photographer. The activity is not prohibited, but taking pictures in public, particularly of women, is taboo. Yet the British Council chose photography for its first art exhibition in Saudi Arabia, and in the most religiously conservative city, Riyadh. The show by British photographers is called Common Ground, but the candid picture it gives of Muslim life in contemporary Britain has little in common with this strict society.
The westernised dress and open lifestyle in Jagtar Semplay’s shots of Asian youth culture in Britain show a Muslim community in a state of flux between tradition and modernity. Suki Dhanda captures the relative freedom enjoyed by Shopna as she and her young friends play pool, or eat chips in a café. In pictures by Rehan Jamil, the only Muslim photographer, primary school children at the East London Mosque are taught unsegregated; elsewhere, a project worker scours a car park for Muslim heroin addicts.
It took six months of negotiation with ministries to convince them that there was no hidden agenda beyond a desire for cross-cultural bridge-building. In the event, the religious authorities censored two images containing crosses….
At the women-only private view last month, Baroness Uddin, the first Muslim woman to enter the House of Lords, urged other women to keep pushing the boundaries. The men’s private view the following evening was opened by Prince Saud al-Faisal, the Saudi Foreign Minister, and Jack Straw, the former Foreign Secretary, in Riyadh for bilateral talks. While Iyad Madani, the Minister of Culture and Information, spoke of the exhibition as providing “an opportunity for the exchange of ideas and experiences among photographers in the two countries”, and the prince sought “human understanding” between the two kingdoms, Straw spoke to the Muslim community in Britain. We are two religions but with one common ground, one civilisation, he said.
Two religions – but they won’t even allow images containing crosses. A fine example of human understanding, Saudi style.
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