Paris: HH Sheikha Mozah Nasser al-Misnad yesterday underlined the importance of education and dialogue of civilisations in today’s world. She was speaking at the ceremony in which she was inducted as a permanent member of the prestigious Academy of Fine Arts of Institute de France in Paris.
HH the Emir Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani attended the ceremony which was held at the academy’s headquarters in Paris.
Sheikha Mozah said art had a noble and eternal mission.
Excerpts from the text of HH Sheikha Mozah’s speech:
“It gives me great pleasure to extend on your behalf, my gratitude to Mr Taillibert and his team for all their efforts, and to thank the members of the Academie des Beaux – Arts. I am very honoured today for becoming one of them.
I am pleased to be with you today, and thrilled to address this elite group sharing a high interest in politics, economy, art and culture.
With your permission, I would like on this occasion to commemorate the composer Gyorgi Ligeti who passed away three years ago, and who was selected to be a member of this academy.
Gyorgi Ligeti is not here with us now, his circumstances did not help him become a member of the Academie des Beaux-Arts, in all the creativity and challenge which he represents.
His biography confirms Eugene Ionesco’s words and I quote: “An artwork is not a reflection or an image of the world, rather it is an image from the world.”
I do not pretend to be an art critic, however, as I was reading Ligeti’s biography, two things got my attention and guided my analysis and my deductions, perhaps because education and dialogue of civilisations are at the top of my priorities.
First, Ligeti’s practice of the teaching profession which I consider to be one of the most sacred professions not only because it constitutes a very effective and powerful treatment for ignorance, but also because it represents the way for the continuity of life and its development.
Ligeti was not an isolated artist sitting in his ivory tower, rather he made use of his talent and knowledge in order to benefit others.
He taught in his homeland Hungary first then he taught at one of Hamburg’s institutes since 1973 until he retired the same year when the Berlin wall collapsed.
Ligeti not only had a continuous interest in music but also in literature, art, architecture, sciences, mathematics and especially geometry which enabled him to be exposed to human civilisations.
He reminds us of the creative renaissance pioneers who made sure to comprehend the essence of the heritage of human civilisation and who presented it in a way that is easy for the general public to understand.
Humanity is facing serious challenges which do not have a place in this third millennium and which go against its legal and humanitarian laws.
However, existing and renewed human energy which God endowed us with should enable us to overcome them.
What we need today is to make use of this energy away from all sorts of selfishness, arrogance and isolation.
We need to constantly learn from past experiences in order to bring back to life its meaning and value. We also need to build strong foundations in order to bring hope and enhance our confidence in ourselves, and the confidence of our children and grandchildren in themselves.
This is the real change we need, and we need it now and not tomorrow as it ensures the safety of all mankind.
Let us ladies and gentlemen have a serious and responsible look at the world around us, at how we destroy with our own hands our environment causing this slow suicide, how we content ourselves with merely reacting to poverty, disease, spread of ignorance, wars and conflicts instead of taking positive steps and actions in order to prevent them, to the extent that the existence of the culture of death has become acceptable as being the norm and the culture of life has become the exception.
What are we doing to promote the mission of art and human creativity and to combat this shameful and irrational situation?
Creativity and intelligence are human symbols and they can never be confined by boundaries or frontiers no matter how strong they may be.
The nature of this occasion, marked by art and creativity, leads me to tell you a true story where human intelligence and social genius succeeded when politics failed.
When renowned Muslim creative Ziryab had to leave Baghdad, the Caliphate capital at its full power at the time, and head to Cordoba, the capital of the Islamic West, he brought his Arabic, Persian, Indian and Greek culture and influenced easily both Andalusia’s elite and general public.
This influence went beyond Ziryab’s creativity in music to the enrichment of the society.
Benefiting from the freedom enjoyed in Andalusia, Ziryab established a musical school for boys and girls which left an impact on the lifestyle of the people in their dress, cuisine and decorations.
But what is important here is that the genius of creativity and the susceptibility of the society led together to the birth of the Andalusian civilisation, which is the result of the merge of the Oriental Islamic civilisation with gothic, Byzantine, barbarian and Romanian effects with their Christian and Jewish backgrounds.
Cordoba was politically separate from Baghdad but due to the communication of civilisations, they both constituted the two sides of the same coin which is the Islamic civilisation.
Cordoba became an international capital influencing other capitals and sharing with them its various intellectual, artistic and cultural experiences, giving the world Ibn Rushd and Moussa bin Maymun.
So, didn’t the creative artist Zeryab succeed in building bridges between societies and in bringing cultures and ideas closer where politics have failed?
This is the moral of this story, where we witnessed the spread of a civilization based on understanding, openness and tolerance, and these values as everyone knows, paved the way for the birth of the European renaissance.
Ladies and Gentlemen, I believe just like you do, that art has a noble and eternal mission. I hereby, just like you, refer to the type of art which is committed to human causes and which achieves human dignity and defends it.
Such art does not value or give any credit to any artist who utilises his art in order to launch a war resulting in the genocide of a religious belief and its followers, naively transforming them into a low class race with no right to live, even in misery.
Such art does not value and appreciate a musician led by his illusion rather than by his inspiration to naively believe that he is the awaited for savior to deliver the universe from the forces of evil in order to build a new utopia.
Such art does not recognise a naive researcher who suddenly discovered among his dispersed papers and illusionary manuscripts an alternative country for a lost people; leading this art to transform the mirage into reality.
This is art’s eternal mission, it is this Academy’s mission, it is not an immediate magical prescription, but an approach for a long term radical solution and an antidote which will strengthen our immunity against isolation and discrimination, so that we are able to bring back to humanity, the way we see it and the way it should be, its true meaning. Hence art is our tool enabling us to retrieve our humanity threatened by extinction.
Only then, civilisations reconciliation will have a meaning which will give us all the legitimate right of becoming a part of this third millennium.
This is how I understand the mission and vision of the Academie des Beaux-Arts.” - QNA |
