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11 Oct, 4 tweets, 2 min read
Congratulations @wendymk for winning Honorable Mention for the Albert Hourani Book Award at #MESA2020! This is only the second time an Islamic art historian has won the prize, and it couldn't go to a more paradigm-shifting book. Read it.
"Professor Shaw’s book is a bold and successful attempt to reconceptualize the historiography of Islamic art outside the current Euro-centric and colonial paradigm."
mesana.org/awards/awardee…
"To do so Shaw takes “Islam” seriously as a category of analysis, arguing that it drives the production of Islamic art, rather than being incidental to it. In the process she places in generative tension the Islamic and Western paradigms for understanding agency and subjectivity"
Wendy Meryem Kural Shaw, What is 'Islamic' Art: Between Religion and Perception (Cambridge: 2019)
cambridge.org/core/books/wha…

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More from @stephenniem

Dr. Stephennie Mulder Profile picture
11 Oct
There are so many things wrong with this analysis that I'm not sure where to begin. First, Dune is so patently *not* inspired by the fall of Roman Empire - Herbert calls it The Galactic Padishah Empire for a reason. It's not subtle. Not everything in history is Rome, Tom.
The idea that early Muslims would have understood the "fall of Rome" is equally anachronistic. The early Arabs experienced the Roman empire as a continuous & living entity: what we call (equally anachronistically) Byzantium, they called Rome, al-Rūm. hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?is…
And not only did they view the Eastern Roman Empire as a living entity, it was a vibrant source of inspiration: influencing art, scholarship, and knowledge production in the early Islamic period. halshs.archives-ouvertes.fr/halshs-0081740…
Read 5 tweets
Dr. Stephennie Mulder Profile picture
11 Oct
'Herbert’s future is one where “Islam” is...a part of the future universe at every level. The world of Dune cannot be separated from its language...Even jihad, a complex, foundational principle of Herbert’s universe, is flattened – and Christianised – to crusade.'
'And, of course, writing in the 1950s and 1960s, the jihad of Frank Herbert’s imagination was not the same as ours [but] exhibits...influence of Sufism and its reading of jihad, where, unlike in a crusade, a leader’s spiritual transformation determined the legitimacy of his war.'
'When a director...casts people of colour out of the future, ...casts Islam out of the future, they reveal their own expectations and anxieties. They reveal an imagination at ease with genocide...with a whitewashed future that does not have any of the “mess” of the contemp world'
Read 4 tweets
Dr. Stephennie Mulder Profile picture
22 Jul
Outside Cairo is the City of the Dead, a vast, sprawling necropolis ornamented with thousands of exquisite funerary structures dedicated to Sultans, scholars, and venerable forbears of the Egyptian nation. Now a construction project dooms part of it to destruction. Please sign.
And though its domed mausolea are exquisite, the City of the Dead is very much alive. Since the medieval era, its villa-like structures have been inhabited by generations of Cairene residents. Today, over half a million people live in the cemetery. huffpost.com/entry/city-of-…
If this thread has made you curious about the Qarafa, its history, and its people, read Gaila El Kadi's wonderful Architecture for the Dead from @AUCPress
aucpress.com/product/archit…
Read 7 tweets
Dr. Stephennie Mulder Profile picture
29 Jun
If you or someone you know are among those who dismiss the threat of #COVID19 because there's a 99.75% recovery rate, listen up.

My mom is fairly sure she had COVID in March. She was never tested (because there was no testing at the time) but she had all the symptoms:
Profound exhaustion, a migraine-like headache, crushing chest pain, and a cough. She was sick for six weeks.

Since being sick, my famously unflappable mother, habitual climber of mountains and inveterate world traveler, has suffered with intense, crippling anxiety.
Then, about two weeks ago, she went to the dentist for a checkup and they took her blood pressure. It was sky high - 220/98. The dentist told her no way he was doing her cleaning and she should go straight to the emergency room. She did, and they ran some tests.
Read 11 tweets
Dr. Stephennie Mulder Profile picture
28 Jun
Oops! Looks like someone hasn't read the UNESCO 1970 convention. Manuscripts are in fact explicitly protected, as are *cough* incunabula.

Let's have a thread about provenance, UNESCO, and the priciest Qur'an ever sold: 2 days ago at Christie's for $8M.

portal.unesco.org/en/ev.php-URL_…
OK enough shade ;-) In this thread I'm going to respond to the points raised by @incunabula one by one. I don't agree with their reading of the legal or ethical boundaries. But I do agree that having a public conversation about this is a good thing.
ICYMI @incunabula is responding to my thread about the incomplete provenance for this breathtaking 15th c. Timurid Qur'an on Ming colored and gold painted paper that just sold at Christie's for that unprecedented sum.
Read 33 tweets
Dr. Stephennie Mulder Profile picture
23 Jun
Unless they want to deal in looted objects, collectors, dealers, and auction houses have to get serious about transparent #provenance. A few facts @Yael_Rice and I have gathered over the past week about the sale in which this stunning, "no-provenance" provenance Qur'an appears.
What's "no-provenance" provenance? I coined this neologism last week to refer to any ostensible 'provenance' that doesn't live up to accepted international standards. #noprovenanceprovenance
Wait, but what's provenance? It's the history of ownership & sale of an object, ideally from the time of its removal from country of origin to the present. Having a complete provenance helps assure dealers & collectors that an object was removed from its country of origin legally
Read 18 tweets

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