The Hidden Art of Islam

A collection of artefacts from the Muslim world

is about to be put on show at the British Museum.

They tell the story of the Hajj,

the Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca, strictly forbidden to non-Muslims.

Much of the beautiful artwork on show conforms to the religious rules

which inspire the rich visual language of Islamic culture,

past and present.

I can only pray, Inshallah, that this exhibition will be a source

of education, of understanding and of delight.

In Islam, depictions of God and the prophets are prohibited,

but to many Muslims, so too are any human depictions or living creatures.

One group would say any depiction is not allowed.

Then there is the other school which say it's not a big deal.

But on show at the British Museum are images from Muslim history

which appear to break the present-day understanding

of the rules of Muslim art.

In the modern period, people take this prohibition

in a much more literal sense than they might have taken it in a pre-modern period.

Included here are portraits, depictions of human figures

and whole tableaux, showing pilgrims performing the most important pillar of the Muslim faith.

There's nothing in the Qur'an that says figural art is not permitted.

But idol worship is not permitted.

So, if human depiction is the source of such controversy,

how come art displayed here shows a tradition of figurative art

at the heart of Islam, for century after century?

I'm fascinated to see how the artistic traditions of Islam

have navigated this through the centuries.

Sometimes they've been at odds with the clerics.

Sometimes, visual depiction has led to violence, crisis and destruction.

There's been no public controversy over the inclusion of these images in this exhibition,

supported by the country overseeing the sacred sites of Mecca. But why?

Have the rules changed? I'm setting out to get to the bottom

of what forms of art are acceptable for a Muslim

and why this artistic tradition has thrived in the hidden art of Islam.

To understand the origins of the Muslim approach to visual art,

you have to understand the significance of this place.

It was here, at a cave overlooking the city of Mecca,

that Muslims believe the Prophet Muhammad received his first revelation from God.

These revelations continued throughout his lifetime

and formed the Qur'an, the Muslim holy book.

And it made Mecca the centre-point of Muslim worship.

It's the place people strive to reach in their lifetime...

..pray towards five times a day...

..and the direction in which they are buried when they die.

At the heart of Mecca is the Grand Mosque,

and at its centre, this, the Kaaba.

In essence, the most beautiful thing about Mecca is the Kaaba itself

and its beauty is in its simplicity.

It's a black box

and it's a black box which people circumambulate.

And it's just so divinely simple, yet so divinely beautiful.

Muslims believe that the Kaaba was built by the Prophet Abraham,

under divine instruction,

as a focal point of a simple message that there was one god,

not the many gods of the pagan past.

But by Muhammad's time, the Kaaba had been taken over by pagan Arabs

and somewhat ironically, had been festooned with icons

of their tribal gods.

Until, in 630 AD, after years of persecution, exile and warfare,

Muhammad and his followers took over leadership of Mecca.

He destroyed the idols at the Kaaba and re-established it

as a simple house, dedicated to the one god.

This act defined this most sacred site in Islam

as a place where the one god should not be depicted.

The Kaaba is just something which is the house itself,

the way it was built, this is the meaning in Arabic.

But in fact, it's the symbol of God's house. He's not here

but this is the symbol of his presence on Earth,

where Muslims have to go,

and there is no images, nothing there to represent him

because we should not represent God.

So it's a place without a physical presence but a spiritual presence.

The depiction of God himself, or the Prophet,

or any of the figures that are religiously associated,

any prophets for that matter, or the angels, are prohibited.

This is to keep the sanctity of God who is beyond a depiction,

God who is beyond an object.

The Prophet Muhammad,

when he takes Mecca, destroys the idols in the Kaaba,

and the very strong iconoclastic nature of that.

The fear is that if something is made, it may become an object of worship.

People will produce, for example, sculptures,

which could also double up as idols.

The simplicity of the Kaaba itself provides a constant reminder

to Muslims of why there should be no depiction of God or the prophets.

A message most profoundly underlined when any Muslim completes the pilgrimage

of the Hajj - the fifth pillar of Islam.

I've been to Hajj myself

and one of the greatest journeys of any human's life is Hajj.

What was the most awesome experience was looking at the house of God.

But as well as the visual meaning attached to the Kaaba,

there is a further reason why artists from the Islamic world

have been discouraged from creating depictions of any human likeness, if they are in religious settings.

In the Qur'an, there are 99 different names for God,

each of them signifying a characteristic.

There is Al-Rahman, The Beneficent, Al-Rahim, The Merciful.

