Picturing Islam E-Book

Kenneth M. George

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 381

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011

Beschreibung

Picturing Islam: Art and Ethics in a Muslim Lifeworld explores issues of religion, nationalism, ethnicity, and globalization through the life and work of the prominent contemporary Indonesian artist Abdul Djalil Pirous.

• Presents a unique addition to the anthropology of art and religion
• Demonstrates the impact of Islam, ethnicity, nationalism, and globalization on the work and life of an internationally recognized postcolonial artist
• Weaves together visual and narrative materials to tell an engrossing story of a cosmopolitan Muslim artist
• Looks at contemporary Islamic art and the way it has been produced in the world's largest Muslim nation, Indonesia

Leseprobe

CONTENTS

List of Illustrations

Preface

Acknowledgments

Note on Qur’anic Verse

Guide to Indonesian Spelling and Pronunciation

Introduction: Picturing Islam

1 Becoming a Muslim Citizen and Artist

Beginnings

Becoming an Artist - Citizen

The Darkening Sky

2 Revelations and Compulsions

Self and the Spectre of Comparison

Making Spirit Matter

The Influence of Peers

A Lifeworld Refigured

3 Diptych – Making Art Islamic and Making Islamic Art Indonesian

Part 1: Making Art Islamic

First Gestures

Perfecting the Work, Sacrificing the Self

Perfecting Verse in an Imperfect World

Part 2: Making Islamic Art Indonesian

Pirous and Decenta

Islamic Multiculturalism and the Istiqlal Festivals

4 Spiritual Notes in the Social World

Making Spiritual Notes

Displaying and Selling Spiritual Notes

Spiritual Notes and Friendship

Spiritual Notes in a Political Arena

5 Anguish, Betrayal, Uncertainty, and Faith

Sky Split Asunder and Tombs Burst Open

Remind Them: All You Can Do is Be a Reminder

The Retrospective, 2002

Conclusion: A Retrospective

Afterword: Choosing a Frame

References

Index

This edition first published 2010

© 2010 Kenneth M. George

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

George, Kenneth M.

Picturing Islam : art and ethics in a Muslim lifeworld / Kenneth M. George.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-4051-2958-9 (hardcover : alk. paper) – ISBN 978-1-4051-2957-2 (pbk. : alk. paper)

1. Pirous, A. D. (Abdul Djalil), 1932– 2. Muslim artists–Indonesia–Aceh-Biography. 3. Islam and art-Indonesia–Aceh. 4. Islam and culture–Indonesia–Aceh. 5. Islam and politics–Indonesia–Aceh. 6. Art and anthropology–Indonesia–Aceh. 7. Art and religion-Indonesia–Aceh. 8. Politics and culture–Indonesia–Aceh. I. Title.

ND1026.8.P57G47 2010

759.9598—dc22

[B]

2009040194

For Pirous and Erna

ILLUSTRATIONS

Plates

1At the Beginning, the Voice Said “Recite,” 19822For the Sparkling Morning Light, 19823Surat Ichlas, 19704Sura Isra II: Homage to Mother, 19825A kasab designed and embroidered by Pirous’s mother, Hamidah, in 19416White Writing, 19727The Night Journey, 19768And God the Utmost, 19789Prayer XII/Homage to Tanöh Abée, 198110A Forest of Pens, a Sea of Ink, the Beautiful Names of God Never Cease Being Written, 198511Green Valley, 200012The Horizon on the Southern Plain, 199813It Pierces the Sky, 199714The Night That is More Perfect than 1000 Months, 200015Triangle with an Ascending Vertical Gold Line, 199316Meditation on a Circle with a Vertical Line, 200017Pillars of the Sky, 199618An Admonition to the Leader: Concerning the Transient Palace and the Beginning and End of Life, 199519Detail from AlifLam Mim/Only God is All-Knowing, 199820Once There was a Holy War in Aceh: Homage to the Intrepid Hero Teuku Oemar, 1854–1899, 199821The Shackling of the Book of the Holy War, II, 199922The painter brooding over They Who are Buried without Names, 2001 (photograph)23A People’s Fate is in Their Own Hands, 200124Meditation Toward the Enlightened Spirit, I, 200025Allah. Detail from 17 Names for God, 1980

