So That You Might Know Each Other: Faith and Culture in Islam, NMA

Islam, like Christianity, adapted to local cultures. The emphasis here is on artefacts that evoke Muslim sensibilities.

Illuminated Koran manuscript, calligraphy by Hussayn al-Hilmi (1823). Sharjah Museum of Islamic Civilisation

In the Islamic world today, religious belief appears to be far more important than a century or even a half ­century ago. Belief was then more or less universal, as it was in the Christian world, in the sense that everyone was part of the same religious world, even if there were wide ­divergences between the actively pious and those who simply observed the principal rituals and ceremonies, or those who considered themselves essentially secular members of a cultural tradition.

The process was simply not as advanced­ as it was in the West, for the Islamic world was moving from the Middle Ages into modernity without having experienced the equivalent of our Renaissance and Enlightenment periods.

At the same time, modernising regimes, though still authoritarian in countries that had no historical experience of democracy, responsible government or rule of civil law, were trying to establish the principle of a secular society and some of its institutions. The Greeks established the idea of the rule of law, and even for Christian thinkers in the Middle Ages the ­distinction between canon law and civil law was axiomatic.

The Islamic world had only religious law and no conception of how civil law could ­legitimately be formulated, since sharia is taken to be the word of God. This is still an insuperable objection to the very foundation of demo­cracy in the minds of Islamic fundamentalists.

Nonetheless, for much of the 20th century Muslim countries appeared to be moving in a secular direction, in which, as in the West, the more educated part of the population was increasingl­y secular, and the more intolerant, repressive and superstitious expressions of ­religious belief were confined to the lower and less educated classes.

Religion generally was assumed to be in a slow and ­irreversible process of decline in the modern world and no one expected it to return as an ­important force. But by the last decades of the 20th century Islamic fundamentalism had erupted into new forms. It became a rallying point for opponents of despotic rule, as in the­ ­Islamic ­revolution in Iran in 1979, as well as to foreign invaders, such as the Taliban in ­Afghanistan.

As the old dictators fell, fundamentalist ­religion became a source of authority in countries with weak or dysfunctional civil institutions. Even attempts at democratic reforms had the perverse outcome of allowing religious ­zealots to mobilise the superstitious rabble against the secular culture of educated elites.

Suzani (embroidered textile hanging) from Bukhara, Uzbekistan (late 19th century). Vatican Anima Mundi Museum

The result is that today many Muslims are living under more or less restrictive forms of ­religious law, most immediately visible in the veiling of women in countries where they were free to choose how they dressed only decades ago. But there is considerable resistance to these restrictions, and there is no doubt that the situation will continue to evolve in the next few decades. In many of these countries, such as Iran, there is a huge population of young and educated people who have very different ideas, and who will inevitably come to occupy ­positions of leadership in coming years: that is why its President, Hasan Rowhani, has attempt­ed to move the government towards more moderate social policies: he understands that the regime must evolve if it is to survive.

This exhibition, from an unusual­ combination of institutions — the Vatican’s Anima Mundi Museum, the Sharjah Museums Authority and the National Museum of Australia — ­focuses on the spread of Islamic culture across a vast extent of the world and its various manifestations in the different cultures of this region, with a coda devoted to the experience of the ­Afghan cameleers brought to Australia in the 19th century, who became our first ­significant Muslim community.

The exhibition begins, appropriately enough, with the cornerstone of Islam, the Koran. A verse from the holy text has provided the title of the exhibition, and it is a salutary ­reminder, for God says he has made us all divers­e peoples “so that you might know one another” and thus live in harmony.

The form of the book is also of particular interest, for the Islamic­ world had long resisted the Western ­invention of printing with movable type, which began in the mid-15th century and led, by the early 16th, to an explosion of knowledge and ­accessibility to texts that is comparable to the internet revolution of our time.

The scriptures in particular were not allowed to be printed in movable type and could only be copied out by hand.

But by the 19th century a compromise was found by using litho­graphy, which allows handwriting to be exactly reproduced.

The exquisitely refined example displayed in the exhibition was made in India, which ­became a centre of regional publishing and scholarship, with the new Sanskrit colleges set up by the British ­government.

Text and calligraphic script are pervasive in a tradition that largely prohibits the depiction of the human figure and animals, but the ­emphasis of the exhibition is on cultural artefacts that evoke the sensibilities of the peoples of the Muslim world. Islam, like Christianity, had to adapt to the entrench­ed habits of local cultures.

One display case contains a collection of magic­al amulets that represented, as a young Muslim teacher warned his pupils, a local superstitious practice that had nothing to do with true Islam and was prohibited.