One of those characteristics is Al-Khaliq, The Creator,

and it's the reason why so many Muslims believe

that when an artist shows the human form or the form of any creature,

they're putting themselves in the role reserved for God.

And it's the reason why, over the centuries,

clerics and artists have debated what is acceptable and what isn't.

It's also left room for interpretation

as to what could be deemed to be realistic or not.

Some would say this saying of the Prophet, or sayings of the Prophet,

around prohibition of human beings or living entities, a drawing of them, is clear and absolute.

That is not true, because if it was absolute,

why would there be so many others who say it's not?

I don't think human beings have the capacity to draw anything real.

Whatever I draw can never be real, though it may be a replica

of what is real, but it is not real.

Therefore I sit quite comfortably,

not worried about anyone competing with God and winning.

You can't win with God!

At the British Museum, they're unpacking a unique parcel.

In it is a carefully wrapped Qur'an, dating back to the 8th century,

one of the first examples of a written Qur'an.

Muslim scholars accept that this Qur'an is from the Hijaz region

of what is now Saudi Arabia -

a region which includes the holy cities of Mecca and Medina.

The text is written on parchment, in an early style of Arabic script called Ma'il,

which means "sloping", in this case to the right.

It also lacks any marks or symbols that usually distinguish letters

of a similar shape.

It was this, the Arabic script's shape and design

that led to the first and most enduring element in Islamic art.

If it was generally agreed in the early Islamic community

that there shouldn't be figural art in religious settings,

then the early artists and calligraphers were faced with what to do with the Qur'an.

After all, they were part of a tradition

where the Bible had been illustrated sumptuously,

and so there were models for what religious books should look like.

But the Qur'an, if it wasn't going to have figural designs in,

what was it going to have? And so illumination was developed

and geometry, geometric designs, were something they'd inherited

from late antiquity, and so,

the early artists and calligraphers adopted it, used it for illumination.

And so you get frontispieces of early Qur'ans which are geometric

because that's a non-threatening type of decoration

which adds great lustre to the items concerned.

There are three fundamental aspects behind Islamic art.

You have geometry, which is the foundation.

Then you have islimi, which you might know as arabesque,

which is the floral aspect of Islamic art.

At the top of the hierarchy is the calligraphy

cos that's the word of God.

Islamic artists built on the Arabic saying,

"Purity of writing is purity of soul."

They experimented with the shape and design of the Arabic letters,

using the flowing Arabic language to express the beauty they perceived

in the words of the Qur'an.

I've been doing calligraphy for about ten years now.

It started off as an exploration of, essentially, the written word.

Ruh Al-Alam is a young British artist.

He studied the art of calligraphy in Cairo,

under one of the most well-known calligraphers today.

Arabic calligraphy began with two fundamental sources.

One, the Qur'an, the holy scripture.

And the prohibition against depicting figurative work in Islam.

The Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him,

the first word that was revealed to him, by the Angel Gabriel,

was "Iqra", meaning "read".

This was the foundation for seeking knowledge for Muslims.

But also, the verse continues, it continues to teach Muslims

that knowledge was taught to man by the use of the pen.

And therefore, transmission of knowledge was key.

Calligraphy binds both knowledge and penmanship in one.

These are a few of the letters that are found in the Holy Qur'an,

which, in fact, nobody knows the meaning of.

These are the mysterious letters that are found at the beginning

of certain chapters of the Qur'an.

Er, and that mystery, of not knowing what these letters represent,

is, in itself, beautiful.

Calligraphers were given precise rules

for how they should write letters from the medieval period.

And particularly with respect to how they copy Qur'ans.

The interesting thing was how you should write a certain ligature,

for example in one brushstroke,

how the size of a ligature was related, say,

to the proportions of the eye, the eye which is seeing it.

How the dots, the noktas, related to the ligatures and so forth.

There's elements of proportion which were very mathematical and precise,

which are laid down. The idea was you could produce something which was beautiful using these rules.

The way the letters were used,

even though they may not seem as decorative, right at the beginning,

in between the 8th to 10th centuries,

even then there was a very specific geometry used.

There was a real harmony in the way the letters were fitted to the page

and the way certain letters

were elongated so that each line, the margins would be even on both sides

and they'd be justified.

As Islam spread, the art of calligraphy developed,

reaching its peak, among other places,

here, in Turkey, under the Ottoman Empire.

Calligraphy is also integral to the decoration of the world's great mosques.

The words come from the Qur'an or are names of the Prophet Muhammad.

At an Istanbul art gallery, there is the largest collection

of contemporary Turkish calligraphy.

