Author: Fabian Kröger. German version published on September 26, 2013 in Telepolis.
When the Western media talks about Islam, it is mainly about Islamism, terrorism and threats. Although European art has been strongly influenced by Islamic art and architecture, Europe does not integrate Islamic history into its own grand narrative. The fact that there is an ancient tradition of cultural exchange between the Orient and the Occident is almost forgotten in times of the “war on terror”.
Since December 2005, the world’s largest virtual museum Discover Islamic Art [1] has been providing an insight into the cultural links between Europe and the Islamic world. “We want to counter the horror images from the Islamic world,” explains Günther Schauerte, Deputy Director General of the Berlin State Museums involved in the project.
The Virtual Museum of Islam showcases 13 centuries of Islamic art and architecture, from the time of the Syrian caliphs (661-750) to the end of the Ottoman Empire (1299-1922). To this end, 40 museums from 39 European and North African countries and the Middle East have joined forces. Each participating museum selected certain exhibits to be shown in a permanent exhibition on the website. The project is mainly financed by the Euromed Heritage Fund [2] of the European Union.
The museum has now opened its latest expansion with press conferences in 14 countries at the same time: 18 virtual special exhibitions show visitors various aspects of Islamic civilization and its influence on the cultural identity of Europeans in eight languages. The virtual offer is complemented by the illustrated book publication “Islamic Art on the Mediterranean”, published by Ernst Wasmuth Verlag.
The special feature of the online museum is that all works of art can be related to each other regardless of their location. For the first time, historical connections between artworks that are located far from their place of origin due to colonialist art theft, purchases by collectors or even donations can be made visible.
Even a virtual museum that brings works together cannot hide the fact that it remains a political issue as to why which artwork is on display where and in which place.
How did the façade of the Jordanian desert palace end up in the Berlin museum?
The place remains important on the internet too: many treasures of Islamic art found their way into European museums towards the end of the 18th/19th century as part of colonialism. One of the best-known examples is the façade of the Jordanian desert castle of Mshatta [3] from the middle of the 8th century, of which the Berlin Museum of Islamic Art is particularly proud. It was donated by the Ottoman Sultan Abdul Hamid II to Kaiser Wilhelm II in 1903 and was incorporated into the Kaiser-Friedrich-Museum in Berlin – today’s Bodemuseum – which was under construction at the time. Only the foundations [4] of the 1260-year-old palace can still be found today in Jordan, around 30 km south of the capital Amman. But how did this gift come about? Why did the mshatta façade come to Germany? You learn very little about this at the Discover Islamic Art Museum.
German interest in Islamic art arose at the end of the 19th century in connection with imperial Oriental policy: Abdul Hamid II, Sultan of the Ottoman Empire, fell out with the British in 1882 after the latter had occupied his territory on the Nile. In the dispute with London, the Sultan hoped for German support. As the Germans had no colonies in the Middle East, they enjoyed great trust in the Ottoman Empire. In 1889, Kaiser Wilhelm II embarked on his first trip to the Orient. The German Empire hoped to gain access to raw materials and sales markets, while the Ottoman Empire was primarily interested in military cooperation.
The German emperor’s trip to the Orient
In this situation, Privy Councillor Bode, the later founder of the Islamic Museum in Berlin, asked Emperor Wilhelm II to ask Abdul Hamid to hand over the façade, which had only been rediscovered in the 19th century. Paris and London were already demonstrating their imperial greatness with large national art collections – now Berlin was to follow suit. The cultural ideological goal of the German National Museum on the Museum Island was to show the Germans as the “true executors of ancient perfection” [5] through a close juxtaposition of the antiquities department and “German” art. It was also intended to provide an aesthetic stimulus for artistic encounters with the “foreign”.
The Islamic original is in Europe, the Western copy in the Orient
Today, for the Museum of Islamic Art in Berlin, the mshatta façade is “a symbol of the peaceful and friendly exchange between ancient, Islamic and European culture.” In contrast to other exhibits, however, there were never any demands for the return from Jordan.
Nevertheless, in 2004, the Directorate General of the National Museums in Berlin commissioned – perhaps as symbolic compensation? – a replica (6) of the mshatta façade on a scale of 1:15, which – after a stopover in the exhibition Faces of the Orient [7] in Bonn – found its final home in the newly founded National Museum in the capital Amman as a gift to the Kingdom of Jordan. The fact that the Islamic original is in Europe, while only a Western copy can be seen in the Orient, does not seem to be a problem in this case.
Islamic art in the West: looted, bought or donated?
The situation is different in the case of the most famous monument on Berlin’s Museum Island, the Berlin Pergamon Altar. In 1998,[8] the Turkish Minister of Culture, Istemihan Talay, demanded the return of the altar to the Turkish city of Bergama, and in 2001 he renewed this demand. However, the Berlin museum administration is not interested. After all, the German government and the Ottoman Empire had agreed in 1879 to allow the Pergamon Altar to be brought to Berlin for restoration in exchange for 20,000 gold marks.
Carl Humann and Wilhelm Dörpfeld had spent eight years since 1878 uncovering the ruins of the altar on the castle hill of Pergamon, which was considered one of the seven wonders of the world in ancient times. The excavation saved the altar from the inhabitants of Bergamo at the time, who used the marble as a building material. Today, a replica can be seen at the original site in Pergamon.
Restitution of looted cultural assets?
The debate about looted occidental art was last held in Germany on the occasion of the 500th anniversary of the conquest of America. At that time, the development aid organization medico international [9] launched a campaign for the return of looted cultural assets, which it called “The burning of the great library”. The campaign emphasized that it was not just about objects: cultural memory had also been appropriated with the stolen cultural assets.
