Insulting artwork involving Islam, that is. Along with smashed windows and doors, the gallery has been receiving "12 abusive phone calls a day and emails condemning the show. Staff had to call police last week after an angry woman came in to complain. 'She was in a full burqa and was irate and upset. Her behaviour was quite threatening.'"
"Gallery attacked over 'insulting' artworks," by Arifa Akbar for The Independent, October 30:
A gallery showing inflammatory images of veiled Muslims, including a bare-breasted woman partially clad in a burqa, is under police surveillance after being attacked earlier this week.I suppose you now have your answer?Windows and doors at the SaLon Gallery in west London were smashed after a series of abusive, anonymous phone calls and angry protests about the images from Muslims. The gallery has complained to police.
The solo exhibition of paintings by Sarah Maple includes a veiled woman holding a pig, which is interpreted as a flagrant disregard of the Islamic ban on eating pork. The show – entitled "This Artist Blows" – also includes two self-portraits: one of Maple wearing a headscarf has an image of Kate Moss's naked breast attached to it; another shows Maple in a T-shirt bearing the slogan "I love jihad". In another, a veiled Muslim woman wears a badge that says "I love orgasms".
Last night, Maple, a 23-year-old of Kenyan and British parentage, defended her work, saying she had not meant to cause offence but to explore her Britishness and her Muslim faith. She voiced concern about her safety and said she hoped the exhibition of 39 pictures, which opened this month, would not be taken down before its official closing date of 23 November.
"I do think some people have just reacted to my work without thinking about the concepts behind it," she said. "I'm a practising Muslim and initially, when I started making the work, it was really personal, about my background with my father being British and my mother who is a Muslim and how I felt growing up. I was exploring the question of fusing those two together and whether it could be done."
Maple, from Sussex, has upset the Islamic world before. An exhibition by her earlier this year showed Muslim women in provocative poses, including one suggestively sucking on a banana. She won the Saatchi Prize last year for her self-portraits, some of which showed her in a headscarf smoking a cigarette. "People interpreted it as being related to sex, and that it was a post-sex light up," she said.A spokeswoman for SaLon said the gallery in Bayswater, a part of London with a large Muslim population, was receiving about 12 abusive phone calls a day and emails condemning the show. Staff had to call police last week after an angry woman came in to complain. "She was in a full burqa and was irate and upset. Her behaviour was quite threatening," added the spokeswoman.
How do they know it was a woman under that burqa?
I don't think this story is over.
I betcha there's a plot a-brewing (lol) by some Mohammedans right now. Like the recent mailbox bomb of "Jewel of Medina's" publisher.
The nature of the Mohammedans. UK now has to deal with the intolerant.
I have to wonder--Might not a Muslim artist own a burqa?
I have to wonder, Might not a Muslim artist be willing to spend her day making, or arranging for someone else to make, twelve phone calls?
I have to wonder--Might not a Muslim artist stir up the gallery and the media, to gain the interest of the public? Like the old saying: "You can't buy publicity like this..." Or the other: "There's no such thing as bad publicity?"
I wouldn't be surprised to find out, in the end, that this is a stunt, being pulled by the "artist".
Interesting, Abscedere. And maybe not far-fetched. After all, wouldn't a Muslim artist know the trouble she'd be asking for with her "art"?
Sarah Maple is the real deal in the London art world, such as it is, but she is quite naive with her weak arguments in defending "why" she does what she does, thinking that she would somehow be exempt from what we know here at JW as almost certain Muslim retaliations. She's created a buzz before in the hipster scene, and has been called the new Tracy Emin.
Artists provoke. In the West, we have freedom of expression. That quality is an absolute. If free expression bothers you, move someplace where it is prohibited.
Sarah Maple is all about "deconstructing" *Western* stereotypes about Muslims. Funny, though--it's not Westerners who are threatening her and the gallery, but fellow Muslims.
Muslimah Media Watch says, "Maple, who grew up Muslim in the U.K., struggled to find her Islamic identity, and works through it with her art. Her art highlights cultural, religious, and political issues as well."
On the Saatchi prize. Here's "Swindle" magazine on Maple's campaign to win the prize:
"Maple won the Saatchi Prize of ?3,000 with a series of campaign posters that highlighted different identities (I.e., “Vote for me or you’re sexist;” “Vote for me or you’re racist;” “Vote for me or you’re Islamophobic;” etc)."
"Different identities", huh? More "deconstruction", or did some of the panel take these threats to heart? No fear so great in the West as to be considered a sexist, racist Islamophobe.
Here's some of her art, including the infamous banana-sucking painting:
http://bp0.blogger.com/_bnvJqTVkYMc/SBagnPvo83I/AAAAAAAAAWk/mEhJus7kQhE/s400/Sarah+maple+2.jpg
Here's Sarah Maple in her lovely "I (heart) Jihad" t-shirt:
http://www.myartspace.com/blog/uploaded_images/M1-773516.jpg
Ultimately, Sarah Maple's work is self-indulgent and puerile, just meant to provoke. But while many Brits may find her art annoying or banal, they are not going to threaten her for it. The threat comes from Islam, the very thing her work is meant to explore.
In the art world there are artists and there are prostitutes, Sarah Maple qualifies for the latter.
Here is a true artist, Georghine Sandhi
http://balder.org/Galleri/Galleri_01.php
http://balder.org/Galleri/Galleri_00.php
I'm looking forward to her follow-up 'art', where she gets to reflect on the treatment she received from those whose facade she was trying to create.
