Friday, September 12, 2014

Understanding 'Haraam' in Art

I'm one month into living in Kuwait, and finished two weeks of teaching here. In that time I've learn new things and had to adapt some of the ways I teach to better this new culture I'm now working with.

One of the new words I've learned is "Haraam" which in a loose translation means sinful. Basically it has to do with anything that goes against Islamic values. Most of them to an outsider make a lot of sense, things like not wasting food, or showing respect to the elders of your family. Somethings although foreign to westerners we're still familiar with like dressing conservatively.

As an art teacher I have a whole list of things that are haraam. My school follows closely Islamic values so, I end up with a larger haraam list than teachers at other international schools. I was already prepared for the no showing of nudes. And as an art teacher, especially working internationally you're already familiar with the sensitivity around nudes, what age is it appropriate to show them at, which students have religions or backgrounds that is may offend. So I was already prepare for the no naked people in art. Which maybe difficult, but still able to work around it. What I wasn't really prepare is the other things on the list. Which includes, but not limited to, displaying religious figures that appear in the Quran. Obviously I wouldn't be showing depictions of Mohammed, because that's against the rules, and there are basically no pictures of him because of this anyways. But other people like, God, Jesus, Moses, David, are all apart of the Quran. So there goes the renaissance. Which I will now teach about using the Mona Lisa.

We also have: art pieces that are political, are Israeli or jewish(sort of), art that talks about the Holocaust, depict Muslims doing bad things, show inappropriate relationships, display drinking or drug use, in any way encourage pigs to be seen as food.

So far I've shown them images of the Lascaux Caves, which in retrospect I'm really hoping that saying that there was humans 17,000 years ago is not against the Quran.... Needless to say as apart of this new adventure in my art teaching career I now need to find art resources that mostly talk about landscapes.


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