“I don’t think one can avoid the influences of one’s place of birth,” says Samina Quraeshi.“You are raised [in a certain] way and the colors and the textures and all of the sensory experience you are surrounded by are etched in your brain.”
Despite the highly personal nature of her art, the work has broader social implications, namely to add nuance to what she sees as a typically monolithic portrayal of Islam. In conjunction with her new book published by the Peabody Press—“Sacred Spaces: A Journey with the Sufis of the Indus,”—the pieces on view portray the multiplicity found in Sufi traditions. “This book and exhibition is a personal and artistic act of resistance against those forces both within Islam and outside of it that seek to deny such nuances, to silence the voices of mystics, and to distill the diversity of Islamic piety into something essential, unitary, and uniform,” Quraeshi said in her speech at the opening of “Sacred Spaces.”
The Peabody exhibition was originally intended to be a display of her photographic documentation of the Muslim sect. However, Quraeshi felt that the photographs would have alone failed to portray a holistic view of Sufism, one that would be able to educate a Western viewer.
“I was struggling to express Sufism, and I felt that the photographs were not enough,” the artist says. “I wanted to express the emotional experience, and that’s where the art came in.”
ESCHEWING THE LABEL
While Quraeshi believes it unorthodox to use contemporary art to a humanizing anthropological end, such is a necessary gesture to accurately depict the many facets of Islam to a Western audience.
“I want these images to speak across the barriers of cultural mores, linguistic obstacles, and obscure practices,” Quraeshi said at the exhibition opening.
But despite her efforts to inform the Harvard community about Sufism, Quraeshi does not want to be considered an Islamic artist. “It’s a sensitive subject because of all of the horrible things being done in the name of Islam,” she says. “It’s sort of like calling a woman a female artist. You are either an artist or you are not.”
This emphasis demonstrates Quraeshi’s nuanced approach to Islamic culture; her rejection of broad categorizations and the accentuation of the personal in her art sensitize her viewers to the complexities of an important world religion. Ultimately, this even-handed approach—balancing accessibility with personal aesthetic value—is important for a responsible ethnological presentation of Islam.
“I think the goal of the Peabody is to represent the traditions of man,” Quraeshi says. “My work is the living tradition of an area of the world that is very underrepresented. The exhibition is very much in the idea of inclusion and exposing the students to not only the history of mankind but also the living tradition as it is practiced today.”
— Staff writer Meredith S. Steuer can be reached at msteuer@fas.harvard.edu.