrapped Qur'an dating back to the 8th century,
08:28one of the first examples of a written Qur'an.
08:32Muslim scholars accept that this Qur'an is from the Hejaz region
08:42of what is now Saudi Arabia,
08:44a region which includes the holy cities of Mecca and Medina.
08:48Muslim's
08:58Easter
08:59the text is written on parchment in an early style of Arabic script,
09:00called Ma'il,
09:01which means sloping, in this case to the right.
09:02They usually distinguish letters of a similar shape.
09:12It was this, the Arabic script, its shape and design,
09:15that led to the first and most enduring element in Islamic art.
09:25If it was generally agreed in the early Islamic community
09:28that there shouldn't be figural art in religious settings,
09:31then the early artists and calligraphers
09:34were faced with what to do with the Koran,
09:36because after all they were part of a tradition
09:38where the Bible had been illustrated sumptuously,
09:41and so there were models for what religious books should look like.
09:46But the Koran, if it wasn't going to have figural designs in,
09:49what was it going to have?
09:51And so illumination was developed and geometry, geometric designs,
09:55was something that they'd inherited from late antiquity,
09:58and so the early artists and calligraphers adopted it,
10:03used it for illumination.
10:05And so you get frontispieces of early Korans which are geometric,
10:09because that's a non-threatening type of decoration
10:13which adds great lustre to the items concerned.
10:18There are three fundamental aspects behind Islamic art.
10:21You have geometry, which is the foundation.
10:23Then you have Islami, which you might know as arabesque,
10:27which is the floral, vegetative aspect of Islamic art.
10:30And at the top of the hierarchy you have the calligraphy,
10:33because that's the word of God.
10:36Islamic artists built on the Arabic saying,
10:39purity of writing is purity of soul.
10:42They experimented with the shape and design of the Arabic letters,
10:47using the flowing Arabic language to express the beauty
10:51they perceived in the words of the Koran.
10:54I've been doing calligraphy for probably about ten years now.
11:14It started off as an exploration of essentially the written word.
11:19Rualam is a young British artist.
11:22He studied the art of calligraphy in Cairo
11:25under one of the most well-known calligraphers today.
11:30Arabic calligraphy began with two fundamental sources.
11:35One, the Koran, the Holy Scripture,
11:39and the prohibition against depicting figurative work in Islam.
11:45The Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him,
11:47the first word that was revealed to him by the angel Gabriel
11:51was Ikra, meaning read.
11:54This was the foundation for seeking knowledge for Muslims.
11:59But also the verse continues.
12:01It continues to teach Muslims that knowledge was taught to man
12:06by the use of the pen.
12:08And therefore transmission of knowledge was key.
12:12Calligraphy 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.
12:30These are the mysterious letters that are found at the beginning of certain chapters of the Qur'an.
12:37And that mystery of not knowing what these letters represent is in itself beautiful.
12:44Calligraphers were given precise rules for how they should write letters from the medieval period.
12:59And particularly with respect to how they copy Qur'ans.
13:03The interesting thing was how you should write a certain ligature.
13:07For example in one brush stroke.
13:09How the size of a ligature was related say to the proportions of the eye.
13:16The eye which is seeing it.
13:18How the dots, the noktas related to the ligatures and so forth.
13:22So there's elements of proportion which were very mathematical and very precise.
13:27Which are laid down.
13:28And the idea was that you could produce something which is beautiful using these rules.
13:38The way the letters were used.
13:40Even though they may not seem as decorative right at the beginning.
13:44And between the 8th to 10th centuries.
13:46Even 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.
13:58So that each line, the margins would be even on both sides.
14:02And they'd be justified.
14:05As Islam spread, the art of calligraphy developed.
14:09Reaching its peak among other places.
14:12Here in Turkey.
14:14Under the Ottoman Empire.
14:20In Turkey.
14:21In Turkey.
14:22In Turkey.
14:23In Turkey.
14:24In Turkey.
14:25In Turkey.
14:26In Turkey.
14:27In Turkey.
14:28In Turkey.
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.
14:39At an Istanbul art gallery, there is the largest collection of contemporary Turkish calligraphy.
14:56It is put together as a homage to the Prophet Muhammad.
15:03In this work, art and belief go hand in hand.
15:07Muhammad Al-Resulullah.
15:08In the name of the Prophet Muhammad.
15:09In the name of the Prophet Muhammad.
15:10In the name of the Prophet Muhammad.
