spiritopellegrino

I am currently in Qatar, the richest country in the world. Think about the challenge of becoming the richest country in the world only in the last couple of decades. What do you do? How do you handle the transition from being desert people and pearl fishers to…this? This country is currently re-inventing itself with extraordinary drive, ambition, and progressive thinking. It is the home of Al Jazeera, it conducts a very active foreign policy, it is striving to create an open society even as it maintains traditional dress and customs, and it is also collecting a lot of art and opening new museums.

Today I was in the Museum of Islamic Art in Doha. This I.M. Pei building opened in 2008, so it is very significant as the first of the big new modern museums to be opened in the Gulf States. You can sit in the cafe in the central space and have a view of the city and the newly installed Serra sculpture.

I was amazed at the collection. But as I walked around, stunned by the early Persian blue and white slipware bowls and the Mamluk brassware, I started to wonder: why Museum of Islamic Art? 

A bowl for domestic use with Arabic script is not “Islamic.” A Turkish animal carpet is not “Islamic.” A prayer carpet, yes, is Islamic. A Quran is. But just because something is made in an area where the majority of the population is muslim, does that make it “Islamic?” Do we call all art made in western Europe between 325 and 1525 “Christian?” No. We talk of Anglo Saxon art, or Romanesque art, or Frankish art, or Gothic. And then, when it is altarpieces and icons and reliquaries, we talk about Church art, or devotional art, or sacred art. It seems to me retrograde and parochial to identify all art of a whole period and vast geographic range as “Christian.” To do so implies definitional opposition:  it is Christian, not Jewish, Christian, not Muslim. It is to say that we identify ourselves by our religion. But in fact that really isn’t the case, most of the time. People identified much more readily by their city, or by their  region, or by their profession, or by language, than by their religion. And the same, I am sure, goes for those areas where the majority of the population was and is muslim.

The Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris has refashioned itself in order to reflect the new awareness that Arabs and the Arab identity pre-existed the rise of Islam. Read all about it here.

Alexandria! Imagine my excitement coming upon the entry gate to the city, with the name spelled out in Greek, in honor of its founder Alexander the Great.

But just past the gate the trouble started. There has been some rain here, and it took out a part of the highway. Water up to the chassis!

This was starting to look pretty different from Alexandria as I had pictured it. A city’s outskirts tend to be its ugliest parts, but the center is usually the old city, with some monuments left. Embarrassingly enough, how I pictured old Alexandria was informed by this painting, started by Gentile Bellini and finished by his brother Giovanni. It shows St Mark preaching in Alexandria.

The painting shows some of the famous monuments of Alexandria. To the extreme left you can see the tip of the Pharos, or lighthouse, one of the 7 ancient wonders of the world. It was destroyed centuries ago. To the right is the top of a column, known (erroneously) as Pompey’s Pillar, because it was believed to hold the remains of the Roman general who had taken refuge from Julius Caesar in Egypt.  In the center is a highly imaginative reconstruction of the Temple of Serapis, destroyed in the 4th century. St Mark is shown converting the pagan residents of Alexandria to the new faith. Do you see the obelisk directly above his head?  Well, there were two obelisks here near the Temple of Serapis, but in the 19th century, the height of colonialism, they were “given” away, one to London and one to New York.  Here is the New York one, installed in Central Park right behind the Met.

So I wasn’t expecting obelisks, and I wasn’t expecting a great Temple of Serapis, but I thought maybe I would see some old structures, at least ones going back to the period of Bellini, and I knew that Pompey’s Pillar was still there.  I know it seems silly, but it was the one thing in the painting that had some real connection to what is on the ground here, and I wanted that connection. Bellini had never been to Alexandria (though he had visited Istanbul), so his information was highly filtered, but he did know about the pillar, and it is still here. I knew it wasn’t going to be anything special, just a column, but I wanted to see it, touch it, the one material connection between this painting, this place, and me.