It is put together as a homage to the Prophet Muhammad.

In this work, art and belief go hand in hand.

MAN DESCRIBES ARTWORK IN ANOTHER LANGUAGE

Oh, there's er... Amazing, fantastic.

Do you have any particular feelings when you're writing verses from the Qur'an?

TRANSLATION: When you look at the art forms

in the world, you will see that the only divine form is the art of calligraphy,

because we are putting the words of God on paper

and hence enable people to read it.

That's why I can't describe or compare the feeling I have doing calligraphy.

Actually, it is said that the heart can only be happy

with the mention of God.

The same feelings apply to us when we deliver Qur'anic verses

in calligraphy.

Alongside calligraphy, the exquisite precision

of traditional Islamic design, seen in arabesque and geometric patterns,

has maintained its appeal in contemporary design studios.

It's a language of symmetry which was first developed by the Greeks,

but then extrapolated and developed upon within the Islamic tradition.

So often what you will see is an underlying geometric pattern

which you might find in Euclid.

And then, on top of that, you'll find the Muslim craftsmen would elaborate

more complex geometric designs which would appear on top of that grid.

And then they would hide the underlying grid.

The idea is that these patterns are there to engender

a contemplative state.

The repetitions that one sees within islimi patterns

and geometric patterns allow the mind to think upon the repetition

of pattern within nature and the idea of the infinite weave

and the infinite movement and repetition of form

that one sees within the natural world.

So this is an example of islimi, or arabesque.

To complete a composition like this,

you'd start off with the geometry, that's the structure.

So, you'll draw your square and then inside this square is a dynamic square, here.

And then that houses these linear shapes.

And they're the structural shapes, you have four of those,

here, here and here. And then you have, overlaid, four spirals.

And they're the structural lines.

Once you have those, you can add the motifs.

This particular motif is called a rumi motif.

It's not named after the poet. Both the poet and the motif

are named after the city, Rum, or Asiatic Rome,

which was in Anatolia, the capital of Anatolia.

There are original examples of this in Seljuk carvings of birds and animals.

And as they adopted Islam, they lost the representation

and it became this abstract art motif.

It's often said that Islamic art is like a meditation upon the invisible,

so you can see, as well as structural principles here,

there's a symbolic language in operation also.

The fundamental link between proportion and beauty,

that's at the heart of it.

The principle of Islamic aesthetics,

exactly the same notion of proportion between different shapes

and between the horizontal and the vertical,

between the different dimensions. Everything is quite precise.

Of course, sometimes they get things slightly wrong.

Certainly the traditional argument is that if the proportion is slightly off,

then you can, through your aesthetic sense, notice it's wrong.

But the fundamental thing was that if you got the proportions right,

you would produce a work of beauty and that's quite important.

Early Islamic art and architecture also try to depict

the Qur'anic description of paradise -

a concept of beauty on Earth,

with gardens, flowing streams, geometric arches.

There's a verse in the Qur'an where God says, "We have taught you how to calculate,

"we have taught you the science of computation

"about the stars and the moon and the planets.

"We've given you the knowledge so that you can navigate your way

"through the seas by creating compass."

All of these indicate to one particular science

that's called mathematics.

If you look at Islamic history - the garden, the mosque, the minaret,

the mihrab, the pulpit - every part of an Islamic architectural depiction

have always been geometrically perfect.

The way the ventilations have been designed,

they're all geometrically perfect, always correlating with one another,

often depicting the five pillars of Islam.

Or often depicting the articles of faith,

depicting the heavenly presence, the gardens of paradise,

the water, the fruit, the palm tree.

All of these are geometrically put in

and inspired by the very notion of maths from the Qur'an itself.

The artistry and the aesthetics of the Islamic world,

born out of the constraints about depicting humans

and other living creatures in religious settings,

have become part of global tastes in art and design

beyond the Muslim context in which they were created.

Many outside of the Islamic world have not recognised

what inspired these increasingly familiar motifs.

Ah, this is an amazing thing.

As part of the Kiswa archive, this gives you the photos -

they're literally like little passport photos of the people

who were actually making the sacred textiles.

To be a Muslim artist has traditionally meant

that whether you were a painter or an architect,

or working with textiles, your palette was made up of calligraphy,

arabesque and geometry.

It's completely wonderful to be able to put a face to these people

whose job it was to make the sacred textiles.

These particular craftsmen deployed the traditional Islamic artistic approach

to the creation of textiles for use around the Kaaba.