15:12Yes.
15:13That's amazing.
15:14Fantastic.
15:15Do you have any particular feelings when you're writing verses from the Qur'an?
15:22When you look at the art forms in the world, you will see that the only divine form
15:31calligraphy, because we are putting the words of God on paper and hence enable people to
15:35read it. That's why I can't describe or compare the feeling I have doing calligraphy. Actually
15:43it is said that the heart can only be happy with the mention of God. The same feelings
15:47apply to us when we deliver Quranic verses in calligraphy.
16:01Alongside calligraphy, the exquisite precision of traditional Islamic design, seen in arabesque
16:12and geometric patterns, has maintained its appeal in contemporary design studios.
16:17It's a language of symmetry which was first developed by the Greeks but then extrapolated
16:26and developed upon within the Islamic tradition. So often what you will see is an underlying
16:30geometric pattern which you might find in Euclid. And then on top of that you will find
16:37the Muslim craftsmen would elaborate more complex geometric designs which would appear on top
16:42of that grid. And then they would hide the underlying grid.
16:47The idea is that these patterns are there to engender a contemplative state. And the repetitions
16:55that one sees within Islami patterns and geometric patterns allow the mind to think upon the
17:01repetition of pattern within nature. And the idea of the infinite weave and the infinite movement
17:09and repetition of form that one sees within the natural world.
17:14So this is an example of Islami or arabesque. And to complete a composition like this, you'd start
17:20off with the geometry. That's the structure. So you'll draw your square. And then inside this square
17:26is a dynamic square here. And then that houses these linear shapes, which we call kapala. And they're the
17:34structural shapes. So you have four of those, here, here and here. And then you have overlaid four spirals.
17:44And they're the structural lines. Once you have those, you can add the motifs. And this particular motif is called a
17:51Rumi motif. It's not named after the poet. Both the poet and the motif are named after the city, Run, or Asiatic Rome,
17:59which is in Anatolia, the capital of Anatolia. And the original examples of this in Seljuk carvings of birds
18:08and animals. And as they adopted Islam, they lost the representation. And it became this abstract art motif.
18:18It's often said that Islamic art is like a meditation upon the invisible. So you can see that there's, as well as
18:24structural principles here, there's a symbolic language in operation also.
18:30The fundamental link between proportion and beauty. That's at the heart of it, the principle of Islamic aesthetics.
18:37Exactly the same notion of proportion between different shapes, between the horizontal and the vertical,
18:45between the different dimensions. Everything is quite precise. Of course, sometimes they get things slightly wrong.
18:52And certainly the traditional argument is that if the proportion is slightly off, then you can, through your aesthetic sense,
19:04notice it's wrong. But the fundamental thing was if you got the proportions right, you 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, a concept of beauty on earth,
19:23with gardens, flowing streams, geometric arches.
19:28There's a verse in the Quran where God says that we have taught you how to calculate. We have taught you the science of computation about the stars and the moons and the planets.
19:40We've 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. That'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, always correlating with one another,
20:14often depicting the five pillars of Islam, often depicting the articles of faith, depicting the heavenly presence,
20:23depicting the gardens of paradise, the water, the fruit, the palm tree.
20:28All of these are geometrically put in and inspired by the very notion of maths from the Quran itself.
20:34The artistry and the aesthetics of the Islamic world, born out of the constraints about depicting humans
20:42and other living creatures in religious settings, have become part of global taste in art and design
20:48beyond the Muslim context in which they were created.
20:53Many outside of the Islamic world have not recognized what inspired these increasingly familiar motifs.
21:01Ah, this is an amazing thing.
21:07As part of the Kiswah archive, this gives you the photos, and they're 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 or 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.
21:43These 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.
22:00It 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.
22:23Well, we talk about the Kiswah, 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.
22:44So 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,
22:59in order then that you could be able to work out the design on the textile.
23:05The mahmal has had its share of politics.
23:08The Mamluk and Ottoman rulers of Egypt started a tradition of sending this heavily decorated textile to Mecca,
23:15accompanying the pilgrim caravans to the Hajj.
23:18It would stay on the Ka'bah and then come back to Cairo.
23:22To the Egyptian and Turkish rulers, it was a symbol of their protective rights over the Ka'bah.
23:33But 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.
23:44And in 1926, the practice finally came to an end.