Figures

0.1A. D. Pirous, 20010.2Pirous at work in his home studio, Bandung, 20010.3Making a preparatory work for a painting, 20011.1Maps of Aceh and Indonesia1.2“Boss Piroes,” Mouna Piroes Noor Muhammad1.3Hamidah, Pirous’s mother, early 1950s1.4“Mopizar,” Mouna Piroes Zainal Arifin, Medan, Sumatra, early 1950s1.5Pirous with his Uncle Ahmad on the eve of leaving Meulaboh for Bandung, 19551.6Ries Mulder teaching his course on “Art Appreciation,” Bandung, 19551.7Pirous with wife and painter Erna Garnasih Pirous, Bandung, 19681.8“Without a doubt, a modern artist,” Pirous with his paintings in a publicity shot, 19681.9The Sun after September 1965, 19683.1Pirous at work at Decenta preparing the serigraph, Noah’s Deluge, Bandung, 19763.2Pirous, Machmud Buchari, and architect Ahmad Noe’man meeting with the Indonesian Minister of Religious Affairs Munawir Sjadzali, Jakarta, 1992 or 19933.3Ilham Khoiri and A. D. Pirous at Serambi Pirous reviewing the calligraphy on The Poem of Ma’rifat, 20023.4Pirous correcting the Qur’anic calligraphy on The Verse of the Throne, 20023.5Muhammad, a calligraphic installation at Istiqlal Mosque, Jakarta, designed and supervised by Pirous3.6Sketch for Reminiscences ofAceh, I, December 23, 19883.7Reproduction of the last page of the Al-Qur’an Mushaf Istiqlal4.1Ephemeral Mountain: Travel Note VI, 19894.2Come Back to the Lap of Your Lord with Devotion, 20005.1The Truth that Struggles Against the Darkness/QS 113 Al Falaq, 20005.2Once There Was a Holy War in Aceh, 2002, hanging at Galeri Nasional, Jakarta5.3Sketch for Has That Light Already Shone Down from Above?, 19995.4In his own hand(s). Pirous labeling and signing A People’s Fate is in Their Own Hands, 20025.5Through the Days of Our Lives, There is Nothing That Can Give Us Help, Save for the Doing of Good Deeds, 2002

Paintings must be like miracles.

Mark Rothko

PREFACE

Picturing Islam is an ethnographic portrait of a postcolonial Muslim artist, Indonesian painter Abdul Djalil Pirous. My goal is to sketch a story of self-fashioning in the contemporary cauldron of politics, art, and religion. At root, this is a story about making art and a lifeworld “Islamic” as a way of coming to terms with political, cultural, and historical circumstances. It considers very generally, then, a question of enduring interest to anthropologists and others in the humanities and social sciences – the question of subjectivity, our experience of acting and being acted upon in our relations with others as we are caught up in the sway of powerful social and ideological forces. As Judith Butler (2005), Michel Foucault (1997, 2005), Paul Ricoeur (1992), and others have shown so persuasively, questions of subjectivity are also questions of ethics. We commonly look to art and religion for special insights into the ethics and aesthetics of self-fashioning, despite all our trouble in defining art and religion, or the risks we may take in giving them privileged attention. My long collaboration with Pirous has given me a chance to reflect on the hopes and perils of self-fashioning in a Muslim lifeworld. How Pirous has pictured Islam is not just about his relationship to God, but also about his artistic and ethical being and location in this world.

My aim here, then, has been to write an accessible ethnographic account that will find use in a broad range of classroom discussions in anthropology, religious studies, Asian studies, and art history. Picturing Islam is not a primer on that religion, or on the Qur’an, but a portrait of how Islamic ideas and dispositions might settle into the experiential and expressive lifeworld of a believer, or make their way into art. It is a study of lived religion. At the same time, I have tried to show in this book how ethnography might be used to “confront art history with the present tense” (Belting 2003: 192). In that spirit, this book is a modest contribution to a global art history that includes Southeast Asian art and Islamic art as part of its theoretical, historical, and critical venture.

Framing the book as I did around an empirical look at art and ethics in the work of a Muslim painter, and wanting to keep it to a manageable length, I left many theoretical and comparative questions unaddressed. Colleagues interested in subjectivity, the anthropology of art, or art history and visual culture may want to glance at the Afterword.

I will be especially glad if Muslim readers find this book useful or pleasurable. If they find errors of understanding in this book, the errors are mine, despite Pirous’s generous and unflagging effort to help me see clearly.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Picturing Islam would not have come together as it did without the intellectual push from four colleagues: Charles Hallisey, who drew me into conversations about ethics and lived religion; James Siegel, whose work and conversations about subjectivity, language, cameras, and the political unconscious in Aceh and Indonesia suggested ways I might dwell with materials; Nora Taylor, who reassured me that an ethnography of a single artist might actually be a very welcome intervention in art history; and Kirin Narayan, who knows better than most the joys, risks, and power of bringing friends and family into ethnographic writing. Charlie, Jim, Nora, and Kirin bear no responsibility for this book’s shortcomings, many of which stem from my not always following their example or advice. I thank them for their inspiring support.

