Muslim Hate of Art and Artists

Maldives marine artwork destroyed for being a 'threat to Islamic unity'

Sea sculpture by artist Jason deCaires Taylor demolished by authorities after court rules human forms depicted in the work are anti-Islamic

The Guardian
9-24-2018

A new sculptural work, Coralarium, created by artist and environmentalist Jason deCaires Taylor, was demolished last week after it was deemed anti-Islamic. The semi-submerged artwork was criticised by religious leaders and scholars in the Maldives, where Islam is the official religion. The depiction of human figures in art is discouraged under Islamic law.

The government ordered the destruction of the artwork, after a court ruled it to be a threat to “Islamic unity and the peace and interests of the Maldivian state”, the Maldives Independent reported, despite the authorities previously granting permission.

The project by DeCaires Taylor, who is known for his underwater sculptures and galleries around the world, was commissioned by the Fairmont Maldives Sirru Fen Fushi resort, owned by the Accor hotel group, as an “intertidal gallery”, and was completed in July. The large steel frame with cutouts aiming to mimic the marine world was intended to allow sea life to explore freely within, acting as a new habitat for coral and other species. Thirty human figures were positioned on top and inside the frame at tidal level, with others submerged beneath. The sculptures were based on life-casts of people, around half of them Maldivian, with some reimagined as hybrid forms including coral or root-like elements.

Nine months in the making, its creation involved a large team of marine engineers, steel fabricators, divers and mould-makers. Specialist materials included pH-neutral steel, which is safe for use in a marine environment. Changing according to light and tides, the artwork was open to resort guests and day visitors.

However, on 21 September the work was destroyed under court order with pickaxes, saws and ropes.

“On Friday last week I was extremely shocked and heartbroken to learn that my sculptures have been destroyed by the Maldivian authorities at the Coralarium, despite continued consultations and dialogue,” deCaires Taylor said. “The Coralarium was conceived to connect humans to the environment and a nurturing space for marine life to thrive. Nothing else! The Maldives is still beautiful, with a warm and friendly population, but it was a sad day for art and a sad day for the environment.”

Soon after it was installed, a statement was released by the president’s office, stating that “due to significant public sentiment against the installation”, the ministry of tourism would facilitate the removal of the sculptures. Although the English statement describes the work as “sculptures”, the Maldivian uses the word “budhu”, which means idol, the worship of which is considered a sin in Islam.

The discussion spread across social media and into pre-election speeches of politicians last week. The outgoing president, Abdulla Yameen of the Progressive Party of Maldives (PPM), had come under fire during his time in office for not removing the artwork quickly enough, including from president-elect Ibrahim Mohamed Solih of the Democratic Party. The destruction of the artwork occurred only days before the general election, which saw Yemeen losing out to Solih on 23 September. In the run-up to the election the PPM manifesto had outlined the establishment of “Artists’ Hubs in key tourist areas”.

In the days leading up to the election, Solih, speaking to the Maldives Independent, said: “We have a need to define what idols are. Religious scholars or the fatwa council must deliberate on this and specify what things can be labeled as idols. Some people on social media are even saying if these are idols, then mannequins are idols, too.”

In a statement to the Guardian, the Accor hotel group said: “While we are very surprised by the removal of eco-art pieces by the authorities, we respect the people, traditions and customs of the Maldives. The removal process was peaceful and friendly without interruption to our world famous service. The Coralarium structure and underwater trees remains intact, ensuring the coral restoration programme remains alive and well. We have initiated immediate reimagination plans with the artist, creating a new underwater gallery that will be in harmony with the locals and environment.”

By MICHAEL WEISSENSTEIN (AP)
March 14, 2010

LONDON — With the West locked in conflicts across the Muslim world, why would anyone throw fuel on the fire?

A small group of Europeans have been doing just that — provoking death plots and at least one murder by turning out art that derides the Prophet Muhammad and the Quran in the name of Western values.

Behind the scenes is something bigger: a rising European unease with a rapidly growing Muslim minority, and the spreading sense that the continent has become a front in a clash of civilizations.

Recent events — including surprising electoral success by an anti-Islamic Dutch party, moves to ban veils in France and minarets in Switzerland, and arrests in Ireland and the U.S. this week in an alleged plot to kill a Swedish cartoonist — are signs of the rising tensions.

