Beyond the Arabian Nights: an exhibition at the Louvre-Lens

 

A copy of Delacroix, Femmes d'Alger, 1867, by Henri Fantin-Latour

I should have got the message from the title of the exhibition, the impression I got was that it would have major works from the Louvre’s world-class collection of Islamic art.

For the first time ever, a remarkable group of pieces from the Department of Islamic Arts at the Louvre Museum will be displayed at the Louvre-Lens. Among them are two exceptional masterpieces: the Baptistery of Saint Louis and the Lion of Monzon. This unprecedented loan is complemented by artworks from French and Belgian collections.

I like the way the Louvre is thanked for its “unprecedented loan” to the Louvre-Lens, in other words, to itself. However, Islamic art was outnumbered in this show by French works. The exhibition focused on European (mainly French) responses to Islam, or imaginations of Islam. This kind of exhibition (which we can call Orientalism, although the term has been extensively criticized for its ambiguity) is now quite a commonplace for art exhibitions. Said’s book, Orientalism, dates from 1978, and there were exhibitions at the Royal Academy in 1984, The Metropolitan in 2004, and many others. I was astonished to discover the Metropolitan was lining up a new Orientalism exhibition from June 2026.

Isn’t it somewhat colonial to continue to focus on Western artists and their response to Islamic art, rather than look at the Islamic works themselves? What I saw was a number of exhibits that by current standards would never be shown in public, for their sexism and racism. The Louvre has a major collection of Islamic art (in fact, there is a catalogue of the Louvre Islamic collection available to view in this exhibition, although it is not on sale in the Louvre-Lens bookshop), comprising over 14,000 objects, displayed in Paris with a dedicated Islamic gallery only opened in 2012. It wouldn’t be difficult to have an exhibition of some of these pieces in Lens, and to have an exhibition of Islamic art per se. Instead, this show gives the impression not just of tolerating old attitudes, but even encouraging, condoning, or even paradoxically celebrating them. Why are we being shown stereotypical attitudes that are today widely condemned, via artworks of little quaility? For example, you can be pretty sure that any commercial film adaptation of The Arabian Nights dating from the 1960s or earlier would have primitive attitudes, and the clips seem to confirm it. Was it really necessary to include them? Are these among the 300 “masterpieces” on show at this exhibition? This show looks, for the most part as if the curators looked in the dusty archives to see what wasn’t being shown, but was easy to use. Even when you think a major work has been included – there are works by Matisse and by Delacroix – you then discover that the version on show of Delacroix’s Femmes d'Alger dans leur appartement is a copy, rather than the original. Other works, such as a bronze Napoleon riding a horse, seem to have little relevance to the show’s theme.

Instead, we had displays of what the museum already holds – lots of Orientalist works from the last 150 years, much of it displayed out of context. For example, there were the remains of a Paris collector’s apartment, with Islamic objects – but the like so much else in the exibition, these objects were included because a French collector had purchased them. Imagine a show in Saudi Arabia of French art that only included pieces bought by Arab collectors; it would not be a very comprehensive display.

The exhibition closed with some contemporary works, which were supposed to illustrate some kind of progress in orientalist attitudes, but I’m afraid to say in some cases they perpetuated the stereotypes. There was a video of a woman writing on her bare belly, explaining that she was in so doing removing the objectification of women in so much European art. Since her head was never visible, I didn’t feel I a position to see the video in a non-objective way.

There were indeed two major Islamic works, Baptistery of Saint Louis and the Lion of Monzon, but the first is well-known because of its use for baptising French kings. I would have like to come away from the exhibition knowing more about Islamic art, not more about what 19th-century French artists and collectors thought about it. To quote from the exhibition blurb: 

Orientalisms are historical and imaginary accounts. Like any account, they can be transmitted, rewritten, expanded, questioned and criticised. Like any account, they contain both light and dark elements. Like any account, the rest of their history remains to be written, which is expressed by the views of contemporary artists whose artworks are present throughout the exhibition.

Personally, I would stop calling it “orientalisms”, and I would focus on “Islamic art”. It doesn’t seem so radical.

What Robin Lane Fox thinks about The Bible: The Unauthorized Version

 

I wrote about this book while I was immersed in it, and now I have completed it, I can give perhaps are more rounded impression.

Books and websites about the truth or otherwise of the Bible are so prolific, that you would think some ground rules would have been established. Nonetheless, I have only praise for Lane Fox for writing the book, as I initially welcomed the idea of reading what a readable but authoritative historical scholar thought about the Bible. I was brought up in a Christian environment (largely from my school, but also from the wider world) where the Bible was taken, well, as gospel. So the realisation that Biblical scholars have been reassigning and critiquing Bible texts for more than a hundred years was a remarkable discovery. Although this book is largely a distillation of others’ research, it is welcome for all that, since it provides a very clear vision of two opposed worlds: the biblical scholars, who assume authors such as “D” or “P” to explain discrepancies in vocabulary, subject-matter, and chronology, contrasted with the world of believers. The Web is full of writers who will artfully explain to you why the Bible is right, even though the scholars have just proved it wrong. One of the things missing from Lane Fox’s book is just this contrast. There could be a hundred books like this one, without it making any difference to the world beyond the academy. Should this not be considered? In the domain of science, no doubt many people still believe the sun rotates about the Earth,  but it doesn’t make a huge difference, as their knowledge is a kind of cul-de-sac. In contrast, belief in religious systems causes deaths on a vast scale, and (to give just one example) is coupled with the dominant political ideology in the United States and fills me with dread (such as recent calls by right-wing Christians for women to lose the vote and to remain in the home). Academic knowledge, in this domain, is strangely impotent, and you would think that Lane Fox would consider the impact of his writing. Voltaire, in contrast, gleefully grabbed the headlines with his anti-clericalism and dissemination of inconsistencies in the Bible (in his Philosophical Dictionary and elsewhere). The world has need of a  Voltaire today.

