Cosmopolitan Reflections: Critique and Imperial Afterlives in the British Museum’s Islamic Gallery

Since 2018, the Albukhary Foundation Gallery of the Islamic World has invited visitors to the British Museum to experience its treasures and reflect on their histories. The British Museum, and others like the Metropolitan, have turned to border-crossing ideas such as “Islamic art” to style themselves as keepers of shared humanity’s shared heritage. Such moves have provoked scholars critically museums’ reception and retention of the material inheritance of empire. In this paper, I argue that while the Islamic Gallery and similar spaces do serve a vital part in the 21st-century imaginary of the “universal museum,” they should not be simply understood as imperial treasure-troves rebranded as liberal institutions. Through its decolonial co-determination and self-critical representation, the Islamic Gallery rather serves as instruction to visitors in how to be reflective cosmopolitans, disquieted by, and yet at home in, a persistently unequal world.

The Islamic Gallery’s curators draw visitors into the historical imaginary of the cosmopolitan Muslim world through the support of the Yayasan Albukhary Foundation, a transnational Islamic NGO based in Malaysia. At first it may seem historically incongruous for a foundation to take donations from people in a former British colony and give them to the most prominent heir of the empire under religious auspices. I argue that the Foundation and the Museum are collaborating to represent the transcendent religion of Islam and its inclusive world order as a framework to appreciate the Gallery’s diverse materials. In focusing on the creative work done by reifying religious tradition my approach differs from Wendy Shaw, who has argued that the category “Islamic art” intellectually distorts the historical material reality from which museums dislocate objects. The Gallery prominently discusses the “People of the Book” (Arabic: ahl al-kitāb), the non-Muslim communities that maintained significant religious autonomy and rights under Muslim rule. The placard of the Hedwig beaker stresses that the prized artifact features such a degree of intersecting religious iconography that art historians cannot precisely determine its origins. The Gallery includes a silver yad used in reading the Torah as well as images of the Virgin Mary. The Gallery presents these objects as belonging to distinct communities and traditions, and as artifacts of a shared cosmopolitan culture. In this way, the Gallery presents an authorized reinterpretation of the British Museum itself, particular as imagined in the Declaration on the Importance and Value of Universal Museums in 2002. That document, signed by museums including the Louvre and the Met, argues these institutions should not restitute artifacts of colonialism because only these places can offer visitors the chance to experience humanity’s material diversity in one place all together.

However, the Museum also invites and models critical reflection on its own collections in the Gallery. The art historian Bénédicte Savoy has recently raised public awareness of how some museums deny history and feign ignorance in order to deny restitution as calls for restorative justice have become more prominent in the discourse of the metropolitan centers of former colonial powers. Though Savoy’s work has been illuminating, I argue in this paper that museums have continued to exercise their authority by institutionalizing and remodeling these critical agendas themselves. Visitors who take the audio tour “Collecting and Empire” can listen to curators discuss the geopolitical background of the stories of how the Museum acquired particular objects. In the spirit of this tour, the Gallery identifies tiles from the Musallah of Gawhar Shah in Herat, Afghanistan, which British forces destroyed in 1885, and names the British officer who took the tiles. The tour explains that British travelers took possession of the Nereid Monument from present-day Turkey, with the permission of Ottoman imperial officials in the 1840s. On one level, the Museum may appear self-serving by muddling the reductive popular conceit that it came by its artifacts through simple plunder. The Museum undergoes the exercise of self-criticism and finds itself not wholly innocent, but only one beneficiary among others in the imperial era. However more importantly, the Museum also promotes the idea that visitors are supposed to reflect critically on what they see in the context of past and present inequalities. In the Islamic Gallery, the Museum is able to present itself as the space best apt for the practice of critical appraisal and enjoyment of objects.

The Islamic Gallery also serves as a medial space between the general public and academic institutions where postcolonial and critical agendas have originated. Beginning with the US and British involvement in the Middle East in the early 21st century, the press increasingly popularized the academic critique of imperialism and orientalism. As the wars wore on, the public heard as much if not more about the histories of imperial politics and practice than the ongoing military actions themselves. In recent years’ “reckoning” with the legacies of slavery and racism in English-speaking countries, a liberalism defined by its focus on representation, genealogy, and cultural discourse became hegemonic in global cities such as London. Thomas Piketty has argued that this cultural liberalism has come about as Euro-American political parties of the left now depend on elite metropolitan voters whose economic interests directly conflict with older programs of redistribution. Moreover, as trans-Atlantic movements such as Black Lives Matter have stalled in the face of popular and structural opposition, cultural institutions such as universities and museums offer spaces of action for a generation of liberals who have come to understand autodidactic antiracism as politically transformative even as they have come to doubt the possibility of structural change. In the paper, I argue the Islamic Gallery gives new grounds to theorize the pedagogical power of museums today. Theorists such as Tony Bennett have interpreted museums primarily through their origins in the late-19th century elite effort to refine the affective, esthetic, and moral sensibilities of the newly-enfranchised lower classes. In this century, I argue that institutions like the British Museum exercise authority over the content and cultivation of a cosmopolitan liberal conscience, the conscience aspired to by visitors concerned with the correct critical disposition toward the treasures of the Islamic world.