century. A beautiful woman is sitting in a mihrab niche on a Q'uran stand, her feet on a pile of Q'urans (all objects from the museum's Islamic Arts department, including the mihrab). Painted in the Orientalist style, the work is called "Mihrab."We came across "Mihrab" in an article by Wendy M. K. Shaw I had my Secularism students read, which explores the many ambivalent ways in which religious objects and sites were integrated into implicitly secular museums in the late Ottoman as well as early Turkish Republic periods. This painting seems to represent everything that's wrong with putting religious objects in a museum - a merely human beauty displaces (indeed tramples) sacred scripture and blocks the way to Mecca. It could have been painted in triumph or despair at the fate of these objects.
And yet, Shaw shows, it's a considerably more multilayered painting than this. For the woman is Osman Hamdi's wife, presumably his beloved. In Sufi mysticism the beloved can be a perhaps more valid way to God than scripture: the beloved is herself a mihrab.
Or is she a mihrab in a more secular sense, the way museums, sometimes described as "secular temples," are, a conduit not to a religious but some other kind of enlightenment? The Western aesthetic or enlightenment tradition? Hamdi's wife was French...
We had a fascinating discussion, referring back to our experience at the Rubin - and decided to take a class excursion to The Cloisters after Thanksgiving to complete our religious art museum crawl.)
