Persophilia and technocracy: carpets in the World of Islam Festival

Abstract

Recent research has sought to deconstruct the narrative of the carpets of South, Central and West Asia created by late nineteenth and early twentieth century European and North American scholars. This article builds on the methodology of that recent historiographical work, but looks at a later historical moment, the 1970s. Then, as in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the formation of ideas of Iran and Islam through the agency of carpet studies was clearly visible. It explores this process through two exhibitions held in 1976 under the umbrella of the UK-wide World of Islam Festival, Arts of Islam at the Hayward Gallery, London, and Carpets of Central Persia at the Mappin Gallery, Sheffield and the Birmingham City Art Gallery. The article argues that whilst the visibility of carpets in the Festival reinvigorated carpet studies in the short term, its exhibitions failed to offer a sustainable forward path for the discipline. Rather they reinforced already anachronistic ideas about Iran’s role in the material culture of the region and continued to focus carpet scholarship the narrow question of provenience, the place and date of making.