The Mahmal was an ornate cloth,

brought annually for many years from Egypt to adorn the Kaaba at the time of the Hajj.

It'd be placed next to the black cloth that covered the Kaaba

throughout the year called the Kiswa.

What we've got here are objects from a very important archive

of all sorts of documents that are to do with the making of the Kiswa

in Cairo. The Kiswa being the covering for the Kaaba.

We talk about the Kiswa, which is the black covering,

but it's also all the other textiles that went with it.

There was a special workshop in Cairo where all of these wonderful textiles were made.

And what's wonderful about this piece here,

is that this is the template for the design of the bag,

so the bag that was made to carry the precious keys

of the Kaaba that were given as gifts.

In order to get the correct design, they made little holes through it,

in order then that you could be able to work out

the design on the textile.

The Mahmal has had its share of politics. The Mamluk

and Ottoman rulers of Egypt started a tradition

of sending this heavily decorated textile to Mecca,

accompanying the pilgrim caravans to the Hajj.

It would stay on the Kaaba and then come back to Cairo.

To the Egyptian and Turkish rulers,

it was a symbol of their protective rights over the Kaaba.

But to the Saudis, it was a symbol of territorial control

and religiously heretical. In 1814,

followers of a Saudi cleric, ibn Wahhab, tried to stop it.

And in 1926,

the practice finally came to an end.

Many of the traditions which are around the Hajj

were stopped, partly because it was an assertion of their power,

but also because they didn't necessarily want people

to associate sanctity with objects. So, for example, if you have

this annual commemoration where special cloth is made or weaved

for the Kaaba and its use of gold thread, very nice velvet and silks and so forth,

then their understanding was that this was about veneration

of a cubic building.

Whereas, of course, everyone else understood

that traditionally this was about the beauty of the place.

It was about the celebration of the Kaaba because it was a central focus of Hajj.

It wasn't about the worship or veneration of a building,

it was about beautifying it, because it was the centre of the rituals.

Through history, the rulers of the Islamic world

held secular power, as well as religious faith.

Some faced a dilemma when these twin forces pulled in opposite directions.

Little more than 50 years after the death of the Prophet Muhammad,

such dilemmas were being faced

by one of the earliest Muslim heads of state,

whose rule began in 682 AD.

If you're an emperor, or a king, or a queen,

what image do you put on your coins?

Byzantine and Roman emperors put their portrait on it.

Caliph Abdul Malik, one of the first Muslim rulers of the Umayyad empire,

wasn't so sure.

In the late 7th century, he was faced with the problem

of introducing a new coinage for the Islamic community.

And he had to choose. He had the Byzantine coinage

or the Sasanian Iranian coinage.

Both had figures of kings or emperors on them.

He tried putting a figure of himself

on a coinage but then he rejected that, having issued it,

and he developed a completely new coinage

which was solely epigraphic. That means it was covered in inscriptions

on both sides, Qur'anic inscriptions and later historical inscriptions.

Figural imagery was discarded at that point for the coinage.

That's a very significant moment in Islamic history

because that means from then onwards, the identity of the Islamic community, the Islamic empire,

was focused on coins which had no images on them,

simply the calligraphic inscriptions.

But other Muslim rulers, as they grew in power and wealth,

wanted art to reflect their lives,

in their palaces and private spaces.

They asked their artists to draw pictures of them,

of their lives, holding court,

hunting, or just looking good.

Paintings of this kind illustrate the luxurious lives

of Muslim monarchs.

These rulers were not bothered by what Islam allows or doesn't allow.

What stimulated them was voyeurism, power, greed,

an absolute chauvinistic lifestyle that they led,

almost veering into, or edging on to hedonism that we see in the modern world.

In fact, maybe mutation of hedonism in a much graver manner.

Artists in the Islamic world faced a serious dilemma.

On the one hand, they were being asked to produce work

that showed the human form.

But to do so would invoke the wrath of the clerics.

What they did to try and overcome this

was to strike a balance between these two very conflicting demands.

Some artists, as a means to compromising

between the clerics and the rulers,

did depict the monarchs, the emperors, in one-dimensional pictures.

So you actually can't make a real feature of a human being

or a person, they all would look very similar cos it's one-dimensional.

That was a compromise.

They did not want to become known, in the eyes of the clerics,

as aiding the heretic, and they did not want to be killed

by the emperor for rebelling and being called treacherous or traitors.

And they came up with these one-dimensional pictures.

There were times when you had literal-minded clerics,

who were very unhappy about figurative art, in the same way

as they were unhappy about the king drinking wine, right?

