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Cultural Imperialism and Nationalism: the Struggle to Define and Control the Heritage of Arab Art in Egypt

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 January 2009

Donald Malcolm Reid
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Abstract

It was Europeans who started in Egypt a historic preservationist movement for Arab (or Islamic) art.1 It was they who persuaded Khedive Tawfiq to decree, in December 1881, the founding of the Committee for the Conservation of Monuments of Arab Art (hereafter “the Comité,” the usual French designation). It was the European-dominated Comité that opened the Museum of Arab Art three years later, and it was an Englishman, K. A. C. Creswell, who established the Institute of Islamic Archaeology at the Egyptian (later Cairo) University. Why did the Europeans care? In 19th-century Europe, romanticism gave a strong impetus to writers and painters, scholars, and collectors to search for a lost past, the unusual, the exotic, the “Oriental.” This inquiry into the past, at home and abroad, was intimately bound up with Westerners' search for their own identities and with the triumph of the idea of the nation-state. Historic preservationists and museums selected, conserved, and displayed buildings and objects defined as valuable to their national heritages. Romanticism, in part a revolt against classical styles, also spurred a "Gothic revival movement and a fascination with various Oriental styles.

Type
Articles
Information
International Journal of Middle East Studies , Volume 24 , Issue 1 , February 1992 , pp. 57 - 76
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1992

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References

Author's note: This paper was read at the “Processes of Arab Self-Definition” conference in honor of Dr. C. Ernest Dawn, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Nov. 11–12, 1989. For helpful comments, I am indebted to the conference participants, John and Caroline Williams, Timothy Crimmins, and the editor and anonymous readers for IJMES. Research was funded by the Fulbright-Hays Faculty Research Abroad Program and Georgia State University. The Binational Fulbright Commission, the American Research Center in Egypt, and Cairo and Ayn Shams universities sponsored me in Egypt.

1 “Arab art” and “Islamic art” are used interchangeably here. As noted in the text, the “Museum of Arab Art” became the “Museum of Islamic Art” in the 1950s.

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