Creative geographies of Islam: the case of Islamic and traditional visual arts scene in Istanbul

Abstract

While research on geographies of creativity have proliferated in the last few years, there has been scant attention to religious cultural and artistic practices, particularly in the context of the Middle East. This research seeks to address such gap with a focus on the Islamic and traditional visual arts scene which has flourished in Istanbul in the past decade and a half along with the rise of political Islam in Turkey. Rendered obsolete through the Western-oriented and secular cultural politics since the early republican era, art forms such as Arabic calligraphy ( hat), miniature ( minyatür), and illumination ( tezhip) have now found currency as ‘authentically Turkish and Islamic’ in an art scene that emerged alongside Islamist politics. This paper examines the trajectory of Islamic and traditional visual arts through the lens of cultural and creative industries starting from the cultural politics of Islamic urban governance through the 1990s and 2000s, and to the emergence of an Islamist-nationalist authoritarianism in the past decade. In doing so, it aims to situate Islamic and traditional visual arts on the map in studies on geographies of creativity, particularly in the Middle Eastern and Islamic context, where limited attention has been paid to cultural and artistic practices. With ethnographic reflections from the field, it highlights the internal dynamics of an art scene and the potential it bears in unsettling the core concepts of Turkish Islamic nationalism from within.

Conjunctions of Islam: rethinking the geographies of art and piety through the notebooks of Ahmet Süheyl Ünver

“…the mosque and the headscarf) and, more importantly, limits our ability to engage with the multiple trajectories that shape contemporary understandings and practices of Islam. Alongside other recent contributions to the 'creative geographies' of Islam, 113 this article's attentiveness to the geographically and historically contextual practice of Islam offers one model for studying Islam in new ways. There are, of course, many possible conjunctions of Islam, many other ways of conceptualizing Islam, and many other ways of reading Ünver.…”

“…In Turkey today, forms like calligraphy, paper marbling and illumination are key parts of what Hulya Arik has recently termed the 'creative geographies of Islamism'. 7 Precisely for that reason, Ünver was posthumously awarded the Presidential Culture and Arts 'Loyalty Award' (Vefa Ödülü) in 2016. 8 Yet as I argue in this paper, a more nuanced geographical engagement with Ünver's archive complicates any simple equation of art, Islam, and Turkishness.…”