Aga Kahn Museum

Yesterday I had the pleasure of Toronto’s Aga Kahn Museum. Built in 2010, the museum celebrates Muslim history and art. To get there, one must take public transit 45 minutes. The harrowing journey pays for itself simply due to the intellectual experience the museum provides. Although it’s easy to think that the museum is narrowly aimed toward one demographic (Muslims, which isn’t as narrow a demographic as many Westerners think it is), upon entering one notices that the museum is very much a part of the community at large. For one, it’s sprawling campus is located in a residential business district, not tucked away in one of Toronto’s many ethnic neighborhoods. Further, free admission on Wednesdays (which I admittedly took advantage of) encourages everybody to come and its pride decorations outside the entrance demonstrate Muslims’ involvement in broader social issues. 

In short, the museum is a wonderful experience which everybody, and I mean everybody, who visits Toronto should see. The museum follows a roughly chronological pattern, beginning with art from the tenth century CE and continuing up until the 1800s. Overall, I was amazed to see the influences of other cultures found in Islamic art. Usually when we think of the Islamic world, we think of a region that lives in a vacuum, completely isolated from Western society and developing values opposite of “ours.” Yet when one goes through the museum, the descriptive plaques keep pointing out the how the artworks have adopted the styles from other cultures. For example, one tray from the 16^th century shows artistic influences from India, Persia, and Europe—specifically the neoclassical architecture depicted in the piece.

A lot of Westerners are familiar with Gray’s Anatomy, the 19^th century medical textbook whose dramatic drawings of the human body combined art with scientific education. Yet more impressive most people will agree are the textbooks in the Aga Khan Museum. Predating Gray by about 400 years, The Anatomy by Mansur ibn Muhammed ibn Ahmad is the Islamic world’s first ever treatise on the human anatomy.

More impressive still is Canon of Medicine, written by Persian scholar Ibn Sina in 1052 CE. In this encyclopedic work he brings together knowledge from Greek, Roman, Muslim and Chinese medical science. 

Surprisingly, much of the art that comes from the Muslim world isn’t exactly what Westerners think of as art. In the European tradition, paintings and sculpture seem to be the “mainstream” genres—yet in the Muslim world, at least according to the impression I got from the museum, the primary genre of art is illustrative pottery.

While Islamic art does include drawings and paintings, they’re found mainly in tapestry, books and manuscripts used to illustrate stories and traditions central to Muslim history and identity. For example, this drawing of a pigeon in a thunderstorm comes from the manuscript of The Lights of Canopus, a collection of fables of Sanskrit origin.

In contrast to how we usually think of the Islamic world, as a closed society only shaped by sectarian politics, Islamic art reveals the high degree it has been influenced by other cultures.