Qatar Now: Manar al-Muftah | Talisman

The Seas and the Mobility of Islamic Art, 2021

Art's biggest stars are flocking to the collecting mecca of Qatar, but how rich can art be in a land without free speech?

ICMA newsletter, 2020

Harun al-Rashid, the 8 th century Abbasid caliph, presided over the full flowering of the Arabic empire and embodied its noblest aspirations. He stood at the very epicenter of a civilized world, the crossroads of Eastern and Western culture. Under his rule from Ar Raqqah, the Arab diaspora began, eventually claiming the present day Gulf states and extended along the north coast of Africa to Spain, the very frontier of Europe. Qatar today feels itself at the same fulcrum of a new world order, in which Arab culture is re-ascendant, perhaps in a more compact form, but well-suited to this tiny desert emirate. I.M. Pei has captured this moment in time, in his fine Museum of Islamic Art, commissioned by Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Hamad bin Khalifa. To appreciate what Pei has accomplished, it is important to understand some of the historic and political influences of these times. Doha is a city of compressed layers. In its architecture can be found the footprint of decades of American and European influence stamped onto what was originally a small fishing and pearling village on the shores of the Arabian Gulf. Qatar in the space about 100 years has gone from a province of the Ottoman Empire, dominated by the Bahraini Khalifa family, to a semi-independent state, generally agreed to have been created at the Ottoman defeat in Wajbah at the hands of Sheikh Jassim in 1893, to a British Protectorate in 1916, wherein the al Thani family was confirmed as the ruling lineage. The borders between states in the Middle East have only recently been truly solidified, the interior desert sea being openly shared by many countries. The need to confirm oil claims has done more to settle border disputes than any tribal conflict. So, too, Doha has progressed from a shapeless agglomeration of villas, public buildings and mosques to a more organized and structured metropolis, on the verge of codifying zoning bylaws and land uses. Within that context, Mr. Pei was given a choice of sites for the Museum. He chose carefully within a burgeoning city-state where the functional life of a typical building was often less than twenty years. New buildings were springing up literally from the foundations of the old, especially as the new

'Museums and the Material World' edited by Pamela Erskine-Loftus, MuseumEtc , 2014

This paper sets out to investigate how the MIA (Museums of Islamic Art) in Doha incorporates its Islamic Art collection into a discourse of Qatari identity and heritage in a global context. Furthermore, the paper discusses the repercussions and misrepresentations that can occur when an all-encompassing concept such as "Islamic art" is used on a highly selective corpus of material culture.

This is a news summary of the Qatar Unified Imaging Project (QUIP) that I was involved with during 2011-14. This $1 million project mapped private and public archival collections in Qatar, India, Britain, Denmark, and France, and is in the process of publishing the results of its findings. It's most significant publication to date is http://qatarchive.org

2015