Spreading the word
Neil MacGregor on how an exhibition underlines the purpose and aims of the British Museum
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.
Read in the name of your Lord Who created. Read and your Lord is Most Honourable, who taught to write with the pen, taught man what he knew not.
Two texts from the Middle East, St John’s Gospel and the Holy Qur’an both proclaim the primacy and authority of words. The Evangelist’s Word is the eternal creativity of God which, in Jesus, became flesh: the Word Incarnate. In the passage from the Qur’an — the first of the Prophet Mohammed’s revelations — God announces his intention to use the written word to spread truth for all to read and learn: the Word Inscribed.
In Europe, we long ago divided the thinking word from the pleasing image. But in the Middle East, the word has remained something to behold, and the pleasure of well-known words can also be a delight for the eye — a favourite quotation, sacred or profane, can be played with on paper, and in the mind can be contemplated in every sense (see illustration).
The centuries-old link between the Islamic tradition and the written word can be seen in the eloquently simple pottery inkwell from Morocco in the form of a mosque. It is now in the Sainsbury African galleries of the British Museum (see illustration). Two floors above it, a new exhibition, Word into Art: artists of the modern Middle East (until 3 September), explores the latest manifestations of this Middle Eastern phenomenon. Based on the Museum’s collection of modern Middle Eastern art, put together over the past 25 years, it focuses on the expressive transformation of Arabic script into free-flowing form, be it in a contemporary take on traditional calligraphy or the wall-art of street politics. Graffiti takes its place alongside verses from Holy Scripture and quotations from poets and philosophers as sources of personal reflection, religious inspiration or political conflict.
The Museum’s icon in the Great Court this coming summer will be a six-metrehigh sculpture, ‘Blessed Tigris’, by the Iraqi artist Dia al-Azzawi. Made in response to the events of the past three years, it is inscribed with words from the poem addressed to the great river of Baghdad in 1962 by the celebrated Iraqi poet, journalist and political activist Mohammed Mahdi al-Jawahiri (d.1997): ‘O wanderer, play with a gentle touch; caress the lute softly and sing again, that you may soothe a volcano seething with rage and pacify a heart burning with pain.’ The vibrantly coloured sculptural shapes in al-Azzawi’s work echo the ziggurats of ancient Babylon — he was a student of archaeology — even as his use of Arabic writing encompasses later Islamic traditions of calligraphy. As a representation of the complexity and self-awareness of Iraq’s historic identities, and as a way for us to understand the intense feeling Baghdadis have for their beloved city and their anguish at its contemporary plight, it can hardly be surpassed.
This is a show which does not just teach truths about a foreign culture. For the varied cultures of the Middle East — Arabic, Turkish, Israeli, Iranian — are now more at home in London than any other city outside the region, and most within. Bringing together artists from right across the region, many of whom speak truth in exile to their governments and societies in terms of acute social and political critique, this is a show which reveals that London is now one of the intellectual and cultural capitals of the Middle East. We have heard much about ‘Londonistan’, caricatured as a resort for suspect aliens. We have not heard enough about how the world’s most diverse city provides vital intellectual resources for the reimagining and reconstruction of the region — on its own terms. To which end, the exhibition will have an afterlife on the virtual gallery of Birzeit University in Palestine. This will in many ways be as significant as its physical presence in the Museum, as it will there provide otherwise unattainable access for the next generation of artists from Ramallah to the cultural life of their region. This partnership makes sense precisely because that life is already present in the collection of the British Museum, and is in part sustained and produced here in this country.
This show is also a demonstration of what the British Museum has always been about. It was founded by Parliament in 1753 to stimulate and facilitate just this sort of curiosity, in order to enable citizens — and not just British citizens — to think about the new world that was opening up before them at an earlier stage of globalisation’s long story. It was also founded as a vehicle of self-investigation for a people who had only recently experienced the turmoil of civil war in the Jacobite rebellion of 1745, where issues of religious, political, and ethnic identity and allegiance were all at stake. To call it British was no neutral choice. It was British in that it was public and parliamentary, not private and royal. ‘British’ implied a sense of civic, not national, belonging, for a people looking for a common language of political behaviour around which to unite.
It is this founding role of the British Museum as a civic space dedicated to what we would now call post-conflict resolution and communal self-examination through confrontation with other cultures that is now shaping the thinking of museums worldwide.
As China opens itself once more to the world, the inheritors of an ancient and sophisticated culture naturally wish to compare and contrast its achievements with its peers at first hand. The British Museum exhibition, Treasures of the World’s Cultures, currently on show in Beijing and drawing crowds of 7,000 people a day, provides an opportunity for Chinese audiences to do so probably for the first time. This is more than about generating tourism for UK plc. How China understands the world around it will be a fundamental question for all of us in decades to come. Collections like the British Museum’s have an important role to play.
In Africa, the Ethiopian government is planning an open-air museum in the capital, Addis Ababa, designed to represent in one place the diversity of that country’s 74 different ethnic groups, as a means to generate understanding and tolerance in order to overcome the inter-regional tensions that have marred its recent history. The British Museum has been asked to assist in furthering what is as much a universally human as an essentially Ethiopian undertaking.
Further south in Nairobi, our Kenyan colleagues have staged a unique exhibition drawing on the collections of the British Museum and those of the National Museums of Kenya to tell a story for Kenyan audiences about the East African context of Kenya’s diverse cultures.
This project, though ground-breaking in many ways, is simply fulfilling the founding purpose of the British Museum collection, which was, in the words of the first director, Gowin Knight, that it should be for the use and advantage of all, ‘as well natives as foreign’ — whether in Nairobi, Bloomsbury, Addis Ababa or Beijing.
Neil MacGregor is director of the British Museum. For full details about the British Museum’s Middle East season see www.thebritishmuseum.ac.uk/middleeastnow In partnership with Dubai Holding.
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