Reza Aslan

Iftikhar Dadi

Sandow Birk

Zareena Grewal

The text of the Qurʼan in English translation, hand-lettered, within ornamental borders, and superimposed on the artist's paintings of life in the United States.

American Qurʼan

Esra Akcan

This book brings together essays by established and emerging scholars that discuss Pakistan, Turkey, and their diasporas in Europe. Together, the contributions show the scope of diverse artistic media, including architecture, painting, postcards, film, music, and literature, that has responded to the partitions of the twentieth century and the Muslim diasporas in Europe. Turkey and Pakistan have been subject to two of the largest compulsory population transfers of the twentieth century. They have also been the sites for large magnitudes of emigration during the second half of the twentieth century, creating influential diasporas in European cities such as London and Berlin. Discrimination has been both the cause and result of migration: while internal problems compelled citizens to emigrate from their countries, blatant discriminatory and ideological constructs shaped their experiences in their countries of arrival. Read together, the Partition emerges from the essays in Part I not as a pathology specific to the Balkans, Middle East, or South Asia, but as a central problematic of the new political realities of decolonization and nation formation. The essays in Part II demonstrate the layered histories and multiple migration paths that have shaped the experiences of Berliners and Londoners. This analysis furthers the study of modernism and migration across the borders of, not only the nation-state, but also class, race, and gender. As a result, this book will be of interest to a broad multidisciplinary academic audience including students and faculty, artists, architects and planners, as well as non-specialist general public interested in visual arts, architecture and urban literature.

Turkey, Pakistan, and their European Diasporas

Art and Architecture of Migration and Discrimination

Courtney J. Martin

Hammad Nasar

Shezad Dawood

Rachel Garfield

Layering postwar geometric abstraction with Arabic calligraphic forms, Anwar Jalal Shemza's rich and imaginative body of work is surveyed for the first time in this comprehensive volume.He then moved to London in the mid 1950s to study at the Slade School of Fine Art, where his art underwent fundamental transformation.His subsequent work in painting, drawing and printmaking rigorously deploys geometric and calligraphic forms to engage with dilemmas of identity, culture and place in the modern and contemporary era.Born in India in 1928, Shemza attended art school in Lahore, Pakistan, and was soon recognised there as a leading artist and literary figure.Accompanying over 100 illustrations of works and rare archival material, a text by Iftikhar Dadi provides an overview of his career alongside essays by Shezad Dawood, Rachel Garfield, Courtney Martin and Hammad Nasar that offer perspectives on his work, contemporary reception and influence on a younger generation.

Anwar Jalal Shemza

This pioneering work traces the emergence of the modern and contemporary art of Muslim South Asia in relation to transnational modernism and in light of the region's intellectual, cultural, and political developments. Art historian Iftikhar Dadi here explores the art and writings of major artists, men and women, ranging from the late colonial period to the era of independence and beyond. He looks at the stunningly diverse artistic production of key artists associated with Pakistan, including Abdur Rahman Chughtai, Zainul Abedin, Shakir Ali, Zubeida Agha, Sadequain, Rasheed Araeen, and Naiza Khan. Dadi shows how, beginning in the 1920s, these artists addressed the challenges of modernity by translating historical and contemporary intellectual conceptions into their work, reworking traditional approaches to the classical Islamic arts, and engaging the modernist approach towards subjective individuality in artistic expression. In the process, they dramatically reconfigured the visual arts of the region. By the 1930s, these artists had embarked on a sustained engagement with international modernism in a context of dizzying social and political change that included decolonization, the rise of mass media, and developments following the national independence of India and Pakistan in 1947. Bringing new insights to such concepts as nationalism, modernism, cosmopolitanism, and tradition, Dadi underscores the powerful impact of transnationalism during this period and highlights the artists' growing embrace of modernist and contemporary artistic practice in order to address the challenges of the present era.

Iftikhar Dadi

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