How high on your list of time travel destinations is Iran in the 16th century? It should leap several ranks after you see the Metropolitan Museum's spectacularly renovated galleries of Art of the Arab Lands. (Make what you will of the switch away from the former term "Islamic Art.") The 15 rooms contain 1,200 objects spanning 1,000 years. Highlights are the ravishing textiles; the unfortunately placed Moroccan court [below] constructed on site by workers flown in from Fez; the 16th-century Moorish ceiling above (previously owned by William Randolph Hearst); and a large reception room from Damascus circa 1707. Lost in the critical gushing is the recurrent sense of humor or whimsy in many of the intricate folio illustrations or artifacts, like a vase spout in the shape of a rooster or a chair leg carved like a griffin. Other images are open to homoerotic interpretation. New to me was a version of the seven men of Ephesus, who slept together in a cave for 309 years, getting rescued by the bisexual Alexander the Great riding a white stallion. For a more recent take on gay whites discovering Arab men, read the long-delayed biography Wilfred Thesiger: The Life of the Great Explorer, just released here last week, or his classics Arabian Sands and The Marsh Arabs.
Related nonfiction of note:
The anthology Islamic Homosexualities: Culture, History, and Literature
Scott Kugle, Homosexuality in Islam
Afdhere Jama, Illegal Citizens: Queer Lives in the Muslim World
Michael Luongo, Gay Travels in the Muslim World
Joseph Massad, Desiring Arabs
Brian Whitaker, Unspeakable Love: Gay and Lesbian Life in the Middle East
and
The documentary film A Jihad for Love
The museum somehow spent $40 million on construction alone for a project that took 8.5 years.
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