Swedish artist Lars Vilks says he was defending freedom of speech when he produced a crude black-and-white drawing of Muhammad with a dog's body in 2007. Authorities say that set him in the crosshairs of an assassination plot by extremists including Colleen LaRose, a 46-year-old Muslim convert from Pennsylvania who dubbed herself "Jihad Jane."

Vilks said in a recent interview with The Associated Press that he wasn't interested in offending Muslims as an end in itself, but wanted to show that he could make provocative art about any topic he chose. "There is nothing so holy you can't offend it," he said.

The Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten also said it was defending free speech in 2005 when it printed 12 cartoons of Muhammad, one in a bomb-shaped turban, setting off protests and the torching of Western embassies in several Muslim countries. And bottle-blond Dutch populist politician Geert Wilders said he was promoting European values by producing Fitna, a 15-minute film that lays images of the Sept. 11 attacks alongside verses from the Quran. The film was shown in Britain's House of Lords this month.

The cases are extreme, but millions of moderate Europeans also are re-examining the meaning of the liberal values widely cherished across the continent. How, many are asking, should a liberal society respectfully deal with immigrants who often espouse illiberal values? Should the immigrants adopt the values of their adoptive land — or, to the contrary, should society change to accommodate the newcomers who now form part of it?

France, home to at least five million of the estimated 14 million Muslims in Western Europe, launched a parliament-run dialogue on what to do about full-face veils last year. It ended with a parliamentary panel recommending a ban on the veils in buses, trains, hospitals, post offices and public sector facilities. In December, a large majority of Swiss voters backed a ballot initiative banning the building of any new minarets.

The measures sparked some peaceful protests. But the most incendiary provocations have come from the Dutch and their Nordic neighbors, nations with long histories of homogeneity, tradition of provocative artwork and less experience with large-scale immigration than former colonial titans like Britain and France.

Jan Hjarpe, a professor emeritus of Islamic studies at Lund University in southern Sweden, near Vilks' home, said the deliberate provocations were helpful to Islamic extremists, who have been hunting for targets that would win them popularity in the Muslim world.

"It has had almost no effect on the Muslim community in Sweden, who regard it as not very interesting," he said. "These threats against him have to do with extremist groups that want something to react to."

Denmark's Prophet Muhammad cartoons emerged from a discussion in 2005 about whether Islam was being treated with special sensitivity among Danish artists for fear of reprisals from extremists. Jyllands-Posten said the project was a way to challenge self-censorship and show that Muslims, too, must be ready to put up with mockery in a society based on democracy and free speech.

Denmark has an estimated 200,000 Muslims — about 4 percent of the population — while the numbers in Sweden are believed to be somewhat higher.

Islamic law generally opposes any depiction of the prophet, even favorable, for fear it could lead to idolatry. Danish Muslims took the cartoons as an affront, viewing them as symbolic of a backlash against Muslim immigrants in Denmark, manifested by the rise of a nationalist party and sometimes harsh anti-Muslim rhetoric in the Danish press.

An ax-wielding Somali man with suspected al-Qaida links has been jailed since January on preliminary charges of terrorism and attempted murder after breaking into the home of Kurt Westergaard, the 74-year-old Danish artist whose Muhammad-with-bomb-turban cartoon outraged the Muslim world three years ago. The Somali man had won an asylum case and received a residency permit to stay in Denmark, officials said.

Outrage, threats and violence over depictions of Muhammad are nothing new: Salman Rushdie was forced into hiding in England for a decade because the Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran issued a 1989 fatwa, or religious edict, ordering Muslims to kill him because his book, "The Satanic Verses," insulted Islam.

Rushdie has survived, but in 2004, filmmaker Theo Van Gogh was slain on an Amsterdam street by Mohammed Bouyeri, a Dutch Muslim of Moroccan descent incensed by his film "Submission," a fictional study of abused Muslim women. It featured scenes of near-naked women with Quranic texts appearing on their flesh.

Van Gogh was repeatedly shot, and his throat was cut. A letter pinned to his chest with a knife threatened the life of Ayaan Hirsi Ali, an outspoken critic of radical Islam who helped write the film.