Bishtakhta (pearl merchant's chest), late 19th-early 20th century. Bait Al Naboodah Museum, Sharjah Museums Authority

Not all the items in the exhibition are ­designed for religious use. Some of the most ­interesting ones simply relate to traditional ways of life, such as the display of a pearler’s equipment, including an impressively solid chest for keeping money and the precious pearls themselves, and a set of sieve-like brass instruments, used to grade pearls initially by size before they were more closely examined for purity of colour and lustre.

Nonetheless, the exhibition raises interesting questions about the way a system of belief spreads among new populations. Islam was ­initially disseminated by conquest, and even though Christians and Jews, as people of the Book, were allowed to continue practising their own religions, a great many converted voluntar­ily, no doubt partly because otherwise they were taxed at a higher rate. Even the Zoroastrians in Iran managed to survive, but increasingly adopted the new ­religion during the Abbasid Caliphate, which was, in turn, strongly influenced by Persian culture.

A different question is the adoption of Islam in areas that had previously only had animistic beliefs. Here, as with Hinduism in Indonesia and Cambodia, and Buddhism in many parts of Asia, there seems to have been a spontaneous attraction to a more developed form of religious belief, one that, like Christianity, ­offered a ­relatively coherent and universal model of ­ethics as well as a more sophisticated conception of the divinity, and consequently of ­religious and spiritual experience.

Amulet necklace, Cote d’Ivoire (late 19th-early 20th century). Vatican Anima Mundi Museum

While animistic beliefs, however, are domin­ated by the dread of spirits and demons and ghosts, and by concern for the magical formulas that will propitiate these forces and ensure ­fertility, higher-order religions also have their own fears and hopes. The magical procedures of animists are dismissed as superstition, and things in the natural world are increasingly understood as governed by laws of nature.

But behind nature is God, and all our fears are rolled into the one big fear of his judgment, and the fate of our soul after death; our hopes, meanwhile, are ultimately focused on ideas of salva­tion and the prospect of happiness in the next life.

This combination of a common ethical ­system with a conception of reward and punishment in the afterlife also underpins a much ­vaster conception of society and social duties, and therefore supports a larger-scale political state both in peace and in war. Which brings us back to the state of religion in the contemporary Middle East, and the ­division between secular and fundamentalist. Such polarisation means that the former condition of universal belief, varying only between its active and passive ­expressions, has long broken down; and ­religious fanaticism is typically symptomatic of fracturing belief, as it was with the witch mania of Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries, when Christendom was breaking up in the Reformation. But we can see that what ­attracts people to religious revivalism, even short of extremism, is precisely that it provides a platform for common values and social action, especially in the absence of mature secular structures.

The exhibition ends, as mentioned, with a section devoted to the Afghans in Aust­ralia. They were originally brought here ­because it was recognised that only camels were hardy enough to cross our vast inland deserts. Camels were used on the disastrous expedition of Burke and Wills in 1860, and in subsequent years many thousands were ­imported from India and Afghanistan, the ancien­t Bactria and home of the two-humped Bactrian camel, unlike the one-humped dromed­ary of Arabia. In the event, most of the camels imported to Australia were dromedaries and today there are vast herds of them in the outback, by far the most important wild populations still in existence.

The cameleers themselves were not all Afghan­s, but that is how they were generally known in Australia. They all seem to have been Muslim, however, and soon established prosper­ous businesses running camel caravans, which lasted until the introduction of modern trucking, as well as the first Muslim commun­ities in the outback centres where they lived.

Bejah Dervish, Cameleer (1953), by Noelle Sandwith. National Museum of Australia

Several works commemorate one of the most famous and last of the cameleers, Bejah Dervish, who remained a tall and distinguished figure even as an old man. There are drawings of him in 1953 by Noelle Sandwith (1927-2006), a talented young English artist travelling in Australia; the museum has 100 or so of her drawings from 1952 and 1953.

Bejah was born in 1862 in Baluchistan, a ­region south of Afghanistan that is now part of Pakistan, and served in the Indian army before sailing to Aust­ralia in 1890. He played a ­distinguished role in the Calvert Scientific ­Exploring Expedition of 1896-97, and received the expedition’s ­compass in recognition.

Bejah later married and had a son, settling at Marree, South Australia, where he grew date palms; but he was not forgotten, and when he died in 1957 there were obituaries in The Times of ­London and in Australian newspapers.

The exhibition concludes with a short documentary film made about him in 1954, which shows him striding into the desert and laying down his mat to pray, facing Mecca. Bejah’s faith was integral to his courage and ­uprightness as a man; and the tone of the film reminds us that the Western attitude to Islam was generally positive, even admiring, before the religion’s reputation was tragically poisoned by the rise of fundamentalism and terrorism.

So That You Might Know Each Other: Faith and Culture in Islam

National Museum of Australia. Until July 22.