On The 1976 World of Islam Festival and the Question of Time

Announced by the University of Pittsburgh

Lecture by Iheb Guermazi
Chaired by Jennifer Wenzel

This talk looks at one of the largest exhibitions of Islamic arts ever curated in Europe: the 1976 London World of Islam Festival. It examines the peculiar understanding of time and history the festival’s curators proposed and traces this event’s aesthetic theories back to a North African Sufi reformist movement initiated by Emir ‘Abd al-Qadir in the second half of the 19th century. This talk will reveal the unexpected mystical and intellectual genealogy connecting the London festival’s curators to a modern anticolonial Arab reformist movement that contested Western linear teleological histories of progress in favor of a cyclical temporal regime. It will be argued that the exhibition’s curators and theorists used such subversive epistemological claims to offer what they believed was an authentically Islamic history of Islamic art.

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