Egyptian Artist Wael Shawky Is Pulling the Strings of Crusade and Jihad at MoMA

posted on: Jul 12, 2015

By: G. Roger Denson
Huffington Post

The films of Wael Shawky’s Cabaret Crusades are on view at MoMA PS1 through August 31, along with installations of selected sketches, sets and marionettes that the artist used throughout filming. For directions, schedules and other information, consult the MoMA PS1 website. For the viewer going into the films with little or no knowledge of the medieval Crusades and Jihads, see these Four Brief Yet Crucial Turning Points of the Crusades and Jihads for Better Understanding the Cabaret Crusades films.

The Secrets of Karbala by Wael Shawky, HD video, 2015.A revelatory scene, the first to establish the historicism and subject of the film, The Secrets of Karbala (2015), the last of the trilogy, Cabaret Crusades, by Egyptian artist Wael Shawky. That’s historicism, not history, which is being culled, a deliberate seeing in the past the makings of the present or more recent past. Taking form as two groups of marionettes, each made of clear-to-frosted glass, converge on what is a tightly-cropped but verdant pastoral setting. We see only a small number of figures popping up and down as marionettes are want to do while converging from both sides of the frame. Marionette action is never smooth or subtle, but Shawky’s remedy for this is to favor a general inaction and let the character’s dialogue in classical Arabic and the music of Bahrain and other Muslim cultures seemingly animate the illuminated bodies. The title here informs us we’ve arrived on the scene as a spontaneous 11th-century pogrom is about to be inflicted by Christians on Jews somewhere between Cologne and Constantinople. Just as violence is about to erupt, a figure dressed as a monk rushes to stop the group’s leader, Rudolf, from attacking the Jews, and at least this time it seems there is no violence

The scene has no less than set our expectation for one half of the trilogy’s antagonistic subject — the fanatical Christians who set out in 1095 CE (487 AH by the Muslim calendar) to battle the equally fanatical Muslims who for three centuries have been taking possession of the Christian shrines of Byzantium, Palestine and Syria. This particular group are followers of the historical People’s Crusade led by Peter the Hermit on route to their Holy Land, in what is the true first crusade from Europe to Western Asia that precedes the more famous Papal First Crusade by a year. Without a royal or ecclesiastical chaperon, the People’s Crusade accumulated upwards of 20,000 poor illiterate and criminally-inclined belligerents who repeatedly erupted into genocidal melees in the name of their faith killed thousands of Jews and other heathen on the way to Jerusalem — the place they looked forward to confessing their sins.

Shawky needn’t say any more about the Jews in his trilogy. And not only because they aren’t the leading protagonists in the conflicts. Shawky can merely show us one two-minute scene and know he has sufficiently tipped the balance of human atrocities in the Christians’ disfavor by counting on us to recollect for ourselves the indiscriminate annihilations of Jews that would come throughout the next nine centuries, just as they had likely raged the previous nine.

A pogrom on the Crusader route. The Secrets of Karbala by Wael Shawky, HD video, 2015.In fact, this fleeting episode is also indicative of the centuries-long crusades waged in Europe to convert or kill nature worshippers in the isolated regions of the Balkans, Scandinavia, the Alps, the British Isles, and nearly all of Russia well into the 19th Century. In the 11th Century, even Southern France was a religious war zone where millions died in defiance of The Papacy and The Cross. But extinct societies can’t represent their pasts or remind us that we are alive today most likely because our ancestors annihilated people like them for being less brutal, less organized and less equipped. Their extinctions can however haunt us in prophesying the form of our own cultural and ideological obsolescence. Picture ISIS attaining nuclear weapons. And of course that is always what is compelling about historicism–learning how to survive and flourish in, even manage, adversity, as taught to us by the most reprehensible and inspired, the victorious and defeated of ages past. As compelling as living lineages are, it is as relevant to us today to understand how the myths and histories inform us in our lives today, and there is no better vehicle for this than our arts and entertainments. In narrating long expositions on the Crusaders and Jihadis of the 11th-to-13th centuries, Shawky alerts us to the contemporary ideologies and events informing militants who mythologize modern versions of crusaders and jihadis today.

