Striking women's art from the Islamic world

Provided by Catherine G. Murphy Gallery

Art by Palestinian Laila Shawa, part of the exhibit "Breaking the Veils: Women Artists from the Islamic World."

Women from Islamic countries shred others' veils of ignorance about their culture in a St. Catherine University exhibit.

For decades, the primary image that Americans have been offered of women in Islamic countries is of veiled figures striding through open-air markets, waiting in doorways or peering warily through slits in their head coverings. Their lives have remained mostly blank slates suggesting nothing of their education, aspirations, home life, travels, political sentiments or religious views.

Such stereotypes were particularly grating to the cosmopolitan women of the Middle East who found their own identities obscured by misconceptions and ignorance. To set the record straight, a Jordanian princess, Wijdan Ali, and an artist friend, Aliki Moschis-Gauguet, organized a show of more than 50 paintings, drawings and works on paper by women from predominantly Islamic countries. On loan from Jordan's National Gallery of Fine Arts, the exhibit has traveled throughout Europe and Australia for the past five years and is now on view at St. Catherine University in St. Paul through April 1.
Its title, "Breaking the Veils," alludes not only to the garments worn by some Islamic women, but metaphorically to the ignorance and prejudices that often cloud perceptions of them. Participants in the show include Christians, Buddhists, Hindus and adherents of other faiths as well as Muslims. Religion doesn't appear to figure much in the art but, perhaps surprisingly, figurative imagery does.
"The presentation of human images in Islam is only prohibited in mosques and places of worship to keep the Muslims from going back to worshiping idols," Wijdan Ali explained in a 2008 interview. Even then, she added, the opposition to depicting humans is an "extreme interpretation" of the Quran's