So I went first to the Museum, saw some nice things, then met a representative of a new local art school, called Mass Alexandria, and asked her whether she wouldn’t mind seeing Pompey’s Pillar before we headed to the school, where I was going to talk to the students. We walked and walked and walked in the very, very busy streets of Alexandria, streets no less busy than those of Cairo. We saw Cavafy’s house, so we paid a visit. We walked some more. I thought I had it pretty well figured out where the Pillar was, but we just couldn’t find it. Absolutely no one in Alexandria speaks a word of English and, foolishly, I had forgotten to memorize the Arabic name for Pompey’s Pillar (which has nothing to do with Pompey). The hour was getting late and the school is miles outside of town, so I proposed we get in a cab, make him take us past the Pillar so I could get out, have a look, and we could proceed. But he had no idea what we were trying to say. So we just ended up going to the school, arriving an hour late because of the terrible traffic. Basically, I was defeated by Alexandria.

The school, though, was another story. Mass Alex is an effort to provide an alternative to traditional art schools here, which still operate on the beaux arts model.  Here is a good link to it. These students are interested in being part of the world of contemporary art. Bellini was turned eastward, in his day the origin of most of the important things, but these students want to be part of the contemporary scene, which means they are turned west. But they didn’t know much about it. I had to spell the name Sol Lewitt for them. They had never heard terms such as Institution Critique and Post-medium condition. So what I wanted to get across to them was that the modalities of contemporary art–the stuff that fills contemporary galleries and biennials of art–seems like a recent and foreign language, but actually that wasn’t true. Installation art did not “belong” to contemporary art.  Neither did the idea of anti-authorship or collective production. And the same goes for Conceptual art, Process art, Performance art. Etc.. There are ways to see these ways of producing art in other contexts, in premodern contexts, for example.

The idea, ultimately, was to encourage them to see these things not as a foreign international language that they needed to learn but as modes to be dismantled and repurposed. They seemed pretty excited when I left. They wanted me to advise them on their specific projects, things like how to turn script into video art. (Still not sure what that student meant!) So I missed old Alexandria (or Alex as the residents call it) but I saw something of the new Alex.

Being called an unbeliever by a group of teenage girls in headscarves on the streets of Cairo has a specific resonance. I hear it as follows:

“You don’t have rules governing your life. You do what you want. That woman walking with you is not your wife. Actually, we are fascinated and scared by the freedom you claim and flaunt–about the possibility that it opens up in our consciousness. But rather than confront those conflicted thoughts inside ourselves, we will externalize them and demonize them. You are the incarnation of what is dirty and naughty.”

There were smiling and twittering before one of them said it. I had even smiled knowingly at one of them, as if to say, I know you are talking about us.  It was as if they were getting up the courage to say…something. As it happens, the white, American woman I was walking with grew up here and speaks perfect Arabic.  She responded with: “Be polite,” which in Arabic is much harsher. It means, don’t be uneducated savages. They must have been pretty surprised by that, but they hid their surprise well.

Walking away, I said to my friend, “It makes me want to adapt the Monkees song to: ‘I’m an unbeliever.'” When I came back to the hotel in the evening, I learned that Davy Jones had died.

Especially after having the “Should I go or should I go?” excitement building in my mind about the next day’s wedding festivities, the rest of the afternoon proved a lovely walking experience in Khasab. The tough anti-pedestrian vibe of the morning subsided, and I found myself walking in smaller back alleys and more shaded areas.

I started noticing that there was a beautifully consistent and yet various vernacular style to the architecture here. By vernacular I mean it isn’t designed. It is simply done a certain way by the local craftsmen. Style is a designation that someone like me gives to it, after the fact.

You see the metal door in the photo above? Here it is, a little closer.

There are a lot of these doors in Khasab, all related and yet, as far as I could tell, each one different.

You get the feeling that these literally are not designed, in the sense of there being working drawings that are then realized in metal. You have the sense, instead, that the door shape is a familiar frame, and that they do things with metal (and with color) inside that frame.

