This paper explores how urban landscapes of Islam in Istanbul were transformed into new objects of heritage in 1950s Turkey. This was a key period in Turkey’s history. Following the end of one-party rule in 1946, some of the restrictions on public religious worship in Turkey were dismantled or reconfigured. For examples, the language of the call to prayer was switched from its Turkish translation back to Arabic; religious schools (imam hatip liseleri) were opened across the country; and newspaper and magazine articles about Islam became a part of an expanded public culture. While scholars have helped to document the dynamics of these changes, they have had less to say about the projects of conservation, restoration, and development that reshaped many of Istanbul’s Ottoman-era mosques, tombs, and medreses during this period. Yet although these urban landscapes of Islam signaled a new public visibility of religion, these projects of conservation, restoration, and development also transformed what these buildings meant. They came to occupy an ambivalent position as both sites of religious practice and sites of heritage. This paper focuses on the work of the architect and architectural historian Ali Saim Ülgen, who played a key institutional and intellectual role in carrying out many of Istanbul’s conservation projects in the 1950s. Situating Ülgen’s work within the broader cultural and urban context of 1950s Turkey, this paper expands our knowledge of the ways that Islam came to be practiced and understood in public during a crucial moment of transformation.

In June 2014, a national pavilion designed by a group of creative artists took Kuwait City to the Venice Biennale. Under the Biennale’s overarching theme, “Absorbing Modernity”—an ostensive call for participating nations to consider how they have been shaped by modernization efforts of the previous century—the Kuwaiti team entitled their installation “Acquiring Modernity.” The pavilion featured a facsimile of the Kuwait National Museum, designed in 1964 by the French architect Michel Ecochard at the time when Kuwait was gaining independence from the British protectorate. The blueprints of a national story were sketched out by UNESCO experts, attending to propositions by Kuwaiti elites. However, due to conflicting perspectives on national and international aspects, the project was halted. Construction began in 1977. It was completed in 1983. The building thereafter hosted one of the most important Islamic art collections in the world, lent by the royal Al-Sabah family owners. During the Iraqi invasion in 1990, the war-torn museum closed it doors to the public. It was not rehabilitated so it would act as a reminder of the invasion. But the story does not begin with the museum’s inauguration date, nor does it end with the Iraqi invasion. KNM has been an ever-growing experiment that transcended the limits of the art installation. This paper examines the architectural historiography of the building—the site where ideas of the modern and the national have been formed, tested, and reformed. We assume that architecture is what gets physically built on the ground, and historiography is what is written on paper about the history of the built object, but the two are in conflict with one another. How do we operate within these two frames of reference? How do we date the building: in reference to the architect, the state, or the operational pattern of the actual building? With time and the changing meaning of history in Kuwait, assumptions about the role of the museum in the formation of modern cultural values have evolved. This paper evaluates how modernity in Kuwait was represented and mediated by various public and private actors. Recovering the lost elements of the building’s deep architectural historiography allows us to see the present and the past in a new way and to realize that temporality is not any secondary or neutral factor, but an epistemic condition that silently, yet forcefully, affects the production and experience of the building.

Syrian dance scholar-practitioner Adnan Ibn Dhurayl published in 1996 what is the singular attempt to document the national folk dance traditions of Syria – dabke and raqs al-semah. Employing a wide variety of approaches including folklore studies, movement transcriptions, cultural histories of choreography and pedagogy, and bibliographic research into Syrian Arabic sources, “Raqs al-Semah and Dabke: History and Transcription” exemplifies the complexities of rendering Syrian folk dance into modern intellectual discourse in the late twentieth century. This paper presents the main findings of the book, recently translated into English by the presenter, with attention to three lines of critique: first, to identify the pedagogical objects and performative subjects configured through folk dance by situating this project within broader nation-building processes; second, to examine the discursive construction of gender, ethnicity, and place within the text; third, to address how the author affixes Western ontologies of dance onto local practices in order to speak more broadly about issues of pedagogy, representation, and knowledge production in Middle Eastern dance. Next, the paper positions this book as an archival object that stands in stark distinction from the embodied repertoire of Syrian popular dance as practiced today among Syrians living inside and outside of Syria. The paper concludes by demonstrating how Syrian folk/popular dance performatively constitutes the non-modern in Syrian culture.

Officially opened in 1972, the Jordan Museum of Popular Traditions was the first public Jordanian museum to exhibit modern artifacts. With objects amassed from across the Levant, including Jordanian, Palestinian, Syrian, and Ottoman dress, jewelry, amulets, and devotional objects, the collection represents the lived practices of people from the late nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century. In making the museum, the founder Saadiya al-Tel and her nephew, the artist Ali Jabri (1942-2002), sought to preserve and promote regional cultural heritage beyond the claimed nationalist narratives of ancient artifacts and archaeological remains, and into an expression of everyday material and religious life from the not-so-distant past. The museum thus transports visitors into the living cultural and religious traditions of Jordan, facilitated by the curation, design, and research of Jabri who joined as director in 1980. Jabri’s work in the museum offers an example of an artist engaging with his local Islamic traditions and heritage as the creative laboratory for modern art making. Jabri was known as a “neo-realist” painter whose work was fueled by his desire to document and represent both past and present cultural heritage of the Arab world, mixing “ancient beauty and modern Warholian junk.” Such examples include collages composed from 1980s popular Egyptian magazines and watercolor sketches of Cairo’s Fatimid and Mamluk architectural remains. He also worked with archaeological survey teams, drawing and painting landscapes of Jordan’s ancient and medieval Islamic sites with archaeologists’ contemporary pottery charts, measuring sticks, candy wrappers, and bags depicted in situ. His work in the museum extended this documentary drive beyond his paintings and visual diaries into the realm of art historical engagement through his extensive research on the historic objects and devotional materials in the museum. Jabri’s artistic hand is omnipresent in the museum, from its hand-calligraphed labels, carved shelves and wooden ceiling, evocatively designed displays, to even a few small drawings carefully inserted into the museum didactics themselves. The museum thus operates as an extension of Ali Jabri’s lifelong practice to represent modern Arab life in all its entanglements with surviving cultural and religious heritage. Working with Jabri’s personal artist sketchbooks, research notes, and archival documents, along with the museum’s own collection and archive, my presentation examines Ali Jabri’s work in the museum as a key and unstudied instance of a modern artist historicizing, preserving, and disseminating the Levant’s historic traditions.