23:49Many of the traditions which are around the Hajj were stopped because, partly because it was an assertion of their power,
24:00but also because they didn't necessarily want people to associate sanctity with objects.
24:09So, 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,
24:23then their understanding was that this was about veneration of a cubic building.
24:29Whereas, of course, everyone else understood that traditionally this was about the beauty of the place.
24:37It was about the celebration of the Ka'bah because it was the central focus of the Hajj.
24:42It wasn't about the worship or veneration of a building.
24:45It was about beautifying it because it was the centre of the rituals.
24:50Through history, the rulers of the Islamic world held secular power as well as religious faith.
24:59Some faced the dilemma when these twin forces pulled in opposite directions.
25:04Little more than 50 years after the death of the Prophet Muhammad,
25:08such dilemmas were being faced by one of the earliest Muslim heads of state,
25:13whose rule began in 682 A.D.
25:18If you're an emperor or a king or a queen, what image do you put on your coins?
25:25Byzantine and Roman emperors put their portraits on it.
25:28Khalif Abdul Malik, one of the first Muslim rulers of the Umayyad Empire, wasn't so sure.
25:33In 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
25:46and both had figures of kings or emperors on them.
25:50And he tried putting a figure of himself on a coinage.
25:54But then he rejected that, having issued it, and he developed a completely new coinage,
26:00which was solely epigraphic.
26:02That means it was covered in inscriptions on both sides,
26:05Quranic inscriptions and later historical inscriptions.
26:08So figural imagery was discarded at that point for the coinage.
26:12Now that is a very significant moment in Islamic history,
26:15because that means from then onwards the identity of the Islamic community,
26:20the Islamic empire, was focused on coins which had no images on them,
26:25simply the calligraphic inscriptions.
26:27But other Muslim rulers, as they grew in power and wealth,
26:35wanted art to reflect their lives in their palaces and private spaces.
26:41They asked their artists to draw pictures of them,
26:45of their lives holding court, hunting or just looking good.
26:50Paintings of this kind illustrate the luxurious lives of Muslim monarchs.
26:56These rulers were not bothered by what Islam allows and what it doesn't allow.
27:00What stimulated them was voyeurism, power, greed,
27:04an absolute chauvinistic lifestyle that they led,
27:08almost veering onto or edging onto hedonism that we see in the modern world.
27:14In fact, maybe mutation of hedonism in a much more graver manner.
27:23Artists in the Islamic world faced a serious dilemma.
27:27On the one hand, they were being asked to produce work that showed the human form,
27:31but to do so would invoke the wrath of the clerics.
27:35What they did to try and overcome this was to strike a balance
27:38between these two very conflicting demands.
27:42Some artists, as a means to compromising between the clerics and the rulers,
27:49did depict the monarchs, the emperors in one dimensional pictures.
27:54So you actually can't make a real feature of a human being or a person,
27:59they all would look very similar because it's one dimensional.
28:03That was a compromise.
28:05They did not want to become known in the eyes of the clerics as aiding the heretic
28:10and they did not want to be killed by the emperor for rebelling
28:14and being called treacherous or traitors.
28:17And they came up with this one dimensional pictures.
28:20There were times when you had literal minded clerics who were very unhappy about for good of lot,
28:30in the same way as they were unhappy about the king drinking wine, right?
28:35But we also know for most of history they tolerated it perfectly well.
28:39Things ebb and flow.
28:40Sometimes what happens in the modern period is that we assume that there is a basic relationship
28:45between the clerics and those in political power and that this relationship has been fixed throughout time.
28:53And this is clearly not the case.
28:55For most of history those in power basically were in charge.
29:00So what they said, the values that they established, the aesthetics they established, the court culture they established
29:07was 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.
29:25And 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 your rivalling God.
29:39Muslim artists use form and colour in a particular way.
29:46The composition does not have any perspective.
29:50There is no light or shade.
29:52The paintings are never naturalistic.
29:55They do not temper the edges of their coloured areas with reflections or shadows.
30:00There are no atmospheric colour effects used to convey depth or sense of distance.
30:07Brightly 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.
30:19My 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.
30:37That's 6th, 7th century AD up in Central Asia.
30:41And they show the stories of Rustam in polychrome but in different flat colours.
30:48And 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.
31:03I 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.
31:26But 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.
31:50The 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.
32:07And if you look closely at it, you'll see that the faces have been rubbed off.
32:11They would have been inlaid and they would have popped out when you first looked at them.
32:17And 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.
