Creative geographies of Islam: the case of Islamic and traditional visual arts scene in Istanbul

Abstract

While research on geographies of creativity have proliferated in the last few years, there has been scant attention to religious cultural and artistic practices, particularly in the context of the Middle East. This research seeks to address such gap with a focus on the Islamic and traditional visual arts scene which has flourished in Istanbul in the past decade and a half along with the rise of political Islam in Turkey. Rendered obsolete through the Western-oriented and secular cultural politics since the early republican era, art forms such as Arabic calligraphy ( hat), miniature ( minyatür), and illumination ( tezhip) have now found currency as ‘authentically Turkish and Islamic’ in an art scene that emerged alongside Islamist politics. This paper examines the trajectory of Islamic and traditional visual arts through the lens of cultural and creative industries starting from the cultural politics of Islamic urban governance through the 1990s and 2000s, and to the emergence of an Islamist-nationalist authoritarianism in the past decade. In doing so, it aims to situate Islamic and traditional visual arts on the map in studies on geographies of creativity, particularly in the Middle Eastern and Islamic context, where limited attention has been paid to cultural and artistic practices. With ethnographic reflections from the field, it highlights the internal dynamics of an art scene and the potential it bears in unsettling the core concepts of Turkish Islamic nationalism from within.