The Dates Of Wrath
Quite By Chance
Quite recently, and quite by chance, I found myself in an art gallery. The paintings so wyrdfully discovered rather resonated with me, causing me in subsequent days to learn more about the art, and life, of the artist: Shurooq Amin.
For her art seemed to make a connexion between the West and Islam; a quite personal connexion for me, given my somewhat outré past involving as it did a ‘reversion’ to Islam by a former fanatical exponent of Western culture who while travelling as a Muslim in the Muslim world had, albeit briefly, been engaged to a Muslimah in Egypt.
Thus was there for me, in that gallery at that time, another and quite numinous and quite fortuitous intimation of the importance of love, of the importance of the muliebral: beyond the rather stark, and often violent, most decidedly (in my view) misogynist, patriarchal, ethos that still seems to so dominate our world, East and West.
There was also a reminder, for me, of how Art can not only sometimes transcend human manufactured causal abstractions (such as nation, religion, and ethnicity) but can also be a rather acausal vector of that slow social, non-violent, evolutionary change whereby what is numinous, honourable, and so very human, can be presenced, to the benefit of us all.
David Myatt
2014
Image credit:
Shurooq Amin. The Dates Of Wrath. Mixed media on canvas mounted on wood. 2012.
Ayyam Gallery, Dubai
David Myatt 