32:41The 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,
32:57art for Shia Muslims developed in complete contrast.
33:02Shia 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.
33:29Shia Islam traces its beginnings to the Battle of Karbala in modern day Iraq, where in 680 AD the Prophet's grandson Hussein was killed,
33:39a conflict over the leadership of the expanding Muslim community.
33:44The 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.
34:04It 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.
34:14And so you have in Shiism a motivation for showing what those people were like.
34:23Just as in Christianity you had a narrative about Jesus as a man, as well as in Christian belief as the Son of God,
34:31the Son of God, so 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.
34:55You 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.
35:06The function of a lot of the art which is associated with Karbala is reminding people of what happened
35:14and 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.
35:29And yet, some of the items on display here show that even within this tradition,
35:35the orthodoxy surrounding human depiction in religious settings is not always followed,
35:41especially when the epic Hajj journey of a Muslim ruler becomes a historical event in its own right.
35:52Mansa Musa, the ruler of Mali in West Africa, made his pilgrimage in 1324.
35:58His procession reported to include 60,000 men and 12,000 slaves.
36:07Mali was the source of West African gold, immensely wealthy.
36:11And he carried with him something like 80 camels loaded with gold dust.
36:18And when he reached Cairo, he started buying trinkets.
36:21And the Cairo historians record that the whole economy went completely berserk.
36:27Inflation went up sky high and it took about 10 years for the economy in Egypt to recover.
36:37The depiction of his Hajj journey is among the earliest artistic example,
36:41not just of the inanimate features of Mecca,
36:44but of the human figures arriving into this undeniably religious setting.
36:48Century after century, the pilgrimage is depicted and the pilgrims.
36:57There's a very clear line between the religious context and the secular context.
37:02And so in secular context, in people's homes or in palaces,
37:08it was quite often the case that you could have figural representation on the walls of houses and so on.
37:15It's a very different story when you get to the religious context,
37:19because Korans are never illustrated in the same way that Bibles are,
37:24that in mosques you never get figural representation.
37:28And 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.
37:40Before setting out, they have to settle all their debts.
37:43The 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.
37:58Women can wear normal clothes, but most wear white, and they need to keep their faces uncovered.
38:04They then make their way to the Grand Mosque and to the Kathba that stands inside it.
38:17They circumambulate around it seven times,
38:20before 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.
38:37It'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
38:46overcame any reticence about showing the human form.
38:50These are my absolute favourite objects within the exhibition.
38:56They're paintings that accompanied a pilgrim guide called the Anis al-Hujjaj.
39:00And they show pilgrims coming from India.
39:05And you see the little pilgrim boats here.
39:07And, 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.
39:16And 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.
39:23And so here you can see larger ships and then smaller ones,
39:27because once they got close to the coast, often they needed to be guided by these special sea captains.
39:35Here is, before they reached Jeddah, they would stop at Moqa in Yemen.
39:42And 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
39:55without 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, the people who did the Hajj,
40:12and the familiar sights of Mecca.
40:14The ordinary Egyptians who are commissioning these paintings
40:31certainly have very little in common with the wealthy rulers
40:35who were commissioning their works of art on the Hajj centuries ago.
40:38Their 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
40:48is a continuation of the figurative depiction of the pilgrimage to the Hajj
40:54that was started centuries ago.
41:03400 miles south of Cairo, this area is now part of the expanding city of Lucka.
41:07My guide here is Khaled Hafez, a well-known Egyptian artist and a Muslim
41:14who has worked with local painters here and knows their work and style well.
41:19These 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,
41:31just like ancient Egyptian painting, what happens.
41:34So it says, it states, the pilgrim, Mohamed Kanawi, did visit the Holy House of God
41:43and he visited the grave of the Prophet with his wife in this year, 2007.
41:50OK. OK.
41:51But what I find amazing is that it's the first thing you see,
41:54the journey of the Hajj is on the face of the house, which is extraordinary.
41:57It is extraordinary.
41:58There is some sort of a recipe to every Hajj painting that you find, you know,
42:04like in different arrangements.
42:05Right.
42:06So you have the element of the Kaaba.
42:07And then here we have an image of a mosque.
42:12Of course, it signifies here the Prophet's Mosque in Medina.
42:15Right.
42:16Or the mosque of El Kaaba in Mecca.
42:19The calligraphy is done by a professional calligrapher.
42:23Right.