The death accelerated the swelling of anti-Islamic populism in the once-tolerant Netherlands, where Muslims now make up some 5 percent of the 16 million population.

In the 1980s and into the 90s, large numbers of immigrants — mainly Turks and Moroccans encouraged to move to the country as cheap labor — barely integrated into mainstream society and instead stuck together in low-rent inner-city neighborhoods.

In light of the tragic record of the Dutch toward the Jewish population during the Nazi occupation, when some 70 percent were deported and killed, it was considered impolitic to show resentment against another ethnic group. But that didn't mean the resentment wasn't there. It was only in 2002 when the populist politician Pim Fortuyn began speaking openly against immigration and the threat to the Dutch identity that people felt free to voice their anger. Fortuyn's popularity soared, and the party he founded was hugely popular even after Fortuyn himself was assassinated (by an animal rights activist).

Successive governments clamped down on immigration and forced new arrivals to learn about the Dutch language and culture in an attempt to integrate them into mainstream society.

Wilders is derided by his enemies as a neo-fascist but has been able to turn his provocations into political success: his Freedom Party winning in the town of Almere and coming in second in The Hague this month the only two races it ran out of 394 cities and towns that elected local councils.

If the outcome is any indication of the parliamentary vote in June, Wilders could emerge as a king-maker on the national stage with no combination of parties is likely to be able to form a working majority in the next parliament.

One widely praised new book, journalist Christopher Caldwell's "Reflections on the Revolution in Europe" has prompted ongoing discussion of whether Islam can ever truly be integrated into European society. Some see cause for optimism, however faint.

"I wonder whether the liberal order is really quite so weak and inept, whether the story is quite over just yet," Washington Post columnist Anne Applebaum wrote in one review.

Associated Press Writers Karl Ritter in Stockholm and Art Max and Mike Corder in Amsterdam contributed to this report.

Egyptian artists worry about growing Islamic fervor in a nation long known for being a cultural and secular center in the Arab world

Cairo -- She found the death threat pinned to her car. The words "Your destiny" were scrawled near guns pointed at a photo of Anwar Sadat, Egypt's assassinated president.

It wasn't the first time Egyptian fundamentalists had tried to intimidate Inas al-Degheidy, Egypt's first female movie director, whose films typically depict heroines struggling against social discrimination and sexual exploitation.

"When I began making films in the 1980s, I didn't have many problems," she says. "Fundamentalism hadn't taken hold yet. Now, 10 percent of Egyptians like me. The other 90 percent want to kill me."

Degheidy, 52, and many other Egyptian artists say they worry about growing Islamic fundamentalism in a nation long known for being a cultural and secular center in the Arab world.

In recent years, hundreds of plays, films, novels and academic works have come under scrutiny by religious authorities, who have been given increasing authority over schools, radio, television and publishing houses by President Hosni Mubarak with the understanding that they will support him against the rising influence of militant Islam, many observers say.

Thousands of unregistered "popular mosques" have emerged in back streets; most Muslim women wear the hijab, or head scarf -- signs in many subway stations say: "If you love God, why aren't you wearing the hijab?"; many men have zabibas or indentations across their foreheads from bumping their heads on the floor during prayer; couples line up to ask imams for advice on marriage and divorce; filmgoers leave theaters in protest, demanding that certain scenes be cut out that they find offensive to Islam; and U.S.-style televangelists are attracting young people, as are pop singers whose songs praise the prophet Muhammad.

Moreover, two dozen Arabic-language satellite channels -- many financed by wealthy Saudis -- offer viewers a wide selection of religious programs. In one quiz show, contestants can win prizes by answering such questions as "Who was the first Islamic caliph?"

"The same people who tore down the twin towers have come here to tear down Egyptian culture," says Mohamed Gohar, managing director of VideoCairoSat, a private company that provides satellite television service to the Mideast. "I have to follow Saudi censorship. ... Men and women can't hold hands. Religion tells you how to cook a chicken. There are fatwas (religious rulings) for everything."

Most important, the Muslim Brotherhood, the Mideast's first modern fundamentalist political movement, won every seat in which it ran a candidate in parliamentary elections early this year under the slogan "Islam is the solution." They are now the leading political opposition to Mubarak's ruling party.

