Islam in Museums

by Claire Lindsay

A conception of Islam as inherently violent is a large factor in the Western imaginary of the religion and related cultures. The consistency of U.S. backed and funded war and genocide in places like Palestine, Iraq, Syria, and Iran, as well as September Eleventh and the media portrayal of jihad in West Africa as a necessarily violent reinforcement of Islamic “orthodoxy” are just some of the factors that have contributed to this framework. To combat this, many museum exhibits on Islam lend themselves to images of Islam that normalize it as a Western identity. However, this assimilationism is itself problematic; it reduces a massive set of people, cultures and identities into a particular, ahistorical Western ideological space. This, in turn, grants merit to the concept that proximity to Western ideologies grants justification for a culture’s existence - which then lends itself to a fragile and nominal acceptance of Islam that fractures as soon as material conflicts break out. In this brief piece, I’ll discuss how some museums have lended themselves to this framing of Islam, and I’ll give two examples of museums that have challenged this. Lastly, I’ll explain what our goal is with this online exhibit.

The internationally hosted 1001 Inventions exhibit focuses on Islamic culture primarily as relative to Western culture, showing how many intellectual and material productions of the Western world actually have origins in the Islamic world.1 Professor Saira Malik, a scholar of the history of science, argues that “in general, from a Western perspective Islamic culture is synonymous with the Sharī‘a.”2 In other words, the Islamic is seen as a law-based religious notion, and thus as incompatible with post-Enlightenment notions of a break from textual authority. However, the 1001 Inventions exhibit only mentions religion insofar as it is required to describe why certain developments occurred. The exhibit is also centered around the concept of “Islamic civilization.” Thus, what is omitted, Sharī‘a, is excluded from this concept of Islamic civilization. Generally, the exhibit prioritizes a construction of “Islamic civilization” as scientific and rational, aligning with the values of the European Enlightenment in particular.3 This museum thus promotes acceptance through cultural integration. 

This then brings us to a question: can we frame Islamic heritage positively in Western culture without promoting assimilationism? I want to here demonstrate that the answer is yes this has been done; there are exhibits that fulfill the need to portray the complexity of Islamic cultures. The exhibit “Power and Protection” at the Ashmolean Museum in the UK highlights the relationship between divinatory arts and science, and argues that one of them could not exist without the other. For example, the curators point out that “astrological forecasts – themselves based on mathematical knowledge and astronomical calculations – were … needed to produce and activate amulets, to assist with medical prognoses, and to elucidate dreams and omens.”8 Diviners are thus often interdisciplinary - studying in fields like philosophy, astrology, astronomy, arithmetic and geometry. Ultimately, the exhibit argues that “there is no real distinction between ‘natural’ and ‘supernatural’ events in the Islamic world-view; humans, animals, and angels are similarly all God’s creatures and all owe veneration to Him.”9 The idea of separating Islam and Islamic cultures from Sharī‘a and divine authority, or vice versa, is therefore necessarily contradictory to a holistic conception of any particular “Islamic” heritage.

An issue with all of the museums above, save the Ashmolean, is that although they describe themselves as generally “Islamic” museums or catalogs, they hardly acknowledge the existence of Islam outside of the Middle East and North Africa. This results in an ahistorical image of Islam as stagnant and self contained - which hardly gets at “the everyday reality of people stretching across vast expanses of time, geography, and subject matter.”10 Thus, the exhibit “Islamic Art - An African Interpretation” by Annelize Kotze at the Bo-Kaap Museum in South Africa highlights the art of South African Muslims, in an effort to bring light to the existence of Islamic cultures in the region. The exhibit centers the art of the prolific Achmat Soni, an artist who has painted the domes and mihrabs of dozens of Mosques in South Africa; the goal of his art is to help shape South African Muslim identity and heritage, both locally and internationally.11 His piece Ayatul Qursi (“Verse of the Throne”), to me, seems to be a great representation of the complexity of the relationship between materiality and spirituality in Islamic religious values and practices. The piece is beautifully constructed in a rigorous geometric fashion, similarly to the art of many Islamic talismans, and at the same time, the piece is centered around Islam as a faith; the “Verse of the Throne” is a verse in the Qur’an that emphasizes the absolute sovereignty and knowledge of God.

Despite the nuanced narratives brought by places like the Ashmolean and Bo-Kaap museums, the reality is that there are very few exhibits that share this vision in their portrayals of Islamic culture. Thus, my colleagues and I concluded that it was necessary to highlight these aspects in our own exhibit. Firstly, we sought to highlight material culture to ground an image of Islam in the everyday practices of those who engage with it. Secondly, we wanted to provide a narrative which went against the grain of traditional framings of Islam as contained in the Middle East and North Africa - in particular, by drawing from the Islamic Collection at the Ethnographic Museum of Bissau, highlighting Senegambian Islamic material culture. Finally, we followed in the footsteps of exhibits like “Power and Protection” and “Islamic Art - An African Interpretation” by pushing against normative Western views of Islam – which are either assimilationist or Islamaphobic, and are necessarily orientalist – to portray a more nuanced image of Islam which acknowledges both its regional specificities, and the both material and spiritual practices that surround any culture.

Notes

1. Saira Malik,  “Countering the Sharī‘a: how material culture constructs a narrative of an ‘Islamic’ identity that counters the Sharī‘a,” Journal of Islamic and Muslim Studies 2, no. 2 (2017): 79, 83, doi.org/10.2979/jims.2.2.04.

2. Malik, “Countering the Sharī‘a,” 90.

3. Malik, “Countering the Sharī‘a,” 91.

4. Pooyan Tamimi Arab, “Islamic Heritage Versus Orthodoxy: figural painting, musical instruments and wine bowls at the Dutch National Museum of World Cultures,” Journal of Material Culture 26, no. 2 (2021): 188, doi.org/10.1177/1359183521997503.

5. Yassir Morsi, “Melbourne’s Islamic Museum of Australia: the ‘white washed ‘I’ as an Apollonian celebration of liberal myths,” Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs 35, no. 2 (2015): 207, doi.org/10.1080/13602004.2015.1051755.

6. Malik, “Countering the Sharī‘a,” 85, 88.

7. Malik, “Countering the Sharī‘a,” 86.

8. Morsi, “Melbourne’s Islamic Museum of Australia,” 203-204.

9. Francesca Leoni, Power and Protection: Islamic art and the supernatural (Oxford, UK: Ashmolean Museum, 2016), 13.

10. Mike Cummings, “Illuminated and Ordinary: exhibition explores the world of Islamic manuscripts.” YaleNews (New Haven, CT), March 11, 2025, accessed February 19, 2026, news.yale.edu/2025/03/11/illuminated-and-ordinary-exhibition-explores-world-islamic-manuscripts-0.

11. “Achmat Soni’s Artworks Take Centre Stage at ‘Islamic Art - An African Interpretation’ Exhibition,” The Post (Glendale, CA), 2022, accessed February 19, 2026, thepost.co.za/entertainment/whats-on/cape-town/2022-02-08-achmat-sonis-artworks-take-centre-stage-at-islamic-art--an-african-interpretation-exhibition/.

12. “Achmat Soni’s Artworks Take Centre Stage.”