But we also know for most of history, they tolerated it perfectly well.

Things ebb and flow. Sometimes what happens in the modern period

is we assume there is a basic relationship between the clerics

and those in political power

and that this relationship has been fixed throughout time.

And this is clearly not the case.

For most of history, those in power basically were in charge.

So what they said, the values they established,

the aesthetics they established, the court culture they established,

was far more significant than any rules that any clerics put down.

We never find, in later Islamic art,

the three-dimensional plastic art.

You know, sculpture, images of the ruler in three dimensions.

And also, there's a tendency in the figurative art,

in miniature painting, for example, not to represent volume.

I think that's something to do with an avoidance

of giving life to pictures so as you're rivalling God.

Muslim artists use form and colour in a particular way.

The composition does not have any perspective.

There is no light or shade.

The paintings are never naturalistic.

They do not temper the edges of their coloured areas

with reflections or shadows.

There are no atmospheric colour effects

used to convey depth or sense of distance.

Brightly coloured animals and plants,

which are supposed to be lying in the far distance,

are depicted as large and as clearly as those on the foreground.

My surmise would be because it all began with wall paintings.

And wall paintings tend to have areas of flat colour

because that's the way they've traditionally been painted.

The earliest wall paintings we have from the Near East or Middle East,

are from the Sogdia, that's the 6th, 7th century AD in central Asia.

And they show the stories of Rustam in polychrome,

but in different flat colours.

I think probably what's happened is those have got translated

into miniature painting and books originally.

So that idea of flat colours side by side is the way it developed.

I think it's a popular misconception that Islamic art is either

geometric, or floral or calligraphic.

The great courts produced artworks that are surprisingly varied

and include a plethora of figural imagery.

But whilst the great courts may have produced a plethora

of figurative images, over many centuries that did not always mean

that the controversial nature of such artwork diminished.

In fact, one artefact in the British Museum exhibition

provides evidence of what happened in the 14th century,

when the tastes of secular power

collided with a more orthodox outlook.

The court of a Mongol ruler dispatched this candlestick as a present

to the city of Medina, in modern-day Saudi Arabia,

the city where the Prophet himself is buried.

When it was originally produced, it had figures

that went all around it.

If you look closely at it, you'll see the faces have been rubbed off.

They would have been inlaid and would have popped out when you first looked at them,

they'd have been a prominent band across the candlestick base.

And now they've been muted.

But these controversies and sensibilities

over what can be depicted have not been observed in the same way

by one important branch of Islam.

The great schism in Islam between the majority Sunni and the minority Shi'a

is also reflected in the development of Islamic art.

While art in most of the Sunni Muslim world had this tension

between the ruler's desire for figurative paintings and the cleric's dislike of it,

art for Shi'a Muslims developed in complete contrast.

Shi'a theology includes the veneration of members of the Prophet's family,

down in the case of Twelver Shi'ism,

which is the dominant religion in southern Iraq and Iran,

it has the veneration of those imams,

members of the Prophet's family, in a way which doesn't happen in Sunni Islam, in orthodox Islam.

Shi'a Islam traces its beginning to the Battle of Karbala,

in modern-day Iraq, where in 680 AD, the Prophet's grandson Hussein was killed,

a conflict over the leadership of the expanding Muslim community.

The origin that Shi'ites claim is the Battle of Karbala,

at the end of the 7th century, when Hussein, the grandson of the Prophet,

is killed by the caliph's forces, and that becomes the excuse,

the reason, the moment at which Shi'ism looks back perpetually.

It won't forget, it won't forgive

and that becomes the driving force for Shi'ism in the future.

Now then, that narrative is about people.

And so you have, in Shi'ism,

a motivation for showing what those people were like.

Just as in Christianity, you had a narrative about Jesus as a man,

as well as in the Christian belief as the son of God,

so in Shi'ite Islam you have a narrative

of the death of Hussein at Karbala and of the other members of the family.

And that, I think, is what's behind the use of imagery in Shi'ite Islam.

Just a few weeks ago, I was in Iraq

and I picked up a poster depicting the battle at Karbala,

with quite a lot of blood, you know, heads that have been chopped off,

arrows in the eye and so forth.

And it's supposed to be a scene which evokes sorrow and pathos.

The function of a lot of the art which is associated with Karbala

is reminding people what happened and it's a vehicle

to encourage them to cry and grieve over what happened.

Such depictions are at odds with the Sunni tradition,

which is followed by most Muslims.

And yet, some of the items on display here

show that even within this tradition,

the orthodoxy surrounding human depiction in religious settings

is not always followed.