42:24He uses a type of calligraphy called soluth, which is the king of all calligraphy types.
42:29Right.
42:30What is the calligraphy saying?
42:31Is it a verse from the Koran?
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 appeared.
42:43Yes.
42:44An artist did his best to sort of like portray.
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,
42:59do 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 figuration does not exist in Hajj paintings.
43:28Why do you think people to this day still want to make such a statement like this?
43:35I think that with the introduction of Islam to Egypt,
43:40what went very well is this idea of documenting, of reading and writing and documenting everything on walls.
43:46Egyptians never lost this trait since the ancient times.
43:50Actually, we never lost the figuration in our world.
43:53And I think here there is this always controversy between, you know, figuration, non-figuration in Islam.
44:00In Islam, yeah.
44:01But Islam never abolished the cultural specificity of some parts.
44:04Right.
44:05What came before?
44:06So Egypt, for instance, it was a visual culture and a verbal culture.
44:11The communities where Islam originated were principally the desert communities are more of verbal cultures.
44:18It's also, you know, like bragging that we did visit the Prophet.
44:23This 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.
44:41After he's finished his trip from Saudi Arabia and Hajj.
44:46After that, he come here to see his house, his painting.
44:53Because you want everyone to see that you've been to Hajj?
44:56Yes.
44:57The paintings that you find on the houses in this part of southern Egypt don't have the elaborate style with which one associates 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, because what these paintings show is that even in the poorest parts of the Islamic world,
45:19people are willing to use figurative art to tell the story of how powerful this spiritual journey the Hajj is,
45:27but that they're 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
45:49who have produced figurative art.
45:51But many have tried to avoid the realistic depiction of humans
45:55because 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
46:05is when they've portrayed the epic journey of pilgrims to the Hajj in Mecca.
46:10But one rule has remained constant.
46:13Such figurative art has never appeared in mosques or in the Koran.
46:20As interest in Islam increases worldwide, so does understanding of its artistic traditions.
46:26In recent years, auction rooms and galleries around the world have moved away from calling it Islamic art
46:32and is more careful around terms such as Muslim artists.
46:36Instead, this work is increasingly known by Sotheby's and others as art of the Islamic world.
46:43At 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
47:00and a desire to own important art works produced by Muslim craftsmen and Muslim patrons
47:09over a period of 1400 years.
47:12Interest also comes from other quarters, from non-Muslims.
47:16We have private collectors all across Europe and North America and the Far East indeed.
47:25And then there are institutional projects, new museums,
47:29who are looking to build collections of national and international importance.
47:35The buoyant market means galleries like this one in London are thriving,
47:41showing the work of a new generation of artists in the Islamic tradition.
47:45It's intriguing to see how they interpret figurative depiction
47:49and to see the kind of imagery they are choosing.
47:52This is one of my personal favourites because what's quite magical about the piece
47:57is you have the alif and the laam and the meen, but it also looks like a musical note.
48:03Rida al-Sala runs an art gallery in central London.
48:06It showcases works of many contemporary British Muslim artists.
48:11I think post 9-11 there was a political shift towards understanding Islam,
48:19whether that was a negative or positive context, there was an interest there.
48:23That has had an impact on wider international and national Muslim identity communities
48:30and has impacted also art being produced by artists that are living in the Western world
48:36and 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
48:58who prefer its art to steer away from depicting people with any kind of realism.
49:05One artist whose work consists of modern interpretations of calligraphy
49:09is reluctant to show her own face.
49:12I don't want it to be about me. I want my art to speak for itself
49:15and I don't want it to be forefront of my art.
49:18I believe that my art should be good enough to speak for itself without me speaking.
49:24This artwork is all about breaking down barriers
49:27and overcoming your fears and not allowing your fears to stand in the way
49:32of what it is that you may want to achieve.
49:34How I've made a hole in the canvas,
49:38it connotes the idea of breaking through
49:41and not allowing that barrier to stand in the way.
49:44The kapa in this painting represents an unseen reality, just as the kapa in reality does.
50:00For me it represents going back into my own heart.
50:03There's a Sifi master from Morocco and he wrote,
50:10surely we are all meanings set up in images.
50:13That's something that's always affected all of my work.
50:18At the exhibition at the British Museum, this instinctive respect for the non-figurative tradition
50:28is also evident in the choice of composition, materials and imagery
50:33being used by the contemporary artists, showing their work inspired by the Hajj.
50:38Idris 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.
