Eamonn Fitzgerald's Rainy Day

Currently at New York's Museum of Modern Art, an exhibition by women from the Islamic world titled "Without Boundary: Seventeen Ways of Looking." The introductory sentence on the MOMA page goes: "An ever-increasing number of artists, such as Mona Hatoum, Shirin Neshat, and Shahzia Sikander, have come from the Islamic world to live in Europe and the United States." The "have come from" there is a little disingenuous, though. More truthful would be "have fled from".

Which leads one to ask: Why is it that artists are not fleeing from West to East? Indeed, while no one is escaping from the West, a significant percentage of the world's refugees are Muslims fleeing from countries where their religion is the dominant doctrine — Pakistan, Iran, Sudan, Turkey, Algeria — and where honour killings, forced marriages, the denial of education to girls and the disproportionate application of hadd punishment against women are commonplace. Many are heading west, because it is the only place that can offer them the freedom and safety they cannot find at home. That's the reason, "An ever-increasing number of artists, such as Mona Hatoum, Shirin Neshat, and Shahzia Sikander, have come from the Islamic world to live in Europe and the United States."

Now, in case anyone is thinking that we're trying to exploit the "clash of civilizations" here, it's worth noting that in the January issue of Current Sociology, Muslim sociologists from the National University of Malaysia and from the National University of Singapore discussed the problems of the Islamic world and did not shrink for addressing two grievous failings of their societies: corruption and ignorance. Notable is the contribution of Syed Hussein Alatas, the leading light in non-western sociology of the non-western world. His academic career has been a sustained critique of the political instrumentalization of Islam. Along with his mentor, Chandra Muzaffar, Alatas is sceptical about the Islamization of knowledge, believing that, given the chance, the Islamizers would suppress any form of political freedom. The PC-addled flaks at MOMA should bear this in mind when they're next tempted to be disingenuous with language.