SESSION: Reclaiming Craft: Decolonial Perspectives on Heritage and Innovation in the Islamic World
Craft traditions from the Muslim world have often been framed through colonial and Eurocentric lenses, reducing them to exotic artefacts or static relics of a bygone era. This session seeks to disrupt these narratives by exploring and reimagining traditional crafts in present and future contexts while maintaining their profound historical and cultural significance. Can crafts be represented in contemporary art and museums without erasing their original meaning or commodifying their heritage? Can current theoretical and/or methodological frameworks dismantle colonial legacies and promote equitable engagement with these traditions?
Papers will present critical examinations of the decolonizing processes shaping craft histories within the Islamic world and their evolving trajectories. Panel contributors will address topics such as intersections between craft and contemporary art practices, technological adaptations of crafts, the role of Islamic aesthetics, and resistance to cultural appropriation. A range of methodological approaches will be employed to examine issues of craft preservation and innovation, including postcolonial theory, material culture studies, Islamic art historiography, and Islamic epistemologies.
Ultimately, the session seeks to reframe traditional crafts as dynamic, living practices that contribute to the formation of cultural and spiritual identities, while exploring how decolonial perspectives can foster sustainable and innovative approaches to craft representation and evolution in a global context.
Session Convenor:
Sami L. De Giosa, University of Sharjah
Mariam Rosser-Owen, V&A Museum
Format:
Introduction 5 minutes; First conversation 45 minutes:10 minutes paper presentation for each speaker, followed by 15 minutes discussion moderated by Mariam Rosser-Owen
Second conversation 45 minutes:10 minutes paper presentation for each speaker, and then 15 minutes discussion moderated by Sami De Giosa
Conversation 1: Contemporary interpretations of craft
15-min QA
10-min concluding remarks by Seif El-Rashidi, Barakat Trust
Speakers:
Iqbal Akhtar, Florida International University
Pakistani Truck Art: Decolonizing Vernacular Aesthetics and Cultural Resilience
This paper proposes an examination of Pakistani truck art as a vibrant, indigenous aesthetic tradition that resists Western art-historical frameworks and redefines Pakistani cultural identity. Developing organically outside of external commodification, this vernacular art form offers a powerful lens through which to analyze a pluralist cultural identity that transcends both religious sectarianism and state ideology.
Through elaborate painted decoration that incorporates local iconography, wisdom sayings, personal narratives, and expressions of sexuality and suffering, truck art articulates how Pakistanis perceive themselves, moving beyond reductive Western framings of the nation as solely a security threat. This ephemeral, accessible medium acts as a dynamic force for nation-building, facilitating cultural conversation across Pakistan and into neighbouring regions. The aesthetic is a syncretic visual language that draws upon Islamic, pre-Islamic, and contemporary global influences, whose development was paradoxically fostered by Pakistan’s relative isolation from international tourism.
Drawing on material culture studies and postcolonial theory, this paper argues that truck art demonstrates lived faith and cultural resilience forged through decades of conflict. It represents a form of cultural equilibrium emerging from sectarian division, offering insights into craft practices that actively resist colonial legacies and elite cultural gatekeeping. By centring local perspectives and creative agency, this case study directly contributes to broader discussions about decolonizing craft histories and recognizing profound aesthetic traditions that exist outside dominant art historical narratives. This analysis reframes truck art as a dynamic, living practice essential to the formation of cultural and spiritual identity, aligning with the session’s goal of exploring sustainable and innovative decolonial approaches.
Nasir Abdullah, Independent Scholar
Weaving the Ocean: Decolonial Resistance through reconstruction of craft
This paper examines the contemporary art practice of Indonesian artist Ari Bayuaji, whose work emerges at the intersection of environmental activism, traditional craft revival, and critique of global capitalist systems. While rooted in Balinese weaving traditions, Bayuaji’s work resonates within the broader historical craft routes of the Indian Ocean, where Islamic and Southeast Asian textile cultures have long coalesced through trade, ornament, and material stewardship. In an era characterized by accelerated political-economic transformations and technological development, Bayuaji’s practice offers a tangible counter-narrative to hyper-modernity’s social and environmental exploitations.