Conversations with other colleagues and friends have enriched this book in countless ways too. I am especially grateful for helpful insights and suggestions from Abdul Hadi W. M., Warwick Anderson, Lorraine Aragon, Iftikhar Dadi, Veena Das, Kevin Dwyer, Susan Friedman, Anna Gade, Hildred Geertz, Byron Good and Mary-Jo DelVecchio Good, Ramachandra Guha, Michael Herzfeld, Charles Hirschkind, James B. Hoesterey, Pradeep Jeganathan, Carla Jones, Webb Keane, Arthur Kleinman, B. Venkat Mani, Vida Mazulis, Birgit Meyer, Sarah Murray, Fred Myers, Paul Nadasdy, Hamid Naficy, Ashis Nandy, Sally Ness, Terry O’Nell, Kevin “Will” Owen, Christopher Pinney, Allen and Mary “Polly” Roberts, Kathryn Robinson, Setiawan Sabana, T. K. Sabapathy, Patricia Spyer, Mary Steedly, Sunaryo, Stanley J. Tambiah, Julia Thomas, Fadjar Thufail, Aarthe Vaddi, James and Rubie Watson, Andrew Willford, Jessica Winegar, Aram Yengoyan, Yustiono, and Merwan Yusuf. I am indebted, as well, to Lindsay French, Charles Hallisey, Carla Jones, Nancy Smith-Hefner, and Andrew Willford who at the request of Wiley-Blackwell gave generously of their time to advise and encourage me about the direction of the book while it was still a half-written manuscript. Their insights and queries were instrumental to my giving the book its full and final shape.

There is no way I can measure my gratitude to Abdul Djalil Pirous and his wife Erna Garnasih Pirous. Their family and circle of friends have always welcomed me with abundant kindness and conversation, and all of them have shown uncommon generosity in letting me share and write about their lives in as much detail as I have. Pirous and Erna have never told me so, but over the years I am sure I must have made slights, blunders, and intrusions that hurt, angered, or embarrassed someone. I hope they will forgive the flaws and lapses of their friend and resident ethnographer. I want them to take pleasure and pride in this book, confident that the intimate lessons they have given me over the years about art, Islam, and goodness will prove useful for others.

Closer to home, I thank Didi Contractor, Maya Narayan, and Devendra Contractor for their unflagging interest and support. Cheers from my brothers Phil and Andy, my sister Lois, and their families have meant much to me too.

Which leaves Kirin, my wife, companion, and mutual muse. Kirin appears rather late in this book, but has been a miracle of goodness and inspiration since page one. I once knew writing as a desperately lonely burden. Kirin has helped me see writing otherwise, as a way to care for myself and for us both. For that and for all the light she continues to throw into my world she has my unending affection.

Funding for the field research that led to this book came from several sources. I gratefully acknowledge support from the Aga Khan Trust for Culture; the Social Science Research Council; the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research; the University of Oregon’s Center for Asian and Pacific Studies; and the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Center for Southeast Asian Studies. Fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities; the Institute for Advanced Study; the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation; and the Vilas Associates Program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison gave me release time from teaching, making it possible for me to conduct library research and to draft some of the analyses that went into this book. My thanks also go to my Indonesian sponsors at Lembaga Ilmu Pengetahuan Indonesia (LIPI, the Indonesian Institute of Science); Yayasan Festival Istiqal (the Istiqlal Festival Foundation); and Fakultas Seni Rupa dan Desain, Institut Teknologi Bandung (the Department of Fine Arts and Design at the Bandung Institute of Technology).

Some passages in this book appeared in my previously published work. I thank the publishers of the following journals and books for permission to reprint passages or excerpts from:

“Ethics, Iconoclasm, and Qur’anic Art in Indonesia.” Cultural Anthropology 24(4): 589–621 (2009). Wiley-Blackwell and the American Anthropological Association.

“Ethical Pleasure, Visual Dzikir, and Artistic Subjectivity in Contemporary Indonesia.” Material Religion 4(2): 172–93 (2008). Berg Publishers, an imprint of A&C Black Publishers Ltd.

