Of all the places I’ve visited (and that I keep wanting to share with you guys), one in particular keeps coming to mind. About a year ago I had the chance to visit the Aga Khan Museum, an incredible repository of centuries of Islamic and Iranian art and culture.
Our friend Aamer, a Bahraini polymath who now calls Canada home, had enthused about its wonders and offered to act as a guide. Aamer has been a guest on Radio War Nerd several times speaking knowledgably and entertainingly about all things Arabian. Having such a docent in such a museum seemed too good of an opportunity to miss.
As the taxi snaked through the North York district of Toronto, I thought it was a pretty odd setting for a world-class treasure house. Canadian suburbs have not generally been designed with beauty in mind. The lawns, strip malls, tidy houses and cul de sacs may inspire confidence in civil engineering but they don’t spark joy. That said, they do act as a perfect foil for Fumihiko Maki’s architectural flair. As soon as I saw the museum’s gleaming white geometry glimmer into sight, I knew I was about to enter a completely different dimension.
The museum is perched on a hill, on the site of a former Bata Shoes Head Office (how the mighty fall!) right next to the equally impressive Ismaili Center.
Ismailis and the Aga Khan
Ismail’ism is a branch of Shia Islam. The largest sub-branch, Nizaris, recognize Aga Khan IV as the 49th hereditary imam (ie directly descended from Muhammad). He became the Khan in 1957 at the age of 20, when he was still an undergraduate at Harvard University. The Aga Khan III chose his grandson to succeed him rather than either of his sons because he believed a young man would be better able to lead the Nizaris in a rapidly changing world. For this reason he is sometimes called ‘the Imam of the Atomic Age.’
When I walked into the atrium, there was a sense of being in a temple. Huge glass walls revealed a courtyard in the center and even though it was a rainy day, the light streaming in might have been the light of 9th-century Córdoba, Baghdad during the Abbasid dynasty or Khorasan under the Sassanids.
The Prince’s Plates
Aamer was delayed by a big marathon that had disrupted public transport, so I visited a mini exhibition of ceramic ware in a room on the edge of the courtyard. Each item was fascinating and beautiful, even without knowing anything about its provenance. It was interesting to speculate who had made it, where, how, and for what purpose.
Like many of the other objects in the museum, these had originally belonged to the Aga Khan’s uncle Prince Sadruddin Aga Khan (1933-2003). Apart from being suave AF, he was the UN High Commissioner for Refugees between 1966 and 1977 and worked as a diplomat and environmental advocate for many years. In between all this philanthropy, he and his second wife Catherine Aleya Sursock accumulated one of the finest private collections of Islamic art in the world. It is that collection that forms the bulk of objects in the Aga Khan Museum.
Music
After gazing at these things I wandered back to the foyer just in time for a free concert of flamenco music: a man in a polka-dot blouse strummed on his guitar as a woman keened, clapped and twisted her hands in a mournful, rhythmic, sensuous dynamic display. The effect was transporting and hypnotic—once more, I felt I was no longer in the Canadian suburbs but in the Andalusian countryside.
Flamenco has roots both in the dances of the moriscos (Spanish Muslims who remained in southern Spain after the Christian reconquest) and in the musical traditions of the Romani, who migrated from Rajasthan to Europe in the Middle Ages. There are some who believe it is derived directly from Sufi religious music:
“In the 1930s, a student from Pakistan named Aziz Balouch travelled to Spain, and as soon as he heard flamenco he recognized it as almost identical to the Sufi music that he played and sang at home. Indeed, the very next night he sang the same songs back to the original performer—none other than Pepe Marchena—only this time in Urdu. Marchena and his guitarist, Ramón Montoya, were gobsmacked by the foreigner who had just arrived in Andalusia, yet could sing perfect cante jondo as though he had been born and raised in a Spanish village. On the spot, Marchena took the young man on as his fellow performer, and Balouch would go on to record under the name Marchenita (“little Marchena”).”
The Islamic Conquests
When Aamer arrived, we headed into the museum and were immediately faced with maps showing the number and extent of a dizzying number of caliphates. The story of the Islamic Conquests is complicated and confusing but often boiled down to five major periods:
- The spread of Islam under Muhammad on the Arabian Peninsula (622-632)
- Islamic expansion under the Rashidun Caliphate (NE Africa, middle east, Persia) (632-666)
- Expansion under the Umayyad Caliphate (NW Africa, Spain) (661-754)
- Abbasid Caliphate (750-1517)
- Ottoman Empire (1517-19)
House of Knowledge
In front of the maps was a collection of ancient manuscripts. In the tradition of other bibliophile leaders (Ashurbanipal, Ptolemy, the Attalids) the first caliph of the Ummayad Caliphate, Mu’awiya I, created a private library called Bayt al-Hikma (House of Knowledge). This included books written in Persian, Greek and Latin in all the known fields of knowledge. For an example of one such book, see On Plants, which the Library of Congress has digitized.