Is Lane Fox a believer?

One reviewer summed it up nicely as “Fox doesn’t believe in God, but he does believe in the Bible”. Make what sense of this you can. You would think it a rhetorical question when the author announces as early as the Preface “I write as an atheist”. Yet his fondness for some of the books, such as the Gospel of John, is very visible (he keeps referring to its author as “the beloved disciple”

To summarize the book, it is a broad overview of Biblical textual scholarship, covering the Jewish Bible, the Christian New Testament, and some of the other early Christian writings. This would make it just a secondary review of literature, and to a large extent, it is, but Lane Fox attempts to provide his own angle in two ways. First, he writes as a historian, and claims to assess the Bible as history. I’ll discuss that one below. Second, and much weaker, he has his own views on the many Biblical scholars he refers to – but as a reader, I’m so overwhelmed with the details he is reporting that his own views are of minor interest.

His claim to evaluate the Bible as history is at odds with his practice. He seems quite relaxed about the telling of miracles in both Jewish Bible and the New Testament. Voltaire, in contrast, has a clear point of view, and enjoys himself immensely revealing the inconsistencies of Christians, who maintain that every miracle carried out by Christ and the Apostles in the New Testament is infallibly true, yet reports of more recent miracles in the present day are treated with great doubt. Well, Mr Lane Fox, where do you stand? Do you believe some of the miracles but not others? As a historian of the ancient world, Lane Fox has the example of Herodotus to compare. I’m no Herodotus scholar, but apparently Herodotus also had this kind of on-off view of miracles: he believed in the Delphic Oracle, but not in some other miraculous events he reported. Nonetheless, Herodotus was prepared to believe in the intervention of the Gods. Whatever the case, I would expect Lane Fox to compare the treatment of miracles in non-Biblical sources with Bible accounts. You could explain them, perhaps, as part of the ancient world view, just as views of women, justice and revenge were fundamentally different at that time. But that isn’t made sufficiently clear; I don’t think the author ever clearly states his view on the major Christian miracles (the resurrection, the Virgin birth, and so on). 

What Lane Fox reveals

Nonetheless, the book has some startling revelations. Among the discoveries reported by Lane Fox (he wasn’t the first to find them, but they are nowhere nearly as evident as they should be) are:

1. The Christian Bible does not move from retribution to forgiveness (as we are taught at school). The Book of Revelation ends with “the slaughter of most of humanity”. “There is no comforting progression, from a barbarous God of war to a later and milder God of love”
2. The Nativity is a fabrication. Jesus was not born in Bethlehem, and the wise men were added later.
3. Many of the links between the OT and the NT were added by later editors.
4. The Bible is not the word of God (one of the most often repeated claims). Its textual history is messy and highly contested. Many books of the Bible appear to be by multiple authors, written at different times and shoe-horned together. Even the accounts of Jesus in the New Testament are reported in the four gospels with discrepancies between them. Specifically, quotes attributed to Christ are written in four different styles, depending on the author – and the style is continued in the author’s text, so, in essence, you are presented with four different Christs. 

A poor piece of publishing

It’s partly the author’s fault, and partly the publisher’s:

• Poor index: there are over 400 pages of closely-argued text, but the inadequate index covers mainly proper names. A digital version with every word indexed would be a great help.
• As an academic, the author hides behind the use of “we” and quotations that are not cited in the text. This gives the impression of a committee of authority that knows the truth, which we, the readers, are privileged to share (but not to alter).
• Lane Fox’s peculiar system for citations is weird. Quotations are cited, but not in a clear way. He chooses, for reasons best known to himself, not to assign an author to most of his quotes in the main text, and only to refer to these authors in an elliptical way. At several places I have wasted time trying to work out who he is quoting.
• He assumes far too much knowledge on the part of the reader. He expects a grasp of Middle Eastern ancient history, early Jewish history, early Christian history, and good knowledge of the Bible text, including the Apocrypha. He provides no chronology, no list of Bible books, and maddening chapter titles that do not describe what is contained in them.
• Perhaps the book would be better organized as a thematic companion to the books of the Bible
• The author thinks he is witty, and includes many cryptic allusions, which you might (or might not) recognize. Either way, it doesn’t help the intelligibility of the text.
• His concepts of “historian” and primary sources aren’t very helpful. I’ve written about the former in an earlier post. He confidently distinguishes books that are more valuable because they have “primary information”, such as the books of Kings, but to be honest, I think this misses the point. If presented as a work of faith, we judge it differently to a work of history. We remember the Book of Job, which doesn’t have the slightest historical truth, rather than the Book of Kings, however accurate it may be. 

The Unauthorized Version is just one of many books by scholars attempting to clarify their view on the veracity, and historical position of the Christian (and Jewish) Bible. Below the surface, it seems to me that the author is struggling with some kind of belief that he cannot somehow reconcile with his academic career. Four hundred pages later, he is no more comfortable, it would seem, than when he started. The Bible is full of errors, he seems to say, and yet, four hundred pages later ...