Lecture organised in collaboration with the American University of Beirut

Discussant: Dr Alya Karame (OIB)

Abstract

This lecture revisits Egypt during the ‘Urabi Revolt of 1881-82, an anti-colonial revolt which resonated globally with opponents of British colonialism. A series of monumental bronze figurative sculptures commissioned from France and erected in Cairo by the Khedive Isma‘il Pasha (r.1863-1879) as part of a major program of modernization became a flashpoint for the rebels, who sought a fatwa requiring their destruction. Both the content of the fatwa and its context have been seen as reflecting a conservative legalism that was monolithic in its opposition to modernization. But ‘Urabi’s request for the fatwa might also be read as an attempt to mobilize legalism in the service of anti-colonialism. The lecture considers the complex entanglements between local histories, intra-juridical rivalries, and contemporary geopolitics and the part they played in determining the role that public statuary assumed in the polemics of the revolt and its afterlife well into the twentieth century. 

Bio
 

Finbarr Barry Flood is William R. Kenan, Jr., Professor of the Humanities at the Institute of Fine Arts and Department of Art History, New York University. Between 2017 and 2024 he was the founder-director of Silsila: Center for Material Histories.

His books include The Great Mosque of Damascus: Studies on the Makings of an Umayyad Visual Culture (2000), Objects of Translation: Material Culture and Medieval “Hindu-Muslim” Encounter, (2009), and the 2-volume Blackwell Companion to Islamic Art and Architecture (2017), co-edited with Gülru Necipoğlu. In spring 2019 he was the Slade Professor of Fine Art at the University of Oxford, delivering a series of eight public lectures entitled Islam and Image: Beyond Aniconism and Iconoclasm. In autumn 2019 he delivered the Chaire du Louvre lectures at the Musée du Louvre on the theme Technologies de dévotion dans les arts de l’islam: pèlerins, reliques, et copies, accompanied by a book of the same title. In 2024 Tales Things Tell – Material Histories of Early Globalisms, co-written with Beate Fricke, University of Bern, was published by Princeton University Press, winning the 2024 book prize of the International Center of Medieval Art. He is currently completing a long-term book project, provisionally entitled Islam and Image: Contested Histories, which formed the basis of the Slade Lectures.

For NON AUB attendees entrance is through the Main Gate on Bliss street and please make sure to have your ID with you.

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