By Fran Gillespie
WIDELY regarded as the greatest authority on Islamic art in the world, Prof Oleg Grabar visited Qatar’s Museum of Islamic Art this week and gave a lecture on art and museums, attended by students, museum staff and academics as well as by members of the public.
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Acknowledging that Qatar’s new museum is the first devoted solely to Islamic art anywhere in the world, Prof Grabar said that in the last two decades there has been a profound change in the way in which the West viewed Islamic art and that this has had an effect on museums and the teaching on the subject at universities.
Only very recently have Western scholars begun to realise, for example, that Islamic art is not confined, say, solely to the area between Cordoba and Samarkand; it is also a product of African nations where there are thousand of Muslims and of other great regions such as China. In Russia Tartar mosques have a very distinctive style and there is a flourishing tradition of art. Malaysia and Indonesia too have rich artistic traditions.
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Prof Grabar is the author of 18 books, some of which are on sale at the shop in the museum, and of more than 140 articles. He has received honours from all over the world for his unequalled scholarship, and in 1980 was named the first Aga Khan Professor of Islamic Art and Architecture at Harvard University.
Ismailimail 