Film director Degheidy, who wore a low-cut dress and uncovered blond hair in an interview with U.S. editors, said she has to run to her car for fear of harassment and feels sorry for women who wear the hijab -- which denotes virtue -- out of fear. "I feel they have given in," she says.

Most recently, actress Hanan Turk announced that she would start wearing the hijab. Turk is best known for her role in the controversial 2005 film "Dunia" ("World"), which tells the story about a woman who breaks taboos in a society that asks women to hide their femininity.

Ironically, most political analysts say the rise of Islam can be traced to Sadat, who allowed Sharia (Islamic law that governs day-to-day life) to become "the principal source" of Egyptian law in 1980. He also freed many militant Islamists from jails, hoping they would become a loyal bulwark against his leftist opposition. Instead, an Islamic militant within his own army shot him to death in 1981 as he watched a military parade in Cairo.

In interviews, Egyptian artists said the religious revival began in earnest in the early 1990s after tens of thousands of Egyptian workers returned from Saudi Arabia, where they had been influenced by that nation's austere brand of Islam called Wahhabism.

"What we are facing now is a kind of social censorship that is far worse and pernicious" than government censorship of the 1970s and 1980s," says Yousry Nasrallah, who directed the 1995 documentary "On Boys, Girls and the Veil." "It's your audience that has become more conservative."

Alaa al-Aswany, whose 2002 novel "The Yacoubian Building" became the best-selling book after the Quran in the Arab world, has been harshly criticized for offering a sympathetic view of homosexuality in the book. The novel, which also addresses corrupt politicians, police brutality, terrorism and state repression, was initially rejected by several publishers.

Just this month, at least 112 Egyptian legislators demanded that gay love scenes between two leading characters -- an editor of a French-language newspaper and a police officer -- be cut from the book's $4 million movie version, which opened to packed houses last month in Egypt and premiered in April at the Tribeca Film Festival in New York. Another scene facing criticism is a monologue questioning the way Muslims ask God for forgiveness.

"These scenes are rejected by religion and the values of the Egyptian society, even if the society suffers from these problems," Hamdi Hassan, a spokesman for Muslim Brotherhood members of parliament, said early this month. Aswany says rising pressure to conform to Islamic principles is also a result of years of authoritarian government.

"In the past two decades, there has been much poverty, corruption and no democracy," says Aswany, who is also an anti-government activist. "People were obliged to go to work in Saudi Arabia and came back with money and the Saudi interpretation of Islam, which is not tolerant. It is aggressive."

Late last year, three people died in Alexandria during Muslim protests over a church play about a poor young Coptic Christian drawn to militant Islamists, who try to kill him. Although church officials said the play attacked only Islamic extremists, protesters called it offensive to Islam.

Early this year, Muslims and Coptic Christians -- who make up 10 percent of Egypt's 70 million inhabitants -- fought for three days in Alexandria after a Muslim man killed a 67-year-old Coptic and wounded five people in knife attacks in two churches. The authorities said the attacker was mentally ill.

"We had little problems until we started getting a strange kind of unforgiving Islam from the Gulf," says Youssef Sidhoum, editor of al-Watani, a Coptic weekly. "Officials rushed to describe the attackers as insane, which denies the real problem. Alexandria is a bitter example of what is taking place in Egypt unless it is seriously addressed -- the infiltration of fanatical Islam in slum areas where unemployment is very high."

Human rights activists also point out the government's refusal to recognize the Baha'i faith, which began in Persia in the 19th century and has 6 million members but only 2,000 in Egypt. Its members are refused death certificates, and their children are often threatened with expulsion from school.

"They have had more problems since the Islamization process," says Hossam Bahgat, director of Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights. "They are seen as apostates, looked at with suspicion since the religion has its roots in Iran and has holy places in Israel."

Islamists, however, say they have no desire to be intolerant of other religions or return Egypt to the Middle Ages. Instead, they say, they merely want to restore dignity to their lives.

"It's about a way of life, moral, cultural, political," says Mona el-Karedi, a student at Cairo University, who was covered from head to toe.

And although Egypt is no longer the cosmopolitan country portrayed by Lawrence Durrell in his classic four-novel work "The Alexandria Quartet," the nation still stands out from its more puritanical neighbors.

