Arts of the Islamic World
One of the world’s leading experts in Islamic art, Sabiha Al Khemir, the DMA’s senior advisor for Islamic art, will discuss her novel, The Blue Manuscript, which tells the story of archaeologists in Egypt and their search to find the fabled manuscript of medieval Islam while simultaneously telling the story of the scribe who wrote it. Through a subtle and elegant narrative, the varied layers of the novel reveal the path of self-discovery for the characters and explore the relationships between ancient and present Islam, and Islam and Western culture.
Eliza Griswold, a Guggenheim fellow, is a poet and author of The Tenth Parallel, a New York Times nonfiction bestseller about Islam. After learning the story of a teenage girl in Afghanistan who was forbidden to write poems and who set herself on fire in protest, Griswold and photographer Seamus Murphy journeyed there to learn about these women and collect their landays, or folk couplets. Brutal and spare, these poems express a collective rage, a lament, a love of homeland, an aching longing and a call to arms. Griswold will share poems and photographs from her book I Am the Beggar of the World: Landays from Contemporary Afghanistan (April 1).
6:30 p.m. Enjoy tours of the exhibition Nur: Light in Art and Science from the Islamic World. Send an e-mail to artsandletterslive@DMA.org to sign up.