Where is Blackness in Islamic Art?

“Were there any club members there?”  I remember my grandmother asking this question when I was growing up, especially if someone went or came back from someplace new. Club member was a euphemism for a Black person. It was a funny and indirect statement, typical of the signifying found in the language practices of the African Diaspora in the Americas. Humour, indirection, even misdirection are among the Afrodiasporic tools for surviving and thriving under regimes of white supremacy. The question indexes a certain set of expectations a Black person has when other Black people are around: primarily safety and security. If there are club members there, there is greater certainty that the place is one where you will be safe—where you can be and belong.

I bring that question to all the work I do. I do so with full knowledge of how it might be challenged as parochial, whether in the retort that it plays the race card, or is too US-centric, or  so focused on race to the point of missing the point, the universal—as if. I also bring that question to the work I do with an eye to the way representation is a trap—it is not enough that a club member is simply in the building. No, this question is about power: does this space, effort, and so on, reproduce the white supremacist violence that always besieges us, or does it challenge it? Accordingly, I brought that question, that lens, to my exploration of the Fall/Winter 2022 issue of BlackFlash.

Of the eleven articles in this issue, three of the artists whose practices were featured were unambiguously club members, a presence, rather than a complete absence, I am confident is the result of  Kurd’s curating, as her essay, which opens the issue, explicitly identifies the way “the legacy of European colonialism and anti-Black racism…continue[s] to marginalize the voice and histories of Black and African Muslims.”(p3) Not inconsequentially, the work of these three Black and African artists was examined by other Black artists, which stands in contrast to other pieces in the issue in which artists of South Asian backgrounds were reviewed by artists of Middle Eastern descent and vice versa. So, what do these “data” points do? They point to another question: where is Blackness in Islamic Art? Is Islamic Art a place where Black people can be safe to be and belong?

From my experiences with Islamic Art, as it appears in galleries and museums, Kurd’s words ring true: Blackness is absent. The continent might show up, in the form of historical items from Egypt, Tunisia, and Morocco, i.e. “North Africa,” but Blackness is absent. This absence is tied to history, which is a theme that runs throughout the issue. The label “Islamic Art” is problematic because of the way, as both Kurd and Qayyum point out, it glosses over difference and contestation. Yet even within its limitations, demonstrated by much of the work in this issue, attention to history can be identified as characteristic of Islamic Art, or art made through Muslim experiences. The ways in which artists connect to/depart from histories or artistic traditions native to Muslim experience is palpable in most of the works. Take for example Elmizadeh’s A Hundred Times, Why? Even with my own cursory knowledge of Persian art, I immediately know what I am looking at, or more specifically, what history is being invoked.

However, my experience with this theme of history in the work of the featured Black artists is quite different. This is, I argue, because history and relations to its stakes are different for Black (African-descendent) Muslims. There is a consistent and continuous silence in the archive around African-descendent people making durable the idea that we are people without a history. Our histories are uncommonly known, even to ourselves, and our histories can be fraught with pain and trauma. As a result, when relating to the past, the task is at times to undo it, and at other times, to uncover/recover. Once the past is reclaimed, then comes the process of advocacy to help others see and understand its significance.

This line of thought took me back to the US-based visual artist Safiya Cheatam and her work on the Yarrow Mamout. Originally from Guinea, West Africa, Mamout was enslaved in 1752 at the age of sixteen and involuntarily laboured in what is now the Washington, DC metropolitan area until he bought his freedom at the age of sixty. A skilled brick maker, he eventually purchased property and became a local financier. In addition to his native Fula, Mamout was literate in Arabic, and according to historical accounts, as a practicing Muslim and free man, Mamout was known to walk through the streets of the Georgetown neighborhood of Washington, DC making dhikr—“singing the praises of God.” Cheatam imagines that scene in her relief print, Yarrow Mamout “Singing Praises to God” (2020). Cheatam explains that the inspiration for the print’s aesthetic comes from renowned Black artists Valerie Maynard and Kerry James Marshall, whose work centres on depictions of  Black life that capture the dynamism and complexities of the Black experience,  thereby challenging anti-Blackness. She also has a mixed media installation, “Singing Praises to God” II, that uses clay (Mamout’s freedom was dependent on his completions of a set of brick homes) to link Mamout to the Prophet Muhammad, and to herself. History, and its reclamation, is clearly at play in her work, but it is not an “ancient” Muslim history tied to historic lands and empires, but an alienated Muslim history—one through which Cheatam is looking toward an Afrofuture. 

I see this different relationship to history in the work of the Black artists featured in this issue. Faisa Omer’s stunning portraits are very much future oriented while remaining grounded in the present. She works with history as memory—that of her subjects—to provoke the feeling and emotion that radiates from the portraits. Visibility in the City, with its four young male Somali Canadian subjects, who are signifying the history of Black cool and Black survival, and even in their lean we find movement toward the future with vulnerability and hope. History, in the form of Somali tradition, also functions in the performative art of Maroodi in two notable ways. The artist is clearly playing with tradition, through dress and material culture, but considering the silences and obfuscations of African histories, who is this performance legible to? (And should it matter?). Maroodi’s work also suggests an alienated Muslim history, yet unlike the Mamout who navigates and seeks to overcome an alienation born out of racial capitalist violence, the alienation Maroodi navigates and seeks to overcome is born out of their Muslim community’s rejection of their non-binary trans identity. Although not written about within the frame of Blackness, the emphasis on forced migration in Rolla Tahir’s work also invokes the significance of history, in relation to place—the “placelessness” and displacement Black people experience on the continent and in diaspora, and the ways Black people use place to give space meaning.

The choice of medium, performance, and social media for Maroodi, photography for Omer, and film for Tahir brings my ruminations on history and Blackness to the issue of visibility. The racial logic of white supremacy means that to be Black is to never be unmarked, but to always be seen. Even in the moments where Black people are marginalized, we are not invisible, our marginalization is the consequence of our visibility. The white gaze evaluates, scrutinizes, and lusts after Blackness, marking it as the place where what it means to be human, “civilized,” intelligent, etc., is determined. And as a result, Black people, and all they do, become hypervisible. This hypervisibility has historically been amplified in mediums like photography and film, and even more recently in social media, making all of them sites of anti-Blackness. Recall how the film that made cinema history, Birth of A Nation (1914), is a racist revisionary history of the US Civil War; the way photography was used to demonstrate Black inferiority; and how digital blackface has quickly become a primary feature of the social media landscape. Yet alongside this is a history of Black interventions, like Oscar Micheaux’s Within Our Gates, that challenge anti-Blackness and remake, as these artists do, these mediums into sites of self-determination and self-definition. They turn the gaze onto themselves and their communities, inviting others to look, but through the frames they provide rather than the other way around.

Like “Islamic Art,” Black is also a label. And it can be deployed in ways that are problematic, that constrict, homogenize, and even dehistoricize. Yet that is far from the entire story. Rather, to extend Osman’s argument (p.12), Blackness is often what brings Africa and the world together. Reaching back to my grandma’s question then, when we find the Blackness in Islamic Art, it is as a place of encounter and connection, a place of exchange and challenge, and a place of creation.

Su’ad Abdul Khabeer is a scholar-artist-activist. She is the author of Muslim Cool: Race, Religion, and Hip Hop in the United States and curator of Umi’s Archive, a multimedia research project that critically engages everyday Black women as people who know things we all need to know. She is also senior editor at Sapelo Square and an associate professor at the University of Michigan.