Rich Saudis come to Cairo to drink and gamble in city casinos. Egypt is one of the few Muslim countries where women can give back a marriage dowry and file for divorce. Government censors are not as strict. And two national campaigns led by first lady Suzanne Mubarak, aim to educate girls and women (45 percent older than 15 are illiterate) and eradicate the practice of female genital mutilation.

Meanwhile, Degheidy says that despite the death threats, she will continue to make movies like "Cheap Flesh," about elderly Gulf men who pay poor Egyptian fathers to have sex with their teenage daughters; "Lady Killer," about women fighting back against abusive spouses; and "Memoirs of a Teenager," about under-the-table surgeries to restore girls' virginity.

"We feel the Islamists have the power, even though it isn't official," says Degheidy. "But if they kill me, I will die a hero."

As tension mounted over a drawing offensive to Muslims, Swedish police told artist Lars Vilks he was no longer safe at home.

By Tom A. Peter
The Christian Science Monitor

from the September 19, 2007 edition

Almost a year and a half after 12 Danish cartoons of the prophet Muhammad sparked worldwide protest that left scores dead, Swedish cartoonist Lars Vilks has ignited similar controversy. After Mr. Vilks's controversial series of drawings featuring Islam's prophet with the body of a dog garnered attention in Sweden – art galleries refused to display them – Nerikes Allehanda, a Swedish newspaper, printed one in August. As with its Danish predecessor, the cartoon drew outrage from the Islamic world and has started a debate about freedom of expression. On Monday, the situation became even more serious, with Vilks going into hiding following a death threat from Al Qaeda in Iraq.

In a statement issued on Saturday by Al Qaeda in Iraq, the group's leader, Abu Omar al-Baghdadi, called for the killing of Vilks and his editor Ulf Johansson, reports Al Jazeera.

"We are calling for the assassination of cartoonist Lars Vilks who dared insult our prophet, peace be upon him, and we announce a reward during this generous month of Ramadan of $100,000 for the one who kills this criminal," he said.

"The award will be increased to $150,000 if he were to be slaughtered like a lamb."

Swedish police told Vilks that he was no longer safe in his home and have relocated him to an undisclosed location. Vilks, who says he's willing to move and can "do most of his work sitting in front of his computer," has remained defiant throughout the dispute, reports The Local, a Swedish newspaper. Despite being forced into hiding, when asked if the drawings were worth all of the trouble, he remained unapologetic.

"Yes, I still think so. I think the artwork has developed well so far and is on its way towards becoming superb," he said.

Vilks described the events and the debate surrounding his drawings as a repeat of the Danish caricature row, except on a smaller scale and so far without bloodshed.

"I still hold out strong hopes of a happy ending in that this too may end up as a farce," he said.

Vilks's inspiration for the cartoon sprang from a local art phenomenon and his artistic desire to engage his audience by shocking or even enraging them. In the cartoon, Vilks refers to Muhammad as a "roundabout dog," which is a reference to homemade statues of dogs placed in many of Sweden's roundabouts, or rotaries. The sculptures drew much attention this past spring and became something of a public joke. Open Democracy, an online news magazine, reports that Vilks tried to move this "new, rather innocent national emblem into a potentially charged political arena by adding a 'Muhammad' reference to his cartoon dog."

[I]t is relevant to note that Lars Vilks's artistic premises rest on challenging his viewers by making them angry, engaged or amused. He is known not only in Sweden but in various parts of the world (including Canada) for his self-consciously "outrageous" installations. A less toxic example than the dog cartoon was his intervention at a nature compound near Kullen in southern Sweden, where Vilks - without a building permit - constructed a monument made of pieces of lumber and rubbish he had hauled in. The local community board protested - and with that Vilks had fulfilled his core purpose. Whether or not his piece of junk was to be confiscated was no longer the real issue, which for Vilks was the artist's right to provoke.

Lars Vilks, with his cartoon drawing of the Mohammed roundabout dog, pushed the same issue beyond the realm of local Swedish opinion and communal politics. Sweden has a large Muslim population composed of immigrants and (now) the children and grandchildren of immigrants, which has increased steadily during the Iraq war. It does not constitute a homogeneous group, and many of its members define themselves in secular terms. Yet a considerable number too view Vilks's roundabout dog as a deliberate act of defamation of the Muslim religion and an attempt to increase Swedish Muslims' alienation from mainstream society. Thus, even if the primary self-identification of Swedish Muslims is far from narrowly religious, as an ethnic group they feel offended by this act.