Especially when the epic Hajj journey of a Muslim ruler

becomes a historical event in its own right.

Mansa Musa, the ruler of Mali in West Africa,

made his pilgrimage in 1324,

his procession reported to include 60,000 men and 12,000 slaves.

Mali was the source of West African gold, immensely wealthy.

He carried with him something like 80 camels loaded with gold dust.

When he reached Cairo, he started buying trinkets.

And the Cairoean historians record that the whole economy went completely berserk.

Inflation went up sky-high and it took about ten years

for the economy in Egypt to recover.

The depiction of his Hajj journey is among the earliest artistic example,

not just of the inanimate features of Mecca,

but of the human figures arriving into this undeniably religious setting.

Century after century, the pilgrimage is depicted

and the pilgrims.

There's a very clear line between the religious context

and the secular context.

And so, in secular context, in people's homes or in palaces,

it was quite often the case that you could have figural representation

on the walls of houses and so on.

It's a very different story when you get to the religious context

because Qur'ans are never illustrated in the same way that Bibles are,

that in mosques, you never get figural representation.

And so that's actually a very clear distinction.

Hajj is obligatory only to those Muslim men and women

who have the financial means to do it.

Before setting out, they have to settle all their debts.

The dates for Hajj is set through the Muslim lunar calendar.

Before getting to Mecca, pilgrims meet at specified places

to get into a state of Ihram, or purification.

Men need to wear two white seamless cloths.

Women can wear normal clothes but most wear white

and they need to keep their faces uncovered.

They then make their way to the Grand Mosque and the Kaaba

that stands inside it.

They circumambulate around it seven times

before going on to carry out other rituals that take place

over the next five to six days.

Now, imagine I had to tell this story of the pilgrimage

without actually seeing any pilgrims.

It's a situation that must have faced the most religious of Muslim leaders

and yet time and again, the need to tell the powerful story

of the Hajj overcame any reticence about showing the human form.

These are my absolute favourite objects

within the exhibition.

They're paintings that accompanied a pilgrim guide, called the Anis-al-Hujjaj,

and they show pilgrims coming from India

and you see the little pilgrim boats here.

They would have set off on these ocean-going dhows.

You can imagine in those days,

it was really terrifying going on these journeys

across the sea. Here we see the pilgrims who are described as crossing the Sea of Oman,

so this is what we know as the Arabian Sea.

So here you can see

larger ships and then smaller ones

because once they got close to the coast,

often they needed to be guided by these special sea captains.

Here, before they reached Jeddah,

they would stop at Mocha, in Yemen.

And again, this lovely schematised image of Mocha in Yemen.

There is one place in the Muslim world

where paintings of pilgrims have flourished,

without the patronage of wealthy rulers.

Many of the houses here are decorated with paintings

depicting the Hajj journey.

It's a centuries-old tradition

and it shows the ways pilgrims travelled there,

the people who did the Hajj and the familiar sights of Mecca.

The ordinary Egyptians who are commissioning these paintings

certainly have very little in common with the wealthy rulers

who were commissioning their works of art on the Hajj centuries ago.

Their status are different,

as is the modes of transport which took them to Mecca.

But what's important to bear in mind is that this tradition

that I'm witnessing here is a continuation

of the figurative depiction of the pilgrimage to the Hajj

that was started centuries ago.

400 miles south of Cairo,

this area is now part of the expanding city of Luxor.

My guide here is Khaled Hafez, a well-known Egyptian artist

and a Muslim who has worked with local painters here

and knows their work and style well.

These types of Hajj paintings

are only to be found in this part of Egypt.

This is a beautiful example of how Hajj paintings are.

What I find here phenomenal is that it actually documents,

just like ancient Egyptian painting, what happens.

So it states,

the pilgrim did visit the Holy House of God

and he visited the grave of the Prophet with his wife,

this year, 2007.

What I find amazing is that it's the first thing you see.

The journey of the Hajj is on the face of the house,

which is extraordinary.

There is some sort of a recipe

to every Hajj painting that you find, you know, in different arrangements.

So you have the element of the Kaaba.

And then here we have an image of a mosque.

Of course, it signifies here the Prophet's mosque in Medina,

or the mosque of al-Kaaba in Mecca.

The calligraphy is done by a professional calligrapher,

and he uses a type of calligraphy called Thuluth,

which is the king of all calligraphy types.

What is the calligraphy saying? Is it a verse from the Qur'an?

-It says that a good pilgrimage only is the way to heaven.