From her surname, sounds like she had a British father and a Kenyan Muslim mother. In which case, either she chose to be a Muslimah, or her mother insisted, and her father didn't care one way or another. Looks like marrying a Muslimah is as deadly as marrying a Muslim
some of her art work can be seen here.
http://images.google.co.uk/images?q=Sarah+Maple&btnG=Search+Images&gbv=2
The gallery is owned by Ron Wood of the Rolling Stones, so I just wanted to see what came up if I googled Rolling Stones Islam.
Now this is very Off Topic, but you should see what came up
Muslim roots of the blues
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2004/08/15/INGMC85SSK1.DTL
Muslims have NO sense of humor - nor do they realize how their false prophet Muhammad and his minions supplies such great material for poking fun at. No humor in Islam - and no honesty either.
InfidelK9: That is a fascinating article. Thanks.
"Upward of 30 percent of the African slaves in the United States were Muslim, and an untold number of them spoke and wrote Arabic, historians say now."
That comes as a surprise, if true. Interesting also considering the many concerns around Obama's Islamic connections and associates like Farrakhan.
The guitar derives from the Persian tar and not the Arabic oud,as mentioned in the article. The sitar similarly derived from the tar as it moved east and acquired all those sympathetic strings.
Posted by: johndoe
"Upward of 30 percent of the African slaves in the United States were Muslim, and an untold number of them spoke and wrote Arabic, historians say now."
The article also mentions Roots: The Saga of an American Family is a novel written by Alex Haley where the main character Kunta Kinte was a Muslim of the Mandinka tribe.
Haley's novel begins with Kunta's birth in the village of Juffure in The Gambia of West Africa in 1750. Kunta is the first of four sons of the Mandinka warrior Omoro and his wife Binta Kebba. Haley describes Kunta's strict upbringing and the rigors of manhood training he undergoes.
One day in 1767, when the young warrior leaves his village to find wood to make a drum, he is attacked by four men who surround him and takes him captive. Kunta awakens to find himself blindfolded, gagged, bound and prisoner of the white men.
Yet, when we look at the facts we find that in 1767 the majority of the Mandinka were still animists.
By the early 1800s, the Mandinka people were divided both politically and religiously. Two Mandinka societies existed. At the top were the mansas and ruling families. They controlled the land, collected the taxes, and followed the old animist religion. Below them were large numbers of poor farming families and landless artisans. They were excluded from holding political office. Many of these people had converted to Islam. The leaders of this underclass were the marabouts, Muslim holy men and scholars who taught a fundamentalist form of Islam.
At about the same time that Americans were embroiled in a civil Gambia also experienced their own fateful civil war. In 1861, the British, seeking to punish "outrages" against white traders by the mansa of Baddibu, devastated his kingdom. But, in doing this, the British upset the balance of power in the area. They inadvertently set off a holy war (jihad) that swept all the Mandinka kingdoms and beyond. Mandinka marabouts led a series of jihads against the animist Mandinka ruling families. The fighting between the two Mandinka factions continued for another 30 years.
The Soninke-Marabout Wars began in the Gambia in the 1850s until 1901. It was essentially a civil war among the Mandinka tribe which erupted on both the north and south banks of the river. The Marabouts were holy Islamic clerics and teachers and the Soninke were Mandinka kings. The wars were caused partly by the persistent adherence of the Soninkes and their people to local traditional religions in the form of animism, lax religious practices combined with a taste for alcohol at the same time as adhering to Islam. Most of the wars were in fact battles and skirmishes but displaced large numbers of people in Gambia. The word Marabout was later extended to devout Muslims in general. In Senegal they were referred to as the Thiedo by the Wolof. The word Soninke comes from So-ni which is the Mandinka word for libation or sacrifice. This is not to be confused with the term Soninke that is applied to the Serahule.
Background:
Islam was brought to the peoples of Senegambia by north African traders in the 11th century. When the Portuguese arrived in the area in the 15th century there were Marabouts in most of the chief's courts in Gambia. These Marabouts would marry local women thus creating Muslim families in communities that still held onto the beliefs of the traditional animist religion.
These religious leaders would over time purchase a potion of for farming as well as for dwellings. Such land was given to them by the local Mansas for their services as court secretaries. In these settlements the Marabouts would build mosques, establish Koranic schools and teach the new religion of Islam. These settlements in time developed into Muslim towns called Morokunda. These settlements existed in Saloum & Baddibou, Niumi, Tumana, Europina, Jarra and Kombo. The Marabouts regarded those living outside these towns as infidels or Kafirs. Thus they saw it as their religious duty to extend Islam to these people which eventually resulted in the Soninke-Marabout Wars which raged for decades from the 1850s. The war was similar to many Islamic Jihadist movements that emerged in other parts of West Africa in the nineteenth century. It should be noted that their aims were not just religious but had political and secular goals.
The most important change coming out of this war was the permanent establishment of Islam. Today, over 90 percent of the people of the Gambia and neighboring Senegal are Muslims. Another change was the destruction of the old Mandinka ruling family system.
OT @InfidelK9:
I looked at the links you posted, and you're right about the art.
Georghine Sandhi's work reminds me of Frida Gallo.
InfidelK9 - Great post about the history of Gambia.
Interesting post,InfidelK9. In other words, the outcome of 'Today, over 90 percent of the people of the Gambia and neighboring Senegal are Muslims.' is a result of not only violent, but stealth, jihad.
Are you listening, Western people?