There is a new exhibit on Iran at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London through 12 September. If you cannot make it to the exhibition, there is a brief trailer. You can also learn about the exhibition here and there is a slide show of 15 objects over 5,000 years here.
One of the rather silly parts of the coverage of the event on the website is having images with a woman or two women (perhaps to encourage masks…) observing the items, as in the following.
In 1928 my mother, who was 6 years old at the time, received a coloring book from a neighbour. It was called “Big Circus Painting and Crayoning Book” and published in Cleveland, Ohio. On most of the pages there was a color image with the same image below it meant to be colored or crayoned in. The image above seems rather distant from the idea of a circus, but other non-circus images are of the military, a grizzly bear and Scotland.
Newsweek has an interesting article by Christiane Gruber, an associate professor and director of graduate studies at the University of Michigan, about Muslim cartoons against ISIS. Check it out here.
A painting that says it all by Sulafa Hijazi on Arab Women Artists.
Check out the artwork of twenty-five year old Iranian artist, Maryam Sabbaghpour on Mouftah.
by Kathryn Zyskowski, Cultural Anthropology
Click here to read the five articles and interviews with the authors.
This collection gathers together five articles previously published in Cultural Anthropology, by Naveeda Khan, Hayder Al-Mohammad, Carolyn Rouse and Janet Hoskins, Kenneth George, and Arzoo Osanloo. The collection also includes interviews with the authors, who reflect on their work, as well a commentary on the whole collection from Charles Hirschkind. The articles engage with everyday aspects of living, negotiating, and constructing the world among contemporary Muslims. Moving beyond a focus on the aesthetics of dress, gender relations, or the text in Islam, the collection crosses national boundaries and thematic areas, touching on the immense diversity of nations, peoples, languages, and ideas that fall under the category of Islam. A broad array of ethnographic material is included in the collection: gathering to eat soul food in Los Angeles, navigating a kidnapping in post-invasion Iraq, a child’s relationship to a jinn (spirit/ghost) during sectarian violence in Karachi, discourses around justice in media and conversation surrounding a young man’s death sentence in Iran, and debates about the production of Islamic art in Indonesia.
Continue reading Everyday Islam
Image by Naji al-Ali. Painted on the Palestinian side of the separation barrier close to Bethlehem.
by Ammiel Alcalay, Warscapes,
August 11, 2014,
You know as well as I do that a people under occupation will
be unhappy, that parents will fear for the lives of their precious children,
especially when there is NOWHERE TO HIDE.
You know as well as I do that a husband’s memory of his wife forced to
deliver their child at a checkpoint will not be a happy one. You know as
well as I do that the form of her unborn child beaten to death in the womb
will never leave a mother’s mind. And you know as well as I do that a girl will
have cause to wonder at the loss of her grandfather, made to wait on his
way to the hospital, and she’ll have cause to cry at the bullet lodged
in her brother’s head — You know as well as I do that watching
someone who stole the land you used to till water their garden
while you hope some rain might collect to parch your weary throat
Turkey – “The sick man of Europe”, by John Leech, Punch, September 17, 1853
For a fascinating collection of cartoons, many from Punch, since 1853, check out the website “A Cartoon History of the Middle East,” compiled by Peter Casillas.