Fallout from the Vilks incident has not ballooned to Danish-cartoon proportions. But Al Qaeda in Iraq also threatened to attack Swedish businesses if Vilks failed to apologize. "[E]xpect us to strike the businesses of firms like Ericsson, Scania, Volvo, IKEA, and Electrolu," said the group's statement against Vilks. The Times of London reports that Swedish firms in the Middle East are taking the threats seriously.

Swedish companies lowered their profile in the Middle East yesterday amid fears that a newspaper cartoon depicting the Prophet Muhammad with the body of a dog could spark bloody reprisals.

Åse Lindskog, a spokeswoman for Ericsson, said that staff had been told to keep a low profile in Muslim countries and to take extra care in deciding where to go or park their cars.

While the vast majority of Muslims have responded peacefully to the cartoons, the drawings have sparked outrage among some. Earlier this month, a number of Muslim nations officially condemned the cartoons. "The publication of this cartoon, which seeks to attack the character of the prophet Mohammed, is unacceptable, rejected, and condemned," a Jordian government spokesman told the Agence France-Presse. The Guardian reported that the Egyptian Ministry of Religious Endowments responded to the cartoons, saying, "Such an irresponsible act is not conducive to friendly ties between the Islamic world and the West." The Organization of the Islamic Conference, a group representing 57 mostly Islamic nations, issued a statement calling the cartoons an "irresponsible and despicable act with malafied and provocative intention in the name of so-called freedom of expression."

The freedom of press advocacy group Reporters Without Borders came out strongly against those behind the death threats for Vilks and his editor. In an official statement, the group offered the cartoonist and his editor their "total support."

"Freedom to draw cartoons cannot be taken away by such barbaric fundamentalism," Reporters Without Borders said. "Making death threats to the author of a cartoon by promising people a reward if they kill them is a shocking lack of humanity that must be soundly condemned."

"The Swedish authorities and Muslim organisations in Sweden have done everything to calm the situation and head off a major crisis of the kind that erupted after publication of cartoons of the prophet Mohammed in Denmark in September 2005," it said. "Those making the threats now are pouring oil on the fire."

Cartoons depicting the prophet Muhammad elicit such strong responses from the Muslim world not necessarily because they are critical of Islam, but more so because Islam forbids representations of Allah or the prophet. The British Broadcasting Corporation explains that though the Koran does not expressly ban such images, it says, "[Allah is] the originator of the heavens and the earth ... [there is] nothing like a likeness of Him." The passage is largely interpreted to mean that images of Allah or the prophet are forbidden. Express bans can be found in other Islamic teachings and traditions.

Islamic tradition or Hadith, the stories of the words and actions of Muhammad and his Companions, explicitly prohibits images of Allah, Muhammad and all the major prophets of the Christian and Jewish traditions.

More widely, Islamic tradition has discouraged the figurative depiction of living creatures, especially human beings. Islamic art has therefore tended to be abstract or decorative.

Shia Islamic tradition is far less strict on this ban. Reproductions of images of the Prophet, mainly produced in the 7th Century in Persian, can be found.

Depicting the prophet with a dog's body made the cartoon even more inflammatory for Muslims, because culturally, dogs are looked upon as unclean and, in some cases, devil-like creatures. Khaled Abou El Fadl, an Islamic scholar, explains Islam's perception of dogs in an essay.

In a fashion similar to European medieval folklore, black dogs, in particular, were viewed ominously in the Islamic tradition.[1] According to one tradition attributed to Muhammad, the Prophet of Islam, black dogs are evil, or even devils, in animal form.[2] Although this report did reflect a part of pre-Islamic Arab mythology, it had a limited impact upon Islamic law. The vast majority of Muslim jurists considered this particular tradition to be falsely attributed to the Prophet, and therefore, apocryphal. Nevertheless, much of the Islamic discourse focused on a Prophetic report instructing that if a dog, regardless of the color, licks a container, the container must be washed seven times, with the sprinkling of dust[3] in one of the washings.