No Art. No Future. For a Renewal of “Muslim Arts”

A specter haunts the world: cultural uniformity.

Through the financial, marketing, and technical vocabulary in the professional sphere. By the language of song and dress in the musical sphere. Through the topics and values that are proposed in the movie sphere. By the plant and animal ingredients, the recipes, and all the fast-food chains in the food sphere.

American-English culture acts like a steamroller that flattens the astonishing civilizational singularities that "human tribes" have developed over thousands of years of adaptation to their geographical, climatic, plant and animal environment.

Art is the highest concentration of a people cultural richness.

Inversely, the current fashionable art, exciting the media and arousing speculation, from Basel to Hong Kong, from Los Angeles to Sydney, this globalized "contemporary art" with its recycling of the 20th century wastes, represents the American-English cultural standardization, even to the point of succeeding in intellectual deception performances, as with the advertiser Andy Warhol, the visual artist Christo, the photographer Ai Wei Wei, the designer Keith Haring, the sculptor Jeff Koons.

Started in 1536 with the alliance between King Francis I and Suleiman the Magnificent of the Ottoman Empire, the curiosity of the French for "Oriental culture", even to the point of passion with "Egyptology" created following Napoleon's military expedition in 1798 with 167 scholars, was consolidated at the end of the 19th century with the work of Museum Directors, such as Gaston Migeon publishing in 1926 "Les Arts Musulmans" (pics), the 1971 exhibition at the Orangerie des Tuileries in Paris (pics), and even inspiring the jeweler Cartier in the creation of fantastic jewelry in the 1910s (pics).

Qatar initiated a rediscovery of Arab and Muslim arts by inaugurating the #MuseumofIslamicArt in Doha on November 22, 2008, followed on November 11, 2017 by the opening of the #LouvreAbuDhabi, then on April 10, 2018 by a Saudi-French partnership to promote the spectacular site of #AlUla in Saudi Arabia, and soon by the opening of the majestic #Grand_Egyptian_Museum near the pyramids of Giza.

These implementations to preserve and promote "Muslim Arts" are precious and represent hope regarding the terrible destruction suffered by Arab countries with 5,000 years of civilization, such as Iraq following the American military intervention of March 2003, like Syria following the awful civil war that began in March 2011 and encouraged by foreign powers, as in Yemen following the Houthi insurrection from 2004 to 2014.

Beyond that, Arab leaders and Arab youth will have to make a permanent effort to take the "Muslim Arts" out of the Museums, in order to draw inspiration from their cultural roots to give a breathtaking and influential singularity to the architectural, technological and cultural achievements that the "Fossil Fuels Era" allows them to finance.