The Sacred and the Secular

Here's a really beautiful painting created by a female student at the Dubai campus of Zayed University. I made my first of what will undoubtedly be weekly visits to the Dubai campus yesterday (more on that later) and had the privilege of seeing this picture. It is hanging in the office of my good friend Jyoti Grewal, who is also the dean of University College, and who is my boss (as much as I ever have a boss, I suppose). Every year Zayed hosts a women's conference and this painting was displayed. Apparently Jane Fonda loved it and wanted to buy it, but the artist refused and instead gave it to Jyoti because she was her favorite teacher (which says a lot about the power of teacher - as Henry Adams reminded us, a teacher impacts eternity because you can never tell where her/his influence ends). On the long drive back to Abu Dhabi (about an hour and a half) I had lots of time to think about the painting, and, not surprisingly, I had several different thoughts about it. First off, it is beautiful and speaks to the fact that the lives of women in the Islamic/Arabic world are much more complicated than we think they are. Secondly, however, it made me think what the response of Muslims would be if we dramatized some of their iconic images. Now, of course, Jesus is every bit as much a part of the Islamic tradition as he is the Christian tradition, so the distinction between the two is very artificial, and one we make in the "West" all the time (even the use of the term West as distinct from the Arabic/Islamic world is in and of itself a very arbitrary distinction. Plus, it could be argued that this is not an artistic commentary on Jesus, but rather one on an iconic artistic image. The other side of this is, of course, that we "started it" because we were the ones who "commodified" (although I'm currently embroiled in a discussion with my good friend Steve Wehmeyer on this topic) religion in the first place - at least in regards to the representation of our Christian religious figures in a secular setting. If anything, it is the Islamic world that has not changed in that regards; at least not changed in a radical, revolutionary way. One of the constant themes of the blogs since I arrived is the slow, almost imperceptible, evolutionary nature of societal change here - but change nonetheless. Just the creation and celebration of this work of art shows how the world is changing.