Tradition and Tolerance

In Modernism and the Art of Muslim South Asia, Iftikhar Dadi demonstrates how Pakistani artists draw on a range of traditional and contemporary aesthetic practices and intellectual currents. Consistent with Finbarr Barry Flood’s criticism of the post-9/11 mobilization of “Islamic art” against neo-fu...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Religion and the arts
Main Author: Mehta, Suhaan (Author)
Format: Electronic Article
Language:English
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Published: Brill 2016
In: Religion and the arts
Further subjects:B Pakistani writing in English Nadeem Aslam The Wasted Vigil Bihzad Persianate miniature Sufism neo-fundamentalism secularism
Online Access: Volltext (Verlag)
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Summary:In Modernism and the Art of Muslim South Asia, Iftikhar Dadi demonstrates how Pakistani artists draw on a range of traditional and contemporary aesthetic practices and intellectual currents. Consistent with Finbarr Barry Flood’s criticism of the post-9/11 mobilization of “Islamic art” against neo-fundamentalism, Dadi argues that Pakistani artistic works cannot be reduced to performing an anti-hegemonic function. Here, I use Dadi and Flood’s claims to analyze the Pakistani-British author Nadeem Aslam’s mediation of the Persianate miniaturist Bihzad (1465–1535) in his novel The Wasted Vigil (2008). While Aslam reconfigures Bihzad to affirm and interrogate Buddhist and Islamic practices in Afghanistan, he nonetheless privileges a secular, aesthetic critique of neo-fundamentalism. Moreover, athough the scriptures are a source of creativity for Aslam, when decoupled from the arts they mostly inspire violence. This creates a binary between artistic and textual forms of Islam, essentializing art as an embodiment of tolerance.
ISSN:1568-5292
Contains:In: Religion and the arts
Persistent identifiers:DOI: 10.1163/15685292-02003004