Following the pandemic lockdowns, Bayuaji initiated extensive walks along Bali’s coastlines, documenting the accumulation of plastic waste—shipping ropes and fishing equipment devastating local ecosystems. Through ethnographic observation and material engagement, this research traces how Bayuaji transformed this ecological crisis into artistic opportunity by acquiring a failing local textile workshop, thereby preserving traditional weaving employment while redirecting production toward contemporary art.
Bayuaji’s practice involves converting plastic waste into artworks that incorporate Balinese weaving techniques and ornamental patterns. His practice resists global capitalist extraction while activating values historically embedded in Islamic and Southeast Asian craft traditions alike: harmony with nature, dignity in labour, and transmission of knowledge rooted in the community. The workshop employs local artisans who would otherwise face unemployment, creating a sustainable model that merges ecological remediation with cultural continuity.
This paper argues that Bayuaji’s work reclaims regional craft heritage as a site of decolonial and cultural resurgence along the Indian Ocean cultural corridor. Through visual and material analysis, I trace how his practice revives textile traditions as living, generative systems imbued with meaning, sustainability, and spiritual-ecological ethics. Ultimately, his work challenges the devastating impacts of unchecked global capitalism on both human communities and natural environments.
Zelal Basodan, University of Jeddah
Alhambra Vases: A Historical Legacy and its Contemporary Reinterpretations
With this paper, my aim is to introduce the craft behind the Alhambra vases and analyse them, their history and how they were ‘rediscovered’ in Europe from the 18th century onwards. Alhambra vases became iconic art objects in Europe, as a strong visual representation of medieval Islamic Spain and as such they were appreciated, studied and ultimately functioned as inspirations for many European designers and craftsmen. In the past century, major cultural events have been taking place in Spain to celebrate Alhambra vases. These have significantly contributed to the historical and archaeological research on the vases, helping to raise awareness of these prestigious artefacts and their basic forms. In turn, this has led some contemporary potters to replicate the vases, thereby preserving the continuity of the ceramic craft associated with them. Today, however, little work is being done in contemporary ceramics utilising Alhambra vases as a source of inspiration. Furthermore, the lack of research and practice undertaken in Arab countries in the Middle East and North Africa is notable. There is thus a significant need for more research about Alhambra vases in the Arab world. As part of my academic studies and in relation to my contemporary creative practice centred on the Alhambra vases, my research aimed to further reinterpret them through a creative process. The aim was to produce contemporary hybrid artefacts inspired by historical pieces, following traditional methods while also incorporating new digital technologies. The second aim of my project and research was to contribute to the revival of the traditional reduction lustre technique in the Gulf countries, especially as a Saudi female ceramic artist, in order for objects such as Alhambra vases to have a new lease of life through a contemporary Middle Eastern ceramic practice. The presentation of the paper will include a mix of theoretical underpinnings behind the revival of Alhambra vases and a visual rendering through photos of the process behind the reconstruction of traditional and new technological techniques used in the creative process.
Conversation 2: Anthropological approaches to craft
Speakers:
Babak Rahimi, University of San Diego
On Living Museum and Counter-Archive: A Study of the Shiʿa Material Museum of Qum, Iran
This paper presents an ethnographic and interpretive study of the Shiʿa Material Museum in Qum, Iran—a singular institution that blurs the boundaries between archiving, craft, and devotion. Described by its founders as a “living museum,” it operates not as a repository of static artefacts but as a dynamic site where the collection of Shiʿi material culture intersects with embodied religious practices such as nazrī (votive offerings). This is exemplified by carpet weavers whose wages are preceded by a votive act. Drawing on fieldwork and interpretive analysis, the paper examines how the museum’s curatorial logic both reproduces and subverts the conventions of museological display. It argues that the Shiʿa Material Museum functions as a counter-archive, confronting the imperial epistemologies of classification, collection, and exhibition that have historically structured the modern museum. The study centres on the role of a photographer-cleric whose creative interventions link devotional piety with visual and material production, forming a moral economy in which votive goods circulate as gifts rather than commodities. Each exhibited object, the paper contends, constitutes a sensorial and affective archive through which the sacred past is reanimated in the present. By foregrounding an Islamic epistemology of devotion and memory, the Shiʿa Material Museum challenges imperial museological frameworks and reimagines the museum as a site of ethical encounter and spiritual labour within late capitalism.