This thirst for knowledge-gathering continued in Islamic centers through the centuries. One of my favourite of these early encyclopedias has the great title The Ultimate Ambition in the Arts of Erudition (نهاية الأرب في فنون الأدب, Nihāyat al-arab fī funūn al-adab). Written by Al-Nuwayrī (1273-1333), it is quite a grab-bag of topics, which include ‘The Heavens’, Proverbs and Parables’, ‘Aromatic Plants’ and ‘On the History of the Mamluk State’. Under the entry for ‘Horse’, he quotes a fanciful description of one by the pre-Islamic poet Imru’ al-Qays (501-544). If I had never seen a horse I’d find it hard to picture it on the strength of these lines, though I can sort of see what he means:
It has the flanks of a gazelle, the two legs of the ostrich
The lope of the wolf, the fox cub’s trot,
When he sets off, his back seems as smooth as the pounding-slab
Of a bride’s perfume or the colocynth, to be split
Charging, fleeing, hurtling forward, all together
Like a boulder carried down a raging torrent
Swift as a child’s spinning top, whipped around
Between his two hands by the trailing thread
A darky bay, the saddle-felt slipping off his back
Like a raindrop off a smooth rock
Bureacratic Objects
Interestingly to me (as a stationery addict), there was quite a lot of office equipment: rulers, desk lamps, pen rests, inkwells… I hadn’t thought about it before, but it must have been pretty demanding in bureaucratic terms to run such a huge empire.
In the late 7th century, Damascus became the capital of the Umayyad Caliphate and all of the surplus revenue of the Umayyad Caliphate’s provinces were forwarded to the treasury of Damascus. It was a dazzling and powerful city. The Ummayyad mosque still standing there is one of the largest and oldest in the world.
Mu’awiya I, the founder and first caliph of the Umayyad Caliphate, followed the practices of the Byzantines and set up four main governmental branches: political affairs, military affairs, tax collection, and religious administration. Each of these was further subdivided into more branches, offices, and departments. In an effort to discourage the forgery of official documents, the Diwan al-Khatam (Registry Bureau), had official letters produced in duplicate; one was sealed and dispatched and the other copy was filed away. There was also an effective postal service, the barīd, which also functioned as a kind of intelligence agency.
Tile Art
There were ceramic tiles and pots but the most distinctively ‘Arabic’ ceramics were the tiles used to decorate the walls of buildings, particularly mosques.
Science
The Ummayyad Mosque of Damascus was the workplace of one of Islam’s greatest technical astronomers, the muwaqqit Ibn al-Shatir (1304-75). A muwaqquit was an official timekeeper—essential for religions because they need to establish coordinated times for prayer, holy days and calendars. Using observational data, he reformed the Ptolemaic models of the sun, moon and planets. He invented a timekeeping device for calculating prayer times called the jewel box Sandūq al‐Yawāqīt li maʿrifat al-Mawāqīt.
Literature
There were several gorgeous illustrations of stories, particularly the Shahnameh (The King of Kings) by Firdausi (977 and 1010). This epic poem tells the (largely mythical) story of the Persian Empire from the beginning of time up until the Muslim conquests in the 7th century. This folio depicts a court of Keyumars, the first shah of the world.
Another famous and revered book is the Khamseh (Quintet) by Amir Khusraw Dihlavi (1253-1325). This page is an excerpt from “The Night of Power” (Shab-i Qadr) . The poem depicts the story of a saint who made a failed attempt to stay awake until the “Night of Power” (the night when believers commemorate the night when the first verses of the Qur’an were revealed to Muhammad).
There is also one of the earliest versions of the stories of the Abbasid caliph Harun al-Rashid, A Thousand and One Nights, maybe the most famous Arab poem of all. This version is called A Hundred and One Nights. It’s written in maghribi Arabic and is from Spain about 1235.
The Conference of the Birds (Mantiq al-Tayr) by ʻAṭṭār, Farīd al-Dīn (1114–1220) tells the story of the journey of the soul’s ascent to God through an allegory of birds in their search for enlightenment from their Supreme Master (God),who is envisaged as the mythical Sīmorgh, or Phoenix. Farīd al-Dīn was one of the greatest proponents of Sufism, a mystical Islamic practice in which Muslims seek to find the truth of divine love and knowledge through direct personal experience of god.
The Rose Garden of Love (Gulshan-i Ishq ) recounts a North Indian Hindu love story recast as a Sufi tale for an Islamic court in south-central India. In a world of magical beings, beautiful gardens and monsters a pair of star-crossed lovers must overcome obstacles and painful separations before living happily ever after—an allegory of the soul’s search for God.
Calligraphy
Calligraphy means ‘beautiful writing’ and in my opinion some of the most beautiful writing in the world is in Arabic. There were countless examples of it, some of it etched into an oyster shell.
It’s impossible to describe all the great things in this museum, or the expansive sensation the whole collection gives you. If you are ever in Toronto, it is worth seeing.