“Art and Identity Politics: Nation, Religion, Ethnicity, Elsewhere.” In Asian and Pacific Cosmopolitans: Self and Subject in Motion, edited by Kathryn Robinson, pp. 37–59. New York: Palgrave (2007). Palgrave Macmillan Publishers.

“Picturing Aceh: Violence, Religion, and a Painter’s Tale.” In Spirited Politics: Religion and Public Life in Contemporary Southeast Asia, edited by Andrew C. Willford and Kenneth M. George, pp. 185–208. Ithaca, NY: Southeast Asian Publications Series, Cornell University (2005). Southeast Asia Program, Cornell University.

“Violence, Culture, & the Indonesian Public Sphere: Reworking the Geertzian Legacy.” In Violence: Culture, Performance and Expression, edited by Neil L. Whitehead, pp. 25–54. Santa Fe: SAR Press (2004). School for Advanced Research. “Conversations with Pirous.” In A. D. Pirous: Vision, Faith, and a Journey in Indonesian Art, 1955–2002. Bandung: Yayasan Serambi Pirous (2002). Yayasan Serambi Pirous.

Signature Work: Bandung, 1994. Ethnos 64(2): 212–31 (1999). Taylor & Francis Group.

Designs on Indonesia’s Muslim Communities. Journal of Asian Studies 57(3): 693–713 (1998). Cambridge University Press and the Association for Asian Studies.

I am deeply indebted to Ilham Khoiri and Dar Charif for their help in translating the Qur’anic Arabic in Pirous’s calligraphic paintings. I thank Fadjar Thufail, Atka Savitri, Amy Farber, and Bart Ryan for help in transcribing my Indonesian interview materials, and Noah Theriault for help with the index. Over the years I have worked on this project I have had the help of some wonderful graduate research assistants. They are: James B. Hoesterey, Erica James, Kate Lingley, Jennifer Munger, Susan Rottmann, and Fadjar Thufail. I thank them all, and want them to know how proud I am of their accomplishments.

I am so very lucky to have had the professional assistance of the Pirous family “Dream Team.” The digital reproductions of Pirous’s paintings and family photos were prepared with the superb care of Rihan Meurila Pirous, Eka Sofyan Rizal, and their colleagues at dialogue+design and at paprieka. Mida Meutia Pirous and Dudy Wiyancoko kept me supplied with archival data from Yayasan Serambi Pirous. Dudy and Iwan Meulia Pirous also reviewed this manuscript and offered helpful tips and insights.

Last, I owe unending thanks to Jane Huber, Blackwell’s former senior acquisitions editor for anthropology, for her unflagging interest and confidence in this project. I am deeply grateful as well to senior editor Rosalie Robertson, editorial assistant Julia Kirk, production editor Elaine Willis, and project manager Helen Gray at Wiley-Blackwell for their steady counsel and outstanding care in helping bring this book to completion and into the world.

In memory

Since late 2002, I have lost six colleagues and friends whose personal and intellectual company helped guide me as I moved forward with this project. I want to remember them here: anthropologists Begoña Aretxaga, Daphne Berdahl, and Clifford Geertz; painter Umi Dachlan; art writer Mamannoor; and the always kind Masjoeti Daeng Soetigna.

NOTE ON QUR’ANIC VERSE

Ilham Khoiri and A. D. Pirous identified the Qur’anic passages that appear in the paintings discussed in this book. I have rendered these Qur’anic passages in English, adapting and mixing translations prepared by Abdullah Yusuf Ali (2005), Ahmed Ali (1994), M. A. S. Abdel Haleem (2004), and Michael Sells (1999). I use the abbreviation QS followed by a number when identifying a Qur’anic sura, or chapter (e.g., QS 112 is Qur’anic Sura 112, Al-Ikhlas). Sura names and their translations are taken from Ali or Sells.

Khoiri and Pirous also transliterated the Jawi in these Qur’anic paintings into Romanized Indonesian-Malay.