I spent a good part of the last week in Musandam Peninsula, which is the Arabian prong of the Strait of Hormuz. My real goal in going there was to see Kumzar, which is the outermost inhabited point, on the far side of an island off the peninsula, only 45 kilometers from Iran. Here are a couple of maps for purposes of orientation.

Do you see Kumzar in black at the top of the more detailed map, in one of the island’s inlets?  It is isolated, in the strict sense that you only get there by boat, even today. Their oil and water and other necessities all come by boat. And that means it is also a cultural and linguistic island.  The language, Kumzari, which is unwritten, is a mish-mash of Farsi, Arabic, and…Portuguese. The Portuguese ruled this coast 400 years ago. Kumzari is a linguistic archeology of this place. I wanted to hear it spoken.

I spent my first day on the peninsula walking (and walking, and walking) in Khasab, on the mainland. Even the small towns here are distinctly unfriendly to pedestrians. Things are not very modern, but they want to be modern, and so everything is designed for cars to use, in anticipation of some suburban future. It is a tiring place to walk around in. So when I saw a “Coffee Shop” appear on an otherwise fairly desolate coastal road, I approached with joy…only to find it closed. There was a group of locals standing around in front of it. I threw up my hands, the universal sign for frustrated coffee desire, and one of them who knew a little English told me he would take me in his car back to the souk where I could have some. He and a friend of his and I got into the car and started talking.

After the usual “where from?” preliminaries, he asked why I was there and I told them I was planning to go to Kumzar the next day. (To get to Kumzar you need to book a private boat all day, a really, really expensive proposition. I had gotten the tour guy down from his starting price of $500, but it was still going to be a lot.) When my new friend heard me say that, he laughed and said, “We are Kumzaris and we are going there tomorrow. You can come with us. There is a wedding.” Then he asked why I wanted to go, and when I said that I really wanted to hear the  language, he laughed and said, you can hear it right now, and proceeded to talk with his friend the rest of the way.

Now here are some highly unprofessional phonetic observations. Arabic is a dry language and one has the sense that words tend to be broken up into fairly regularly sized syllables. There is a staccato that is particular to it. Kumzari is much more liquid, and also much more irregular in its tempo. I recognized those long, elegant, slightly undulating A’s of Persian, closer to an O than our A but not an O at all. I was listening hard for the Portuguese, but I have to admit I didn’t hear it. That said, I often find Portuguese (not Brazilian Portuguese but Portuguese Portuguese) pretty hard to pin down anyway.

When he dropped me off he said, “Yes, we meet at the coffee shop where I saw you first time at 9:30 tomorrow and we will go in the boat about 10. You don’t pay me, but we are all day there. OK see you.” I think it’s fair to say that when he drove off he assumed I wouldn’t show up. And to be honest, I wasn’t certain I would, either. Did he really mean it? Wouldn’t I be intruding on the wedding? Should I really cancel the boat I had booked? What if I canceled that and then this fell through? What if his friends weren’t down with it?

Pretty soon, of course,  it was settling in my gut that I was going to give it a try.  I was being offered a Patrick Leigh Fermor-type experience and there was no way I was going to miss my chance at it. I spent the rest of the afternoon walking around in Khasab and getting increasingly excited about what the next day would bring.

I’m in Khasab, the Arabian side of the Strait of Hormuz, and I’m told that’s an Iranian boat. I also read today in the paper that there is increased Iranian submarine activity in these waters with all the rising tension. The Iranian boats on the surface are just small traders, bringing 30-40 goats each, which scamper onto Arabian hills. In return they bring, cigarettes, cell phones, and…me?

Here is one of the more rampant goats I encountered. Must be Iranian, by my reckoning.

This place is so low-key; the water is so placid. But right now you have to ask, are there submarines in there?

I made a new friend while sitting on this rock looking out over the Strait. Her name is Sarah.