{"id":15,"date":"2016-03-22T08:14:46","date_gmt":"2016-03-22T08:14:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.harvard.edu\/aesthcamille\/?p=15"},"modified":"2016-05-05T04:58:10","modified_gmt":"2016-05-05T04:58:10","slug":"black-box","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/aesthcamille\/2016\/03\/22\/black-box\/","title":{"rendered":"Box of Ignorance"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"IMG_3289\" \"IMG_3290\" \"IMG_3291\" \"IMG_3292\"<\/p>\n

Reading:\u00a0Infidel of Love: Exploring Muslim Understandings of Islam\u00a0<\/em>Introduction<\/p>\n

This box represents\u00a0cultural and religious illiteracy and misunderstanding of religion.\u00a0Professor Asani stated in his introduction that people usually categorize and paint \u201cwith a single color and a single brush stroke\u201d difference and in that sense failing to\u00a0acknowledge or perceive\u00a0the diversity, beauty and complexity of other cultures. For that reason, all the human figures or images representing different aspects of Islam are in black and white on the box.<\/p>\n

Professor Asani emphasized the problem of religious and cultural illiteracy, how misunderstandings and ignorance can lead to misconceptions and tensions between and within cultures. I thus decided to represent Islam as a black box, reflecting various erroneous or narrow-minded views people can hold of the religion. It is important to understand that I make no reference to planes’ black boxes in any way. I decided to take a box after remembering\u00a0the saying “Think outside the box”. For me, it involves thinking for yourself and not taking for granted what you are told. I then chose the\u00a0color\u00a0black to show that narrow-minded people have a vision of Islam that \u00a0is not enlightened, they are behind a sort of “veil of ignorance” and have\u00a0no access to “light” as in truth or wisdom.<\/p>\n

The 4 sides of the box represent lens through which religion can be approached: through devotional or textual approaches (as mentioned in the introduction) or by looking for instance at the history of the religion or its artistic traditions. But looking at each separately does not give a correct and well-rounded idea of Islam. Looking at Islam only through a devotional approach (doctrines and rituals for instance), leads to \u201crarely acknowledging the diversity of interpretations and practices\u201d . The textual approach can lead to misinterpretations if one ignores the context in which the scriptures were written and be ground to \u201cexclusivist interpretations\u201d and \u201cextremisms within religions\u201d such as the emergence of a deadly interpretation of \u201cdjihadism\u201d. Only looking at\u00a0Islam’s\u00a0history or at \u00a0its artistic expressions \u00a0(calligraphy, architecture etc.) are two other ways of interpreting religion. Although these two lens of studying religion are not as dangerous as the previous ones, they do not give a full understanding of Islam and only allow the viewer to access a limited and fragmented insight into this religion.<\/p>\n

Instead, knowledge and understanding of religion reside in the opening of the box, in being curious enough and rigorous enough to explore religion in its entirety and integrating all its different aspects at once when studying it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Reading:\u00a0Infidel of Love: Exploring Muslim Understandings of Islam\u00a0Introduction This box represents\u00a0cultural and religious illiteracy and misunderstanding of religion.\u00a0Professor Asani stated in his introduction that people usually categorize and paint \u201cwith a single color and a single brush stroke\u201d difference and in that sense failing to\u00a0acknowledge or perceive\u00a0the diversity, beauty and complexity of other cultures. For […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7970,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-15","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","post-preview"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/aesthcamille\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/aesthcamille\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/aesthcamille\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/aesthcamille\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7970"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/aesthcamille\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/aesthcamille\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":104,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/aesthcamille\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15\/revisions\/104"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/aesthcamille\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/aesthcamille\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/aesthcamille\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}