Leighton House

I'd recommend that everyone taking this course visit Leighton House near Holland Park (details here: http://www.rbkc.gov.uk/LeightonHouseMuseum/general/). We'd have visited on the day we're going to look at the Islamic collection at the V&A, but unfortunately the one day a week that the museum is closed is a Tuesday. Anyhow, my visit made me think about two things:

1. First, walking through the Arab Hall at Leighton House is a great tonic for the spirits of anyone who feels battered down by contemporary rhetoric and debate about the Arab-Islamic world. If there are two phrases from such debates which express current ignorance and intellectual poverty, they are "Londonistan" and "the Arab Street". The latter phrase numbs the mind in its conviction that there is some kind of Arab mentality which can be discerned and which can then ground American/British policy, whilst the odious "Londonistan" debases the contributions of Arabs and Muslims to the cosmopolitanism of this city, preferring to trust the slurs of intelligence services in Washington and Paris over the experiences of Londoners. What's more, it turns what should be a source of pride into a cause for shame, for it is indeed admirable that London has been the home of most dissident movements in the Arab-Islamic world for decades, and just as we now celebrate, in a heritage-y kind of way, Marx working in the British Museum, and Lenin at his printing press in Clerkenwell, we need to reclaim the positive story of Arab-Islamic London. So, to go back to Leighton House, the feeling I had on walking into the Arab Hall was just the kind of celebratory sensation I have on walking down Edgware Road late at night, or sitting amongst families eating at Abu Zaad in Shepherd's Bush: of the positive contribution of Arabs and Muslims to this city.

2. The Arab Hall also got me thinking about what has probably been the dominant debate within the academic study of "the Middle East" for nearly thirty years, namely Edward's Said's critique of Orientalism. Leighton, like many of his peers, was in many ways a classic nineteenth-century Orientalist, in that his paintings display a passion for an exotic other and a desire to represent that alterity to audiences back home. Yet, when one stands in the Arab Hall, filled as it is with tiles which Leighton brought back with him from Syria, the sensation I had was more one of awe than a sense of approaching some kind of pastiche. In a relatively small space, Leighton and his collaborators made a space which is a a form of summary of the vocabulary of Islamic architecture, from the interior use of water, the tiles, the carpets, the mashrabiya screens, the dome, the use of geometry, the mosaics, the use of columns and the muqarnas. Looking back at that list, I can see see how this might be regarded as a classic example of Orientalist excess in its desire to describe Islamic culture, rather than understand it, but the feeling I had in the room was of Leighton's evident respect for the art of what he evidently regarded as a truly great culture. Now such discussions are tricky, because we ought to try to establish whether a typical Orientalist gambit was at play here, where respect was accorded to Islamic culture in the past as a means of denigrating the present state of Islamic civilization, but this room also made me recall that when Said wrote about the Orientalists, he had a great deal of admiration for some of their texts. Some of his followers have created an image of Said as a scourge of the west, but he was no such thing; simply an elegant critic of the political consequences of art and ideals.
So can we now enjoy Leighton's Arab Hall in an uncomplicated fashion, impressed by the faithfulness of its reproduction of the styles of a great culture? My answer is yes, because although I haven't conveyed the full complexity of is construction (its relations to Sicilian Islamic styles, and the manner in which Aitchison, Leighton's architect, used British crafts to fit together this collection of Syrian, Turkish and other artefacts), walking into this room one felt like one had walked into a great building in the Arab-Islamic world.