50:56The idea is to try and capture an emotional response to what it was like to leave the journey of Hatch, 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
51:15and what they're asking themselves after having prayed in a certain direction for so many years of your life
51:21I see this incredible, emotional black cube.
51:25What 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,
51:33they'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,
51:42do I want to go to Hajj? What have I learned while I've been here in this exhibition?
51:46And 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 with the sentences.
51:57Each time you're stamping you're almost trying to trace the steps of perhaps someone walking towards the kava as well,
52:04you know, starting in the centre and moving out.
52:07And that creates a credible energy to the centre which is, you know, what the kava is.
52:11You know, this flow of emotion, this flow of people around it and towards it all the time.
52:16dł..
52:17This flow of emotion...
52:20Bюan Khadrmah, Indiaerness
52:43all of the people bring it's magnetic the idea is coming from when our grandfathers and the
52:50fathers when they go to hajj and they came back they told us we feel something attraction
52:57us to one place to this cube that's stuck in my mind and after that i think about something
53:03who has a magnetic to pull you to this this drawing or attraction is not just only physical it's also
53:14from inside spiritual it's an old every children have it in the school it's simple very simple
53:26everyone can do it in the home but it has a lot of concept a lot of meaning for for the concept
53:31of the life i build a field of magnetism
53:44so i put the cube magnet above the table here i put two magnets underneath the table
53:52so this will give you something like earth magnetic field
53:56it's like spiritualizing thing when you come with millions of people around together to one place
54:04and yeah so this is the concept
54:12it is simple art that reflects the profound nature of the kaaba this simple building that continues
54:19to be an inspiration to countless artists and attracts more muslims than ever
54:24muslims are no longer so dependent as they once were on depictions in figurative paintings to capture
54:31this enduring experience it's what i find incredibly moving that that same
54:37spirit of wanting to go there and to touch that sacred place and the renewal and all of that i find
54:46incredibly moving and that it just literally doesn't seem to have changed at all you know you may
54:51have been coming by camel at one point and by airplane now but actually it really hasn't
54:56the essence of it hasn't the essence doesn't appear to have changed at at all but that's just looking
55:01at it from my perspective
55:06over the centuries the artistic traditions of islam have embraced a wider range of art forms than has been
55:12generally recognized and throughout muslim history this has included figurative art not usually
55:18associated with muslims it's revealing to see which of these visual styles emerge most commonly in the
55:25work of today's contemporary artists the most common recurring image is of the very place that first
55:32defined the muslim approach to visual art
55:35in some way the caravan itself is almost like a modernist sculpture in its form this solid black box
55:49i made steel cubes the dimension of each cube is the dimension of the carbon
55:56but chopped into 49 cubes seven times by seven times exactly
56:02of course you know as one walks around the car but they have to walk around seven times
56:09it's made from steel made from blue steel and then it's lacquered to give it a really shiny quality
56:14or like a jewel-like quality which i wanted and then i sound blasted the daily prayer the salat prayer
56:20into each cube five times because obviously you're supposed to pray five times a day each cube is unique
56:27they're done with five different segments of the prayer you have to look at it in three different
56:33ways you have to look at it aesthetically i think you have to look about where it changes the way you
56:37think about a certain environment and and also whether it actually transports you back to a certain
56:44place for me it's about transporting me back to a certain time in my life so therefore you know when
56:48you're when you're when you're entering an incredible space like this and you see 49 steel cubes that are
56:54shaped in the same way as a as the kaba which the show is based on essentially you're asking them to
57:02think about and making links between now and then restrictions on acceptable forms of art seen by many
57:09as limiting the output of artists in the islamic tradition appear here to be doing no such thing
57:16the artists we've encountered are not constrained in expressing their artistic intentions within a
57:22framework that sets out clear boundaries the rules they understand around figurative representation
57:29are informing not constraining them today artists in the islamic tradition are creating art which has
57:36as much power as that of any artist
57:39but now in mecca the surroundings of the kappa are changing the grand mosque and its environment
57:48are part of a huge redevelopment of the city as visitors reach record numbers and are set to rise
57:54even more in the years to come but will artists of the future still continue to find inspiration here
58:01when the kappa itself appears to be on the verge of being dwarfed by its surroundings
58:05will these changes put at risk that simple beauty of this most important building the kappa
58:13carrying as it does so much influence over the beliefs the practice and the art of islam
58:26uh
58:36uh
58:48You
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