Lola Cindric, School for Advanced Studies in Social Sciences (EHESS), Paris / Center for South Asian and Himalayan Studies (CESAH), Paris
Disguising pacchikari as ‘pietra dura’: a Mughal-inherited craft between constrained agency and invisibility
Since the end of the 16th century, Florence and Agra have been the predominant centres of stone inlay production, thanks to the patronage of the Medici and the Mughal dynasties. During the colonial period, a baseless narrative that persists today alleged that this technique – labelled “pietra dura” in Italian – was passed on to the subcontinent by Italian artificers. In my doctoral dissertation, I argue that this Florentine primacy served the imperialist ideology of both the British and the Italian nations and continues to impact this craft today.
Indeed, from the 1990s onwards, European entrepreneurs seeking cheaper labour shifted demand for Florentine inlays to Agra. Inlayers, therefore, had to expand their iconographic repertoire to Florentine copies, whose zoomorphic and anthropomorphic patterns conflict with their Islamic ethics, as the interviews with the makers reveal. Such commodities are then sold on the global art market as “Italian ‘pietra dura’”, completely invisibilising the artisans in Agra.
Based on my ethnographic fieldwork, this presentation focuses on the constraints currently imposed on the agency of Agra’s inlayers, as well as the process of their invisibilisation on the global scene. Whether informed by Mughal patronage, by British demand in the colonial period, or by European entrepreneurs today, the artisans’ agency remains timelessly determined by a trading system. Hence, instead of being concerned with the essence of a lost « Islamic tradition » to be recovered, I would rather argue for a dynamic understanding of artisanal productions as constantly renewed by various constraints and power dynamics that need to be critically identified.
Nader Sayadi, University of Rochester
A Silk Weaving Revival in Iran: Replacing the Merchant Capitalist Class in Twenty-First Century Kashan
This paper examines the revival of silk weaving (sha’rbafi) in Kashan since the 2000s. It argues that the restoration of the sha’rbafi mode of production helped this craft to thrive in a new way. More specifically, two groups of young professionals have replaced the pre-modern neighbourhood merchant (tajir-i mahal) class within the sha’rbafi’s social relations of production over the last two decades. The drastic decline in merchant capitalists’ involvement in the socio-political affairs of their local communities in Kashan, and the lack of an alternative to fill that gap, were key factors that disrupted the sha’rbafi mode of production in the second half of the twentieth century. This study shows that a group of fashion designers from Tehran and a few young silk weavers from Kashan have taken over the role of the former neighbourhood merchant class to facilitate silk weavers’ access to raw materials, new desirable designs, consumption markets, informal personal loans, and healthcare.
Sha’rbafi has experienced some degree of change in its technology (weaving looms), materials (dyestuffs and chemicals), and chaîne opératoire since the early seventeenth century. However, its overall social relations of production seem to have changed little in the past few centuries. Scholars such as Wulff, Gluck, Hassan, Serjeant, Floor, Milwright, and Issawi have collected invaluable ethnographic and archival information about crafts’ know-how, production processes, techniques, and European import and export markets. Nevertheless, these studies have paid little attention to the microsocio-political structures of object-making in the Islamic world. By focusing on the sha’rbafi mode of production, this study helps develop a new approach that centres the inner socio-political mechanisms of manufacturing rather than prevalent narratives of global markets and tourism.