A regrettable synchronicity: During the month this commentary was written, Allepo, Syria, a strategic objective for both Crusaders and Jihadis nine centuries ago, was the site of shelling in the contest to control Syria’s most populous city and main commercial hub. The photo Al Jazeera published even resembles a frame of one of the battles that Shawky depicts between the Crusaders and the Jihadis in The Road to Cairo, 2013.While we can readily see among the Crusaders a glaring contrast between the commoners on foot and the knights and royalty on horseback, what may require explanation is the social evolution of the Christian class structure that is at root to why we are watching Christians wage war against great and wealthy Muslim cities. After all, six centuries earlier, Christians were nonviolent embodiments of “a new covenant of love”. For this, New Testament scholar John Dominic Crossan explains that in the 4th Christian century, a newly Imperial Christianity was instituted when the Roman Emperors ideologically and militaristically transformed the Church from a sanctuary for those following the model of their martyred Christ, to a militaristic building of the Holy Roman Empire in which religious and ethnic cleansing was pardoned when waged in the name of God. Shawky should seriously consider chronicling the Church’s 4th-to-5th century militarization as a backstory should he produce a fourth Cabaret Crusades film.

It is this Imperial class of Crusaders that the British historian and Christian Crusades scholar, Geoffrey Hindly, reminds us tantalized such modern heads of state as Kaiser Wilhelm II and Chancellor Adolf Hitler to represent themselves to their supporters as the heirs to the Holy Roman Emperors waging crusades against the heathen and heretic Slavs — or as modern Chalemagnes vanquishing the Saracens from European shores. During World War I, we are told that with his unit capturing Jerusalem, British General Edmund Allenby compared himself with Richard the Lionheart, while others compared Allenby more correctly with French Duke Godfrey of Bouillion, the Christian “liberator” of Jerusalem in 1099. During the French takeover of Syria in 1920, French General Henri Gouraud visited the tomb of Saladin, the greatest of the Muslim vanquishers of Crusaders, to crow, “Awake, Saladin. We have returned. My presence here consecrates victory of the Cross over the Crescent.”

July 15 1099, Jerusalem captured in a bloody siege with many atrocities perpetrated on Muslims by the Crusaders. The conquest which keeps Jerusalem in Christian hands for nearly a century is the crowning achievement of the First Crusade, though its success will never again be matched in any subsequent Crusade.The Horror Show File by Wael Shawky, HD video, 2010.Both Muslim and secular heads of state in the Middle East have been no less analogical in their identifications with the Jihadis who ousted the Crusaders. King Faisal bin Hussein bin Ali al-Hashimi, the rebel king of Syria and Iraq (and friend to T. E. Lawrence) in the 1910s and 1920s, and after him Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser Hussein in the 1950s, and more recently Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, terror patriarch Osama bin Laden and now the self-proclaimed Caliph of The Islamic State of Iraq, Syria and the Levant, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, all strove to expel the Western occupiers in the Middle East by envisioning themselves as the new Saladins in a renewed quest to vanquish modern Western Crusaders. And yet it is such identifications with historical figures that often proves obscenely deceptive, as in the case of Saddam the mass persecutor of Kurds identifying with Saladin the great leader of Kurds.

Saladin is the most noble and generous of the Muslim protagonists. But Shawky spends more screen time implicating the combined betrayals and massacres perpetrated on weaker and unarmed Muslim populations by less formidable Jihadi antagonists who invariably impose their own conquests on populations and possessions not yet threatened by the Franks–though the Jihadis use the threat of impending Crusader assaults as pretexts for taking possession of attractive principalities and deposing of their dynasties.

Pope Uban II calls for commoners and nobles to join The First Crusade to the Holy Land, 1095 CE, The Horror Show File by Wael Shawky, HD video, 2010We like to think of art being the most reflective sensor of contemporary cultural dynamics, but rarely are we treated to such a profoundly artistic analogy of our own geopolitics with the geopolitics of such a remote and infamous past as those pictured in the films made in the last five years by Shawky. There are, of course, on a larger scale, and with human actors, the renowned precedents of Sergei Eisenstein’sAlexander Nevsky recalling the Nazi menace threatening Russia in 1939. There is also Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible satirizing Stalin’s genocidal mania right under the dictator’s nose, and Andrei Tarkovsky’s Andrei Rublev paralleling his contemporary Soviet society with its persecution of nature worshippers by the Russian Orthodox Church, a thinly veneered indictment of the Soviet persecution of all lifestyles outside the Marxist-Leninist purview.

Imad al-Din Zangi, