While I was in London last week, Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff and I went with a group of people to see “Hajj: journey to the heart of Islam”, a feature exhibit that runs until April 15 at the British Museum.
Despite paying £12 to see the Hajj material, we discovered that visitors were not allowed to take photographs. I was sure the museum’s website would have more, but when I got home and took a look, there wasn’t much available.
And, truth be told, there wasn’t really that much to the exhibit. The sitara — the curtain for the door of the Ka’aba, on loan from King Abdul Aziz Public Library in Saudi Arabia — was the prize artifact, and it was impressive indeed. There were numerous other beautiful objects on display, plus a lot of calligraphy, descriptive texts, photos, drawings, engravings, etc.
We saw plenty of images of devotees circling the black cube (counterclockwise) or kneeling to pray, but no contemporaneous materials from the 7th or 8th century. There was no ground plan from the original Mecca as determined by archaeological excavation, nor any artifacts dug up at the site. There’s good reason for that, of course, since no archaeological activity is allowed at any of Islam’s holy sites.
This makes the Hajj exhibit a rather paltry affair in comparison with, say, the magnificent Egyptian and Assyrian galleries at the British Museum. It’s all hype and puffery and public relations, an expensive and elaborate sales campaign bankrolled by the Saudis and designed to supplant the beating heart of Western culture with the austere emptiness of Islam.
Or, as Elisabeth said when we walked through the door, “This is da’wa!”
I asked her to write her impressions of the exhibit, and this is what she had to say:
It is not usually my style to spend a whopping twelve pounds Sterling of my hard-earned money in order to visit the British Museum’s special exhibition on the Hajj, especially in view of the fact that my knowledge exceeds that of most non-Muslims (I actually venture to say that I know more than most Muslims). The reason I decided to enter the tomb that represents Islam is simply to see what the exhibition organizers were able to make out of nothing.
For example, how can one claim to show the history behind the Hajj when there is no historical evidence of Islam on the Arabian peninsula? And so there was very little to show about the Hajj except copies of the Koran, hajjis’ reports about the Hajj, intricately stitched prayer carpets, and movies about the experiences of those who completed the Hajj. As expected, it wasn’t much, because there isn’t much.
What I did notice, however, was not only the high number of non-Muslims who walked through the exhibition, but also the many school classes. Most of them were made up of very young children, many of whom were eight- or nine-year-old girls in hijab.
Looking at them, I felt my heart ache. No one can tell me that these girls willingly donned the hijab and the long dresses when they entered school. What galls me even more is that by covering up, these girls are being sexualized, for this is what the hijab tells us, the non-Muslims: “Do not touch these girls, they belong to us. They are our property.” As soon as a girl reaches puberty — which according to Islamic tradition is when Mohammed married Aisha and consummated the marriage — she is seen as marriageable.
As I wandered through the exhibition, I had the sensation of walking through a tomb that is called Islam. Everything exuded gloominess, as gloomy as the faces of many devout Muslims walking in the streets.
One can imagine how refreshed I felt upon returning to the — as yet — non-Muslim world, to the sunshine, to relative freedom.
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