The writing in the halos is actually not Arabic, but Pseudo-Kufic: Renaissance-era Europeans thought that the Arabic script was that which was used in Jesus’ time, so they thought that they were lending some historical authenticity to their representations by including some characters that resembled Arabic. That is all that is going on in Gentile da Fabriano’s “Adoration of the Magi,” but Kenan Malik, writing in the Guardian, would have you believe that this painting demonstrates “a willingness, too, to reach beyond the otherness of Islam and to see the Muslim world not as demonic or exotic but as a variant of the European experience.”
And that is his objective, and that of the Guardian: to pull the wool over the eyes of Britons and Europeans, so that they become more accepting of the mass Muslim migrant influx. Sure, there is jihad, and there are Muslim rape gangs, and skyrocketing crime rates due to migrants, but look! There was a “deep connection between Europe and Islam” during the Renaissance. Islam has always been “a variant of the European experience”! So get used to it!
Islam has indeed, at least since the early eighth century, been “a variant of the European experience” — the variant that included violence against non-Muslims, and their subjugation as dhimmis under the rule of Sharia. I show this in immense detail in my book The History of Jihad From Muhammad to ISIS. Don’t be lulled into complacency by the historical lies of Kenan Malik and the Guardian: click here to preorder The History of Jihad From Muhammad to ISIS.
“Look at art for the deep connection between Europe and Islam,” by Kenan Malik, Guardian, July 8, 2018:
The Adoration of the Magi is an early 15th-century altarpiece painting by the Italian painter Gentile da Fabriano. Housed in the Uffizi gallery in Florence, it is considered by many art historians as Fabriano’s finest work and as the culmination of the International Gothic style of the late 14th and early 15th centuries.
Look closely at figures of the Virgin Mary and Joseph, and you will notice something odd. Their halos feature Arabic script. That might seem sacrilege in a Christian religious painting. Yet as a new exhibition in Florence, at the Uffizi and the Museo Nazionale del Bargello, sets out to show, such cultural and religious cross-dressing was common at the time. Entitled “Islamic Art and Florence from the Medici to the 20th Century”, the show explores “the knowledge, exchange, dialogue and mutual influence that existed between the arts of east and west”.
Embodied in the Renaissance view is certainly a sense of Islam as the other. But it is intertwined with curiosity, respect, even awe. There is a willingness, too, to reach beyond the otherness of Islam and to see the Muslim world not as demonic or exotic but as a variant of the European experience.
“I believe that the more we know of each other culturally, the easier things are,” suggests Giovanni Curatola, a curator of the Florence exhibition. That seems a pious hope. To transform contemporary sentiments about Muslims or migrants will require far more than an exhibition. Yet, at a time when many politicians present Islam as alien to the European experience, such shows are a useful reminder of how historically deeply intertwined are the worlds of Europe and Islam….