"East Said and Hamaj" .. How Muslims appeared in the paintings of Orientalists?

Hind Massad

While practicing their normal lives and engaging in their daily habits, it never occurred to them that these practices and scenes have caught the eye of the transient stranger, and that they will turn to paintings, will cost millions of dollars after a century, and will establish what is now known as "Orientalism."

Trade between the Ottoman Empire and the Byzantine Empire continued to expand, and hundreds of painters toured the lives of Arabs and Muslims in their paintings until the frames became closer to open windows on a magical world.

It starts from the nature of Islamic architecture and the practices of worshipers in mosques and their daily habits and ends to the interiors of houses and the generosity and prosperity.

While some painters went on to present unrealistic scenes of the Levant and Muslims of their imagination, others went on to convey scenes of extreme realism, the Mashreq appeared in Europe like a wonderland, whose inhabitants enjoy a dreamy life at the same time "very primitive".

This is what Western colonial powers later exploited in their campaigns for what they called "the happy East," by portraying Arabs and Muslims as a group of savages who enjoy unworthy bounties while Europeans freeze in the cold and die of starvation and poverty.

They are harem
Arguably one of the most fictional and paradoxical paintings is that of the harem and the neighborhood. Orientalist painters can see naked women in Haramlak and draw them if that area of ​​the house is confined to the people of the house only.

Therefore, the orientalist portrayal of the harem and the neighborhood in the orientalist paintings was completely unrealistic.

In addition to all sitting naked on the haremlik, women appear in a completely European form. The ivory white body is thin and has European facial features but is adorned with black hair instead of yellow.

This was the most prominent feature of oriental women in Orientalist paintings. All of this is in complete contradiction to the inevitability that Arab and Muslim women will have to enjoy Middle Eastern features predominantly corny skin color, wavy hair and brown or brown Arab eyes.

Thus, the paintings of Islamic architecture, or scenes of everyday life outside the homes and away from the harem, are closer to realism. It has already conveyed a tremendous amount of eastern Islamic culture to the West.

It can be said that the most Islamic countries to which the orientalists adopted the painters to travel as a source of inspiration are Egypt, Turkey and the countries of the Maghreb.

Mosque, azan and worshipers
In the painting "Maghrib Prayer in Cairo" by the French painter John Leon Jerome (1824-1904), painted in 1865, we see a realistic portrayal of an imam leading worshipers on the roofs of a Cairo house. The painting follows the realist school of painting where we see a clear representation of the elements of the painting more like photography.

The traveler and French writer Lotte Pierre (1850-1923), accompanied the painting with a description of the state of life of Muslims in prayer in his book "The Ghost of the Orient", saying: "From behind the silence, there was a very melodious voice. It seemed as if floating above the silence. He almost ends up dead from what happened, but he revives again and echoes what he says under the high domes, where the echo barely disappears until the voice resumes again. First, they are imprisoned deep in their knees, then worship in deeper humility, and finally, they strike the ground with their foreheads in a regular motion on the heart. one man."

After Jerome, the paintings of the American orientalist Frederick Arthur Bridgeman (1847-1928) are one of the most prominent open windows on the Old Orient that help to understand the nature of Muslim life in that period and the view of foreign orientalists to Islam.

His painting "Street in Algeria" provides a clear perspective on the status of women in the Muslim community of that period. To the left of the panel is a woman with a head and face veil exchanging conversations with a man sitting in front of her. On the other side of the street, a number of men sit on a mastaba, holding together.

It appears from the degree of light and the distribution of shadows in the painting that the time was before sunset. The painting gives the impression that the atmosphere is calm and people live in peace and goodness, especially with a child playing mandolin in the middle of the painting. Other than Algeria, he visited Egypt and painted many oil paintings of Egypt's cities.

In his painting "The Orange Seller", which he painted during his visit to Egypt, we see a simple and warm scene for a young boy, carrying a baby, had come down from her donkey to buy some oranges from a street vendor. From the painting, we see the simple confusion of Egyptian women of that period and of men as well.

As usual, Bridgeman was interested in drawing shadow and light and clarifying the weather. This is the habit of most European Orientalists, where the eastern weather was one of the characteristics of the region that contradicts the extreme cold they suffered.

There is also the portrait "The Gate of the Great Umayyad Mosque in Damascus", painted in 1890, by the German orientalist Gustav Bornfind (1848-1904), and is also one of the most famous paintings of foreign orientalists about Arabs and Muslims.

The painting was sold at Sotheby's in London at a price of £ 2,505,250 in 2008. The price tag is so polished that it is polished in so much detail that it is almost a witness to life in Damascus at that time.

Bornfind tried to highlight the technical details of the painting as both a historical record and a balanced view. We see the distribution of shadow and light with the men and the bathroom sitting among them topping the painting, behind them a carpet maker is done and seems to have got buyers. We see two men on his left sitting on a terrace and checking the movement of his hands in the carpet. Just behind, we see wide banners carried by a number of dervishes standing in front of the sanctuary.

We believe that Bournfind highlighted the architectural details of the mosque and provided clear pictures of its sections, the inscriptions on the walls and other works of the Persians and Indians who built it and adorned it after Abdul Malik bin Marwan ordered its construction in 705.

Ibn Battuta, in his book "The Masterpiece of Perspectives in the Oddities of the Lands and the Wonders of the Travels," says that the Emperor of Byzantium sent a hundred Greek artists to participate in his adornment when he heard it. This was the reason for Burnevend's attention to the mosque in an attempt to highlight its architecture.

Witness, that Orientalism, although a modern concept, the East was in the ages past like a country of wonders, which has been orientalist painters draw on its charm over the centuries did not fully realize.