INTRODUCTION: PICTURING ISLAM

“This isn’t dawah. I’m not campaigning for religion. I am making art. What you see here, all these paintings, these are my spiritual notes.” My friend Pirous grew animated, eager to refute the complaints of the clerics and critics who had questioned his motives in making “Islamic art.” It was early March 1994, and we had spent much of the afternoon at his private hillside gallery, Serambi Pirous, sorting through paintings for the gallery’s long-planned opening, timed to coincide later in the week with the artist’s birthday, but designed too as a special Ramadhan gathering of family, friends, and colleagues. With sunset and the muezzin’s call to maghrib prayers echoing from mosques and radios, we put aside some paintings that still needed hanging, broke the daylong fast with sweets made from palm sugar and coconut milk, and headed back to his nearby home. Our car crept through narrow, crowded lanes of motorbikes and mosque-bound pedestrians. A bend in the road gave me a panoramic glimpse of Bandung’s sprawling neighborhoods and urban ridgetops, all aswarm with the lamps and headlights of the city’s two and half million inhabitants. We pulled into Pirous’s driveway. Pirous climbed upstairs to the rear of the house to pray, while I lingered in the entryway, as I sometimes did, to study one of his signature Qur’anic paintings.

Pirous and his wife Erna had designed and built this house in the early 1980s. Featured in several of the popular architecture and design magazines that cater to Indonesia’s urban elite, the house served as their home and studio, as well as a showcase for some of Pirous and Erna’s best paintings. The main doorway had brought me – like all their guests – squarely before the ochre-and sienna-colored expanse of At the Beginning, the Voice said “Recite” (Sebermula Suara Itu, “Iqra”),

Figure 0.1 A. D. Pirous, 2001. Photograph courtesy of Yayasan Serambi Pirous.

a “calligraphic painting” that features the first five verses of Qur’anic Sura 96, Al-‘Alaq (“The Embryo”). Take a look at Plate 1. Many Indonesian Muslims place decorative plaques featuring short and familiar Qur’anic inscriptions near the main threshold of their homes – the Basmallah (“In the Name of God the Compassionate the Caring”) and the “Verse of the Throne” (QS 2: 255) are favorites. Pirous’s painting is a grand and arresting variation on this customary use of calligraphic art. Pirous once told me that he kept this painting for himself, and placed it at the doorway, “because it builds the spirit of the house.” It renders in unblemished Qur’anic (or Classical) Arabic one of the first revelations given to the Prophet Muhammad. Opening with the Basmallah, the passage reads, from right to left:

In the Name of God the Compassionate the Caring

Recite in the name of your Lord who created

Humankind from an embryo

Recite, for your Lord is all-giving

Who taught by means of the pen

Taught man what he did not know before

This Qur’anic passage reminds the faithful of their capacity for language, thought, and learning – the gift of knowledge and reason from the pen of God. The passage appears written in raised letters on an immense slab, a visual allusion, perhaps, to what Islamic traditions describe as a concealed primordial tablet, the eternal, already-inscribed, “uncreated” Qur’an. Yet the tablet looks broken or divided at the painting’s midsection, a “break” that visually marks a shift in language. The Qur’anic passage is repeated on the lower panel, but translated and inscribed in Jawi – Indonesian-Malay written in Arabic script. Two languages, one “message.” Five gold-lipped holes – are they punctures? leaks? – pockmark a fragmented plate near the top of the painting. Are they a painterly reference to the “five pillars” of Islam? To the five hours reserved for daily prayer and witness to God?

After a few minutes of reflection, I pulled myself away from the painting, slipped off my shoes, and wandered upstairs to the living room. Not long after, Pirous came down. Freshened by prayer and evening bath, Pirous settled into a chair and earnestly resumed our conversation about the mingling of religion and art and the dilemmas one has to face in making “Islamic art” in Indonesia. A massive painting loomed high on the wall behind us as we talked: For the Sparkling Morning Light (Demi Cahaya Pagi yang Cemerlangi Plate 2). The cracked, magenta tablet in the center of the painting displays all of QS 93 Ad-Duha (“The Early Hours of Morning”) in Qur’anic Arabic and turquoise. The first few verses reassure the faithful in the face of adversity:

In the Name of God the Compassionate the Caring

By the morning’s bright light

By the night when it is still

Your Lord has not abandoned you and does not hate you

What comes after will be better for you than what came before

Pirous went on to tell me about some of those who harbored suspicions about his calligraphic paintings and who had scolded him for using art for da’wah, proselytizing or spreading the faith. Like all our conversations, this one was a playground of languages. Pirous darted back and forth between Indonesian and English. His hands joined the conversation too, his fingers and palms speaking animatedly about his exasperation.

The religious leaders and ulama (Islamic scholars) here never talk about art and culture. They are blind to art. They don’t know what is meant by modern art. And they don’t recognize it as a form of knowledge or its relationship to Islam. They don’t know anything about that.

A smile broke out behind his mustache and goatee, and his eyes brightened with earnest conviction.