Only in the rarest – and most blatant – cases have European states given in to the request of looted countries to return certain exhibits. For decades, for example, Italy and Ethiopia fought over the “Obelisk of Axum”, which had been looted by Italian colonial troops in 1937 and taken to Italy. It was not until the mid-1990s that the government in Rome decided to return the 24-metre-high obelisk [10]. In April 2005, a Russian Antonov aircraft brought the stone colossus back to its African country of origin.
The fact that the trade in looted art is a lucrative business even in post-colonial times is shown by the trial against the long-time curator of the world-famous Getty Museum in Los Angeles, Marion True. She is alleged to have bought Italian art objects looted since the 1960s for the museum. The former Italian Minister of Culture Antonio Paolucci is demanding clarification on a total of 40 objects worth 25 million dollars that are in the possession of the Getty.
Farewell to Orientalism?
Every museum for Islamic art is confronted with prefabricated clichés about the Orient: The initiators of the museum are aware that they are not operating in a space out of politics. “The equality of the participating museums on the global market for cultural heritage is an important political message of the project,” emphasizes Eva Schubert, Director of the non-profit organization Museum Ohne Grenzen, which founded Discover Islamic Art [11]. Every country must present art, culture and history from its own viewpoint and local perspective.
This is intended to take account of the debate on the Western construction of the Orient, which was initiated as early as 1978 by the US-Palestinian literary scholar Edward Said, who died four years ago. In his work “Orientalism. Western Conceptions of the Orient”, Said describes how the West – and Orientalism in particular – first constructed an image of the Orient in order to then be able to differentiate itself from this image. In this sense, the Orient and Islam do not exist at all; they are the sum of imaginary attributions and form a reference system that was created for the purpose of Western claims to dominance. Said emphasized [12] his point of view once again in 2003 with regard to the Iraq war:
“Without the systematically produced feeling that these distant peoples in the Middle East are not like “us” and do not uphold “our” values – and this is precisely the core of the Orientalism dogma – there would have been no war.”
Edward Said
While Said still conceived the “Orient” as a very static, one-sided projection, invented by the “Occident” for the purpose of securing power, more recent research points to a multitude of dynamic “Orientalisms” that criss-cross the intercultural field. This is currently evident, for example, in the fascination with orientalist imagery, which is celebrated in exhibitions and illustrated books. Although the old Oriental studies of the 19th century have been fundamentally renewed by sociology, anthropology and political science, exoticist, culturalist and even openly racist images of the Orient are still very present and powerful. Nevertheless, it is not only Western dominance that is on the agenda today, but also the scope for action of the “others”. These are the so-called “postcolonial studies”, which now also inquiry into the images of Europe that exist in colonized countries.
Defamiliarizing the view of one’s own roots
In this mined field, a museum like Discover Islamic Art must therefore ask itself how Islamic culture can be exhibited at all after the criticism of Orientalism. After all, the question of what connects and what divides Western and neighboring Islamic culture is particularly explosive today. A decisive factor in the communication of Islamic cultural history – to which the Museum Discover Islamic Art is also committed – is the abandonment of a polarizing or romantic culturalism that sees different cultures as opposing closed units. In contrast, a concept of culture must be strengthened that emphasizes the diverse historical interdependencies between Islam and the Occident.
Claus-Peter Haase, Director of the participating Museum of Islamic Art in Berlin’s Pergamon Museum, says:
“The aim is to direct our gaze towards something that is very often sold to us as foreign. The aim is to alienate the view of one’s own roots.”
Claus-Peter Haase
Although formulated tentatively here, this approach points in the right direction. For even today, binary attributions of Occident and Orient, first and third world, the “West and the rest” still characterize the perception of the post-colonial world order. In a situation in which the invocation of ethnic and cultural identity produces separatisms and wars worldwide, it is therefore of central importance to overcome the dichotomous distinction between Orient and Occident, between “own” and “foreign”, which 19th century orientalism helped to create. The museum makes an important contribution to this.
Islamic art – a Western invention?
However, visitors to the museum’s website will not find an answer to the fundamental question of what Islamic art actually is today. Is every art form practiced by a Muslim “Islamic art”? Don’t Jewish or Christian artists living in Arab countries also produce “Islamic art”? Are the buildings of architect Zaha Hadid or the films of Elia Suleiman “Islamic art”?
The fact that the concept of Islamic art is an invention of 19th century Western art history is often ignored. In Berlin, for example, well-heeled private collectors and archaeologists can be identified as actors. “Through the Berlin example, art history actually only began to divide Islamic art into periods and regions in the way that we are gradually passing on as established knowledge today,” confirms [13] Claus-Peter Haase. What we know about Islamic art today therefore stems primarily from Western efforts to canonize it in the museum environment. Even if this is not morally reprehensible, the Western view often lacks self-reflection, the willingness to make cultural conflicts and ruptures visible – something that is traditionally completely alien to the museum, which is conceived as a place of worship.
Reappraising the history of the Western musealization of Islamic art could also be in the self-interest of European museums – because it is also a history of disappointment. The expected public success often did not materialize. Visitors could learn something about the social and cultural history of Western collecting from the history of an art object. If it became clear why it came where and under what circumstances, who was interested in it and when, and who was not interested in it and why, the visitor could locate the broad field of Islamic art much more vividly in the present. Some Western visitors to “Discover Islamic Art” may ask themselves: was no one in the Islamic countries interested in the works of art that Western archaeologists bought up or simply took with them? And what is the relationship between the collections of Islamic art in the West and the museums that have since been established in Islamic countries today?
(Translated from German by the author with the help of DeepL on March 2025).