-Right.

And then himself, the Hajj, we know that this Hajj has appeared.

The artist did his best to sort of like portray.

And he's dressed in the white cloth that you wear

-when you go to the Hajj.

-Absolutely.

Given the sensitivities in Islam

about the showing of the face in art,

do people object in these paintings

-to the display of the face?

-No, not here.

To the locals in Luxor

and the practitioners of Hajj paintings on the walls,

there is no objection to that at all.

So this idea of prohibition of figuration

does not exist in Hajj paintings.

Why do you think people to this day still want to

make such a statement like this?

I think that with the introduction of Islam to Egypt, what went very well

is this idea of reading and writing and documenting everything involved.

Egyptians never lost this trait since the ancient times.

Actually, we never lost the figuration in our art,

and I think here, there is this always controversy

between, you know, figuration, non-figuration...

In Islam, yeah.

But Islam never abolished the cultural specificity of some parts.

What came before.

Egypt, for instance, it was a visual culture and a verbal culture.

The communities that were Islam-originated

were principally the desert communities, more verbal cultures.

It's also, you know, like bragging that we did visit the Prophet.

This positive type of bragging existed since the ancient times.

Mustapha, tell me, why did you want your house to be painted like this?

-Because you want everyone to see you've been to Hajj?

-Yes.

The paintings that you find on the houses

in this part of southern Egypt

don't have the elaborate style

with which one associates Islamic art around the world today -

in fact, you could describe these paintings as being quite crude.

But that is to miss the point, because what these paintings show

is that even in the poorest parts of the Islamic world

people are willing to use figurative art

to tell the story of how powerful this spiritual journey the Hajj is,

but that they're also willing to use art to tell the whole world

this story, as it has been done for centuries.

It seems to me that there's always been artists

working in the Islamic world throughout history

who've produced figurative art.

But many have tried to avoid the realistic depiction of humans

because it might be seen as putting them

in direct competition with God - the Creator.

The closest they've come to such figurative art in religion

is when they've portrayed the epic journey

of pilgrims to the Hajj in Mecca.

But, one rule has remained constant -

such figurative art has never appeared in mosques

or in the Qur'an.

As interest in Islam increases worldwide,

so does understanding of its artistic traditions.

In recent years, auction rooms and galleries around the world

have moved away from calling it "Islamic art",

and is more careful around terms such as "Muslim artists".

Instead, this work is increasingly known by Sotheby's and others

as "art of the Islamic world".

At the same time, auction houses have seen in a boom in interest

in art in the Islamic tradition.

We've seen an explosion of interest in the auction world.

It's partly pride on the part of Muslims, pride in their own heritage,

and a desire to own important artworks

produced by Muslim craftsmen and Muslim patrons

over a period of 1,400 years.

The interest also comes from other quarters, from non-Muslims -

we have private collectors all across Europe and North America,

and the Far East indeed,

and then there are institutional projects -

new museums who are looking to build

collections of national and international importance.

The buoyant market means galleries like this one in London

are thriving - showing the work

of a new generation of artists in the Islamic tradition.

It's intriguing to see how they interpret figurative depiction,

and to see the kind of imagery they are choosing.

This is one of my personal favourites

because what's quite magical about the piece

is you have the alif and the laam and the meem

but it also looks like a musical note.

Reedah El Saie runs an art gallery in central London.

It showcases works of many contemporary British Muslim artists.

I think, post 9/11,

there was a political shift towards understanding Islam -

whether that was a negative or positive context,

there was an interest there.

That has had an impact on wider international

and national Muslim identity, communities,

and has impacted also art being produced by

artists that are living in the Western world

and their interpretation of sort of geopolitical sort of trends.

So there's been a surge in the amount

and quality of art being produced

around that whole dialogue.

Glimpses of the human figure can be found,

but they don't dominate this gallery.

They appear to respect the inheritance

of an audience of Muslims, who prefer its art to steer away

from depicting people with any kind of realism.

One artist whose work consists of

modern interpretations of calligraphy

is reluctant to show her own face.

I don't want it to be about me, I want my art to speak for itself.

I don't want to be forefront of my art because I believe that

my art should be good enough to speak for itself without me speaking.

This artwork is all about breaking down barriers

and overcoming your fears and not allowing your fears

to stand in the way of what it is you may want to achieve.

How I have made a hole in the canvas,

it connotes the idea of breaking through

and not allowing that barrier to stand in the way.

The Kaaba in this painting represents an unseen reality,

just as the Kaaba in reality does.

For me, it represents going back into my own heart.

There's a Sufi master from Morocco

and he wrote, "Surely we are all meanings set up in images."

That is something that

has always affected all of my work.

At the exhibition at the British Museum,

this instinctive respect

for the non-figurative tradition is also evident

in the choice of composition, materials

and imagery being used by the contemporary artists,

showing their work inspired by the Hajj.

Idris Khan's painting of the Kaaba

invokes the transformation the journey to Mecca

is supposed to bring about.

The shape itself is based on the mosque in Mecca.

I like this explosion of words out of a central form.

The idea is to try and capture an emotional response

to what it was like to leave the journey of Hajj, essentially.

The actual structure of the piece is made up of different sentences

and I guess, in a way, in the back of my mind,

I was trying to find out what people leave Mecca with

and what they're asking themselves.

After having prayed in a certain direction

for so many years of your life to this incredible,

emotional black cube,

what is it like when you're there, and then you leave?

Does it change you?

Especially when they're walking around an exhibition like this.

They're looking at these incredible works about the journey of Hajj.

As they come to the last piece

maybe they're asking themselves those very questions.

"Do I want to go to Hajj?

"What have I learnt while I've been at this exhibition?"

Somehow to try and capture that emotion in this drawing.

There is something very nice in the repetition of picking a stamp up

and stamping a wall directly with the sentences.

Each time you're stamping, you're almost trying

to trace the steps of perhaps someone walking towards the Kaaba.

Starting in the centre and moving out.

That creates incredible energy to the centre which is what the Kaaba is.

This flow of emotion, this flow of people around it

and towards it all the time.

Ahmed Mater, a Saudi artist,

has conceptualised this in his installation

which he is setting up at the exhibition.

A concept which is brilliantly simple and profound.

It is simple art that reflects the profound

nature of the Kaaba.

This simple building that continues to be an inspiration

to countless artists, and attracts more Muslims than ever.

Muslims are no longer so dependent as they once were

on depictions in figurative paintings

to capture this enduring experience.

It's what I find incredibly moving that that same

spirit of wanting to go there, and to touch that sacred place,

and the renewal and all of that,

I find incredibly moving.

It just literally doesn't seem to have changed at all.

You may have been coming by camel at one point

and by aeroplane now, but it hasn't changed.

The essence doesn't appear to have changed at all.

That's just looking at it from my perspective.

Over the centuries the artistic traditions of Islam

have embraced a wider range of art forms

than has been generally recognised.

And throughout Muslim history,

this has included figurative art not usually associated with Muslims.

It's revealing to see which of these visual styles

emerge most commonly in the work of today's contemporary artists.

The most common, recurring image is of the very place

that first defined the Muslim approach to visual art.

In some way the Kaaba itself is like a modernist sculpture in its form.

This solid black box.

I made steel cubes.

The dimension of each cube is the dimension of the Kaaba.

But chopped into 49 cubes.

Seven times by seven times, exactly.

Of course, as one walks around the Kaaba,

they have to walk around seven times.

It's made from steel, made from blue steel, then it's lacquered

to give it a really shiny, jewel-like quality which I wanted.

Then I sandblasted the daily prayer into each cube five times

because obviously you're supposed to pray five times a day.

Each cube is unique.

They're done with five different segments of the prayer.

You have to look at it in three different ways.

You have to look at aesthetically.

You have to look at it where it changes the way you think

about a certain environment.

And also whether it actually transports you

back to a certain place.

For me, it's about transporting me back to a certain time in my life.

Therefore, when you're entering an incredible space like this

and you see 49 steel cubes that are shaped in the same way as the Kaaba

which the show is based on essentially,

you're asking them to think about making links between now and then.

Restrictions on acceptable forms of art,

seen by many as limiting the output of artists in the Islamic tradition,

appear here to be doing no such thing.

The artists we've encountered

are not constrained in expressing their artistic intentions

within a framework that sets out clear boundaries.

The rules they understand around figurative representation

are informing, not constraining them.

Today, artists in the Islamic tradition

are creating art which has as much power as that of any artist.

But now in Mecca, the surroundings of the Kaaba are changing.

The Grand Mosque and its environment are part of a huge redevelopment

of the city, as visitors reach record numbers

and are set to rise even more in the years to come.

But will artists of the future still continue to find inspiration here

when the Kaaba itself appears to be on the verge

of being dwarfed by its surroundings?

Will these changes put at risk that simple beauty

of this most important building, the Kaaba?

Carrying as it does so much influence over the beliefs,

the practice and the art of Islam?

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