Whatever I say in my art expresses my belief, and my faith in values for this life, because for me, religion has two faces: There is a face in the form of religious teaching. But there is also a face that is in the form of art, the face of culture, where my life is at peace, and where I can learn more about Islam. Like I say, I am an ordinary Muslim. I just want to be a good Muslim.

Lifeworlds

Picturing Islam is about Indonesian artist Abdul Djalil Pirous and the many years he has spent making “Islamic art.” It tells a story about an artist with an anthropological and art historical twist. Pirous has long been celebrated as a pioneer of contemporary Indonesian Islamic art, and there is no shortage of newspaper articles, reviews, exhibition catalogues, and book chapters about him, read mostly in Indonesia, but found in Europe, the United States, Australia, and other places in Asia too. As for me, I see in his art a vast canvas of global social and cultural forces. These forces result in the mingling of religion, art, nationality, and selfhood, sometimes with great promise and potential, other times with considerable panic and peril. The story is not Pirous’s alone, but could be told by (or about) many post-colonial artists throughout the Muslim world. The details might be different, but the dilemmas would be similar. At root, it is a story about making art and a lifeworld “Islamic.”

The term “lifeworld” belongs to a long tradition of phenomenological philosophy and sociology. I use it in this book as shorthand for the ongoing circumstances in which we find ourselves, culturally, politically, historically, and experientially. Each of us is thrown, with others, into a lifeworld through which we must find our way, refashioning its horizons as imaginatively and as pragmatically as we can. What I find so useful about the term is that it helps us avoid portraying people in the confines of an all-encompassing language or culture. Today’s lifeworlds are both intimate and global in dimension. They are the interconnected, lived-in spaces that bring people – with their thoughts, experiences, and sense of self – into reciprocal touch with global currents, seldom through a single language or culture but more commonly through a vast field of cultural-l inguistic alternatives and pluralities. Although lifeworlds are situationally imposed on us, and prejudiced by sedimented cultural traditions, they are, in no small way, open-ended, uncertain, politically inflected works in progress – fragile, blinding, prone to turmoil and repression, and yet creative, aspiring, and exalting in possibility and power.

Taking an anthropological view, I think of a lifeworld as an informal and everyday realm of thought, feeling, and subjectively meaningful activity. People dwell in their lifeworlds, but not freely or unproblematically so. Every person’s lifeworld is complexly cultural, inescapably political, and very bound up with the public sphere. Each is filled with the contradictions and predicaments that come with seeking identities and solidarities, with finding meaning and dispelling illusion. All are vulnerable to the political-economic intrusions and enticements of states and markets. All are richly storied. As we have seen, a story that matters a great deal to Pirous is about his being or becoming a good Muslim through making art. (One could ask, of course, whether he is also keen to become a good artist by being a devout Muslim, but I will set that question aside for now.) This involves his pursuing religious and ethical goals in the largely secular and market-driven world of contemporary art, but also convincing a Muslim public that making art is a worthwhile and ethical project. As Pirous explained to me that evening at his home in early 1994, the very idea of a Qur’anic painting has made some Muslim religious authorities very uneasy. As we will see, an expressly Islamic art does not always find ready or wide embrace in contemporary art venues. For now, however, my larger point is this: A lifeworld is not set apart from collectivities and publics, but is the very place in which collectivities and publics work their magic – and exact their demands – on a person’s sensibility, judgment, ambition, and thought.

It is my view that Pirous’s paintings, and the stories that accompany and surround them, are a bridge between the public and the private aspects of his lifeworld. Taking cue from Hannah Arendt (1958) and anthropologist Michael Jackson (2006), I consider these art works and art stories a “subjective in-between” – a highly political arena for the intermingling of experience and recognition. Jackson so elegantly summarizes Arendt, I quote him here:

Every person is at once a ‘who’ and a ‘what’ – a subject who actively participates in the making and unmaking of his or her world, and a subject who suffers and is subjected to actions by others, as well as by forces that lie largely outside of his or her control. This oscillation between being an actor and being acted upon is felt in every human encounter. (2006: 13)

I ask readers to think of Pirous’s paintings and his stories about them as points of human encounter. As he makes his way in his lifeworld, his works and ideas belong not just to him, but to others as well. They are the places where he is in expressive dialogue with predecessors and peers, with his nation, with ideas about art, and with God. These paintings and stories thus give us a glimpse of Pirous caring and accounting for himself in relation to others, showing us how making art is an ethical venture too.