Journey of faith: Putting on the West’s first big exhibition about the haj has been a challenge
IN JUNE 2009 Neil MacGregor, the director of the British Museum (BM), flew to Saudi Arabia, his first visit to the heart of the Islamic world. He wanted the blessing of the Saudi royal family.
Mr MacGregor and Venetia Porter, the BM’s keeper of Islamic art, spoke to the chairman of the Saudi Commission for Tourism and Antiquities, Prince Sultan bin Salman (known locally as the “astronaut prince” for being the only Saudi to have travelled in space). They also met Princess Adila bint Abdullah, a daughter of the king and one of the few princesses with a public role in Saudi Arabia, and her husband, Prince Faisal bin Abdullah, the new minister of education. At each meeting they outlined in detail the BM’s ambition: to put on the West’s first big show about the haj, the annual holy pilgrimage to Mecca.
All three royals were enthusiastic, which meant the project also had the king’s support. Conscious of the bashing that Islam had taken in the West since Saudi-born hijackers flew their planes into the twin towers in New York nearly a decade earlier, they saw the power of cultural diplomacy. A show that emphasised the ancient tradition of the haj, one of the five pillars of Islam, would be a source of pride for Muslims and a clear reminder of Saudi Arabia’s pre-eminent position in the Islamic world.
But organising the show has posed considerable challenges. The BM had to deal with 40 individual lenders from the Netherlands to Timbuktu, numerous different government ministries in Saudi Arabia and a nervous Saudi embassy in London. The idea of portraying in a Western museum something as holy to Muslims as the haj took some getting used to, and there wasn’t much to go on. Two shows—one on pilgrimage, in Christianity and Judaism as well as Islam, at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford in 2006 and another on pilgrims’ writings at the Islamic Arts Museum Malaysia in Kuala Lumpur in 2009—were the closest precedents. The potential for error or offence was considerable.
Terrified of being blamed if anything went wrong, conservative Saudi officials shied away from taking responsibility. Negotiations over the loan of antiquities from the earliest haj route, from Kufa (in present-day Iraq) to Mecca, proved especially complicated, as did agreeing what profile to give the sponsor, HSBC Amanah, on the exhibit labels. (For a bank to sponsor an exhibition about a religion that forbids charging interest was particularly delicate.) Even after the intervention of a royal aide—Faisal bin Muammar, director of the King Abdulaziz Public Library in Riyadh—it was only when the final shipment of loans left Saudi Arabia for London just before Christmas that the museum was certain the show would come off.
And what a show it is. Visitors are taken on a journey to the city Muslims call Makka al-Mukarrama (Mecca, the Blessed), just as pilgrims have done for hundreds of years and as Prince Charles will when he formally opens the exhibition later this month. A large black cuboid, hung with intricately woven Islamic textiles, rises at the heart of the show in the centre of the BM’s circular reading room. It represents the ka’ba (pictured above), the black stone that the prophet Abraham is said to have built and which pilgrims circle seven times as part of the haj ritual.