SOAS Research Online

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Abstract

This chapter explores Dale Eickelman’s counter-intuitive insight that seeing in the modern-day museum is something that needs teaching. Exploring this pedagogical desideratum in the cultural context to which it pertains, namely, Islamic culture, the chapter highlights the extent to which the modern-day museum strives for absolute visibility and shows how this aspiration fits awkwardly with Islamic culture, which is as much about invisibility as visibility. Responding to a recent challenge in visual anthropology that scholars should try to build a knowledge of their subject from a place epistemologically equivalent to the Quranic al ghayb (the unknown, or invisible), the chapter first grapples with the museological display of Islamic art from the place of the mostly invisible jinn. Second, it explores the extent to which the modern-day museum is embedded within a wider urban culture wed to a desire for total visibility and a certain type of pictoriality. This modern Western visuality, the chapter concludes, is in a certain way the opposite of Islamic visuality.