Visual Dhikr™
returning to remembrance

So many museums and galleries full of huge collections of Islamic Art, so this is great news:

DETROIT -

The Detroit Institute of Arts plans to open a new gallery of Islamic art in February.

The museum announced Monday that the gallery opening Feb. 28 will include works of art from the Mediterranean region, the Middle East, Central Asia and India, and spans the 7th to the early 20th centuries.

The gallery was to be part of the museum’s $158-million, six-year renovation and reinstallation project that was completed in 2007. The museum says the project was delayed until funding could be secured.

The DIA began collecting Islamic art in the 1890s. The museum’s collection will be on view in a larger space than was previously allocated. The new gallery also incorporates works on loan from nine public and private collections.

http://www.dia.org/

source

Interestning article:

Can an architectural element ‘belong’ to a people? Can it be ‘moral’?

A COUPLE of recent events prompted me to ponder the question of whether the dome is an exclusively “Islamic” element in architecture.

One was a request for help from one of my students who is writing his dissertation on whether the dome is still relevant in Islam. The greater impetuts, however, came from a consultancy meeting I attended during which a former senior civil servant, who had been a planner, said that the dome is the best representation of Islam, implying that it is “morally” correct to build mosques with domes. Another person at the meeting added the notion that the dome had been “perfected” by Muslims and, thus, is justifiably unique to Muslims.

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What do you think?