calendario eventi  :: 

X

8/10/2007

Islam in Africa

Sam Fogg Ltd, London

An Exhibition of Works from Saharan and sub-Saharan Africa

Sam Fogg will hold a groundbreaking exhibition Islam in Africa at his gallery at 15d Clifford Street, London W1, from Tuesday 9 to Friday 26 October 2007. The exhibition will showcase the diversity and richness of the Islamic art of Saharan and sub-Saharan Africa. The first of its kind in the UK, the exhibition will include art objects and manuscripts from African Islamic traditions that have been almost entirely overlooked by major collections.

East Africa

In East Africa, Islam spread along the trade routes that connected the coast of Africa with the Arabian Peninsula and India. Arab merchants established settlements as early as the 10th century, which grew into cosmopolitan mercantile states such as Mogadishu, Barawa, Mombasa, Malindi, Kilwa and Zanzibar. The arrival of the Portuguese at the end of the 15th century heralded the decline of the city states; the Portuguese sought to divert the trade, and during the course of the 16th century succeeded in establishing political and mercantile hegemony. This only came to an end at the turn of the 18th century when the Omani sultanate succeeded in ousting the Portuguese from Mombasa and all the remaining coastal cities to the north. Omani control was sporadic, and for much of the 18th century the city states were de facto independent while recognising the authority of the Ottoman Sultan. In the first half of the 19th century Sultan Sayyid Sa'id re-established Omani control over much of coastal East Africa and in 1840 transferred his capital to Zanzibar, which eventually became the seat of an independent sultanate.

The Sultanate of Zanzibar presided over a lucrative trade in cloves and other African raw goods, particularly ivory. The influence of the British, who were sailing to India round the African coast and were keen to protect their maritime and mercantile interests from the Germans, was on the increase. It was from Zanzibar that the explorer David Livingstone started his second African expedition to search for the source of the Nile. A spectacular wooden panel, inscribed with Qur'anic verses intended to ward off malign influences, by repute came from Livingstone's house there (fig. 1). Such panels, as well as carved doors, are a distinctive feature of the architecture of Stonetown, Zanzibar's capital.

Islam also spread along the trade routes through the plains below the Ethiopian highlands that brought slaves from the interior to the coastal cities. Until the middle of the 16th century the Ethiopian plains were home to a cluster of sultanates that resisted and threatened the Abyssinian Empire. After the defeat of the greatest of these, the Adal Sultanate, at the hands of a joint Portuguese-Abyssinian army in 1543, the Islamic presence in Ethiopia for the next three centuries was restricted almost entirely to the city of Harar. The city was the site of an independent emirate from the middle of the 17th century and resisted incorporation into the Abyssinian Empire until 1887.

From the early years of the Harari Emirate is a beautifully copied and illuminated Qur'an, dated 1773, in its original distinctive Harari binding (fig. 2). Very few such early East African Qur'ans have survived. Like the other examples, this Qur'an is in a bold angular script with a commentary that zig-zags across the margins of the pages. These features recall the so-called 'Bihari' Qur'ans of 15th and 16th century North India and pose fascinating questions concerning cultural transfer between India, South Arabia and the East African coast.

Other items from Harari culture include wooden boards inscribed with verses from the Qur'an (figs. 3 & 4). Qur'an boards, found across the whole of Saharan and sub-Saharan Africa, were used as a means of teaching the Qur'an. Once the pupil had finished inscribing the verses, the surface of the board would be wiped clean. Some examples, though, are permanently inscribed and bear talismans, constituting another of the many examples of the blend of sacred text and ritual object that make sub-Saharan Islamic culture particularly rich in tangible forms of worship.

West Africa

Following the Islamic conquest of North Africa in the 7th and 8th centuries, Islam spread down the west coast of Africa along the trade routes that brought salt, slaves and, above all, gold, to the Mediterranean and beyond. Conversion began immediately among the Berber and African tribes that lived in the regions surrounding these routes, and in the medieval period Islam became the official religion of several great African trading empires such as the Mali and Songhay Empires in the Western Savannah, and the Kanem and Bornu Empires in Chad and Western Nigeria. Islam was taken up by the Hausa people of Northern Nigeria and Niger as early as the 11th century, though conversion was very gradual and Islamic practices often sat alongside indigenous beliefs. The only partial conversion of the Hausa people, especially in the countryside, provided some of the ideological impetus for the foundation of an empire by the Fulani people, who led a series of jihads throughout the region in the early 1800s.

Despite the longstanding presence of Islam in Saharan and sub-Saharan Africa, very few manuscripts dating from before the 18th century have survived outside libraries in Islamic centres such as Timbuktu. During the 17th and 18th centuries, a distinctly West African style of manuscript copying and illumination emerged, marked by bold geometric decoration in earth colours and the use of a distinctive variation of the North African Maghribi script, often called 'Sudani', from the Arabic word for the region 'al-Sudan', or 'Land of the Blacks'.

The exhibition includes several manuscripts showing the development of the Western Sudani style through the ages. An early example is an 18th century copy of the medieval Spanish author al-Kala'i's Life of the Prophet (fig. 5). The most striking feature of the manuscript is the numerous full-page illuminated panels filled with a variety of patterns in ochre, yellow and red. The ingenuity of the designs makes this manuscript a showcase for the marriage of the Islamic tradition of geometric decoration and the West African genius for pattern.

A further development of the tradition is seen in a costly and pristine 19th century copy of al-Jazuli's pilgrimage manual, the Dala'il al-Khayrat (fig. 6). Similar in format and design to the Life of the Prophet, the illuminated panels and lettering are brighter and make use of brilliant green. The quality of the script and illumination is matched by the superb leather binding with tooled decorative patterns, and a marvellous carrying case decorated with designs made from different coloured pieces of leather. Representing the very culmination of the tradition is an early 20th century printed Qur'an, the large, abstract and very bold patterns of which are the fullest and most colourful expression of Hausa Qur'anic illumination (fig. 7).

The Saharan fringes of the Sudan are represented in the exhibition by a magnificent 19th century Berber minbar (pulpit), probably from the Atlas region (fig. 8). With its original polychrome and over a metre and a half high, this is a splendid illustration of a North African Islamic tradition rendered in a distinctive and colourful local idiom. The minbar was acquired from a Paris jewellers, where it had been since the 1960s.

Opening 9 october 2007

Sam Fogg
15d Clifford Street, London
Free admission

stampa

permanent link