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Building Bridges:
Toronto's New Aga Khan Museum

MURRAY WHYTE

 

 

 



It’s a long, long way from the Don Valley Parkway to the royal court of Shah Tahmasp I, who ruled Persia in the 16th century, but all of a sudden closer than you’d think.

On September 18, 2014, the Aga Khan Museum, a chiseled, light-filled structure of Brazilian granite, opens its doors to the public and, in that instant, you can start counting the number of borders crossed.

Chief among them is the one between the otherwise unremarkable suburban outpost of Don Mills in Toronto, Canada, where the workaday office parks of Wynford Drive now count a monumental building by Pritzker Prize-winning architect Fumihiko Maki as a neighbour, and the remarkable, millennium-spanning collection of Islamic art and artifacts the new museum will house.

And yes, if you’re wondering: the crown jewel of the 1,000-strong collection, a miniature book painting commissioned by Shah Tahmasp to illustrate the Shah Nameh, a 1,000-year-old epic poem of mythology and kings, is ready and waiting, already on the wall.

That one piece alone makes a point: when it opens, the museum will, in a heartbeat, have perhaps the most impressive collection of Islamic art anywhere in North America.

Its owner, Prince Karim Aga Khan IV, a billionaire living north of Paris and the spiritual leader of roughly 15 million Ismaili Muslims worldwide, has been building it for decades, just as his family had before him, piece by piece.

So why put it here, on a hillock with a commanding view, mostly, of one of the continent’s worst rush-hour gridlocks?

“Well, why not?” smiles Henry S. Kim, the museum’s director. “Everyone asks me that question, for some reason.”

Kim is an affable Chicagoan who spent two decades at Oxford -- first as a graduate student, then as a curator and administrator at the prestigious Ashmolean Museum -- before landing the directorship here.

He’s more impish than glib, clearly enjoying putting the finishing touches on a project more than a decade in the making (he signed on not quite three years ago; the project was announced in 2002).

But he’s happy to take a serious turn, too. The Aga Khan and his team had first looked to London, he says, but couldn’t build what they wanted within the city’s tight confines and rigid building regulations.

“And Toronto came up again,” Kim says, “I think for reasons that are fairly clear. Toronto is very different. You look at countries, and cities, that embody multiculturalism and is there anywhere better than Canada in welcoming new populations, and not just by letting them in but allowing the fabric of society to be altered by it? Those are the values of the Aga Khan Development Network (“AKDN“) -- promoting diversity and pluralism and understanding -- and I don’t know you’d find a better place to do that than right here.”

The museum has a mission of its own, of course, but it’s part of a much greater whole. The AKDN is a vast entity founded by his highness that operates in 30 countries worldwide, running schools and providing health services in some of the poorest corners of the planet.

Though he’s a faith leader, the Aga Khan and his family have always taken on international development roles -- his uncle, Prince Sadruddin Aga Khan, one the family’s chief art collectors, was the High Commissioner for Refugees at the United Nations for a dozen years in the 1960s and ’70s -- and here, faith largely takes a back seat.

In 1967, he founded the Aga Khan Foundation to promote education and civil society largely in Muslim countries, but its programs were open to all. Over the years, the foundation grew into multiple agencies that now form the Aga Khan Development Network, one of the world’s biggest development agencies with more than 80,000 employees. In 2010, its global budget topped $600 million (U.S.).

Its core mission is to preach tolerance through education and cultural development, and the museum, both with its collection and expansive, manicured grounds serving as a public park, is the boldest bricks-and-mortar embodiment of that mission. Across the country, Ismaili Muslims number about 100,000 (about 40,000 of them in Ontario) but, true to the faith, the museum isn’t aimed purely at them.

“I think what we have here is a great opportunity for learning,” says Moez Rajwani, the vice-president of the Aga Khan Council for Canada, an association of his highness’s followers here. “This museum is for Canada and it’s for the world. It’s about encounters between different kinds of people: all kinds.”

For Kim, though, it still has to be a museum first.

“I had two big challenges,” he says. “The first was to get the museum open. And now, it’s like a child: birth will happen. My next challenge is the long term: to secure the museum’s funding and to make sure that the ticket sales go well.”

The museum and the neighbouring Ismaili Centre, itself a monumental, swooping domed structure by Indian architect Charles Correa, with which it shares its central garden, were both funded by the AKDN, with a combined price tag of about $300 million (U.S.). The Ismaili Centre, one of six worldwide, is anchored by a central prayer hall, though it’s open to the public for outreach and education programs.

The museum is another thing: once its doors open, it will have to make a broad public appeal. The goal, as soon as possible, is to be self-sustaining. At $20 per adult ticket -- a little more than the Art Gallery of Ontario’s $19.50 and the Royal Ontario Museum at $16 -- Kim figures that means a target of 300,000 visitors per year.

While that may sound modest compared to, say, the ROM, which draws about a million annually, the Aga Khan Museum is a different beast.

“We’re an art museum,” Kim says. “Our specialty happens to be Islamic art. And let’s face it: most people who come to this museum will have no background in Islamic art. Look at the museums around the country and across North America, really. There’s only a handful of collections. So we need to give people the building blocks from which they can hopefully develop an interest.

“And,” Kim adds, significantly, “maybe we can dispel some misconceptions.”

Here, maybe, lies the nut of the mission of both the museum and the Aga Khan himself. Over the years, over countless public appearances and interviews, the Aga Khan targets ignorance as the source of conflict between Islamic peoples and the Western world.

It’s a fair point.

For a century or more, there’s been a relatively free-flowing cultural and economic exchange between the West and, say, Asia and India, both of which are represented here in significant immigrant populations and important cultural institutions continent-wide.

Not so the Islamic world. Virtually invisible here before the cataclysmic events of September 11, 2001, Islam was suddenly bolted to the forefront of every Western mind, and for all the wrong reasons. It’s been, to say the least, a challenging decade and a half for a people who began as marginalized and suddenly felt unfairly branded as a threat.

Given the events in Syria and Iraq even now, that perception has faded, though it’s become more complex.

“Turn on the news, anywhere in the world and the news isn’t good for Muslims,” Malik Talib, president of the Aga Khan Council for Canada, told a group of international media at the museum this week. “They’re vilified and stereotyped. We want to address that here.”

And yet, slowly, things have changed. A recent indicator of that was when the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York opened its new Islamic galleries, to great fanfare, in November 2011. It was a representation of objects that it already had, but putting it all together in a new space built specifically to house it was a significant act.

“I think there’s a realization, finally, that there’s an important part of the world that’s been left out of our collective experience,” says Shafique Virani, a core faculty member at the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs. “Muslims are almost a quarter of the world’s population and we have this huge blank in our collective consciousness. All we know are snippets in the news, without any connection to the Muslim world’s place in world history.”

Virani, who has written a book on the Aga Khan and his ancestors, sees the museum as a massive corrective to a collective blind spot.

“This will put Toronto on the map,” he says. “It really is one of the most exciting things that could happen here. Now we have this incredible resource: things we used to show in PowerPoint presentations we can go and see for real.”

The collection is as diverse as it is significant. Over the ages, the Muslim world stretched as far west as Spain and as far east as South Asia. Everything in between is represented here, from extraordinary pieces of art made for royal courts over the ages to everyday objects used in daily life.

Throughout, a cross-fertilization of cultures is front and centre. Kim steers toward a 14th-century instrument used to chart course by the stars. Its inscriptions, he makes careful note, are in Arabic, Hebrew and Roman characters, indicating co-operative relations across cultures even then.

“One thing we have to dispel is that Islamic art is religious art,” Kim says. “Because Islamic, these days, has all the wrong connotations. It’s really the art of Muslim civilizations. What we want, really, is for people to be astounded by how much of it is non-religious. Yes, we have religious artifacts, we have Qur’ans, because they’re an amazing form of the art of the book. But it’s a balanced view.”

The museum means not to be a dusty historical tomb. Alongside its ancient objects, the Aga Khan Museum will have an active program of performing arts and a contemporary art program that positions the Muslim world in the present moment. Its opening show, an exhibition of contemporary artists from Pakistan, will be anchored by an expansive painting

And then, there is the simply stunning. Kim edges close to a dizzyingly intricate miniature book painting from Shah Tahmasp’s commissioned Shah Nameh, perhaps the museum’s most prized possession. A thin plate of museum glass is the only thing between his nose and the delicate, centuries-old work, and the extreme close-up is a necessity. It’s tiny and extravagantly detailed, depicting a fantasy version of the Court of the Keyomars, where emperor and courtiers lounge amid dense foliage alive with anthropomorphic forms.

“What you’re looking at is the Mona Lisa of Islamic painting,” Kim says, removing his glasses for a quick refocus. “This is the greatest of the great. It’s easily one of the most extraordinary works of world culture that exists. Why haven’t we seen works like this in a major museum before?”

Kim would admit a certain bias, but he has a point. The simple fact that the museum is poised to become perhaps the most significant hub of Muslim culture in North America the moment the ribbon is snipped speaks to the blind spot Virani mentions.

“Hopefully, this is a bit of a corrective,” Kim says. “And in a sense, maybe it will also help people outside of Canada realize why Canada is so unusual. What is the Muslim world now, today? Canada is part of it. That’s a good thing.”


[Courtesy: The Toronto Star]
September 14, 2014
 

Conversation about this article

1: Jasmer Singh (Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada), September 14, 2014, 9:24 PM.

The Ismailis and their leader, the Aga Khan, are -- together -- an important case study for us Sikhs. We can learn a lot from them, and there is so much in how they function as a community, for us to emulate. Trust me, not the Jews but the Ismailis are the ones we should be looking up to as our role models. This article should be an eye opener for those who have no idea why. Thank you, sikhchic.com, for highlighting it on your site.

2: Hardev Singh (Richmond Hill, Ontario, Canada), September 14, 2014, 10:13 PM.

Well commented, Jasmer Singh ji. Ismailis have great leadership, a well structured progressive organization with global citizens and outlook. Our Gurus gave us all, but our current crop of leadership is on a self destructive road.

3: Dr Birinder Singh Ahluwalia (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), September 15, 2014, 8:12 AM.

Tending my deepest and sincerest respect for the spiritual leader of the Ismaili community worldwide, His Holiness The Aga Khan, I profer heartfelt congratulations to the Ismaili community of Canada for bringing this project par excellence to fruition on the beautiful soil of our great country, Canada, more so on the wonderful site in our great city, Toronto. I know a lot of people in the Ismaili community, some of them as good friends - I would like to personally congratulate them on this stupendous achievement ...

4: Kulvinder Jit Waraich (Niagara Falls, Ontario, Canada), September 16, 2014, 8:16 AM.

I agree with each of the first three commentators. Any minority group has to adopt a certain structure and principles in order to function well in the present day world. Ismailis the world over, Bahais and the Parsis in India and perhaps others too that I am not aware of, follow that structure. Sikhs absolutely need to follow the organizational examples of these communities. We have to change our mind set if we have to survive and thrive in the present world. These communities are educated, united and make sure that everyone in their community is employed and financially stable. I congratulate the Ismailis for this impressive museum.

5: Bhai Harbans Lal (Dallas, Texas, USA), September 17, 2014, 10:24 AM.

We were given a preview of the museum in the Ismaili Jamat Khanna last year and more recently we were invited to a tour of some of the exhibits. Both were combined with presentations. Both programs were led by the youth. Yes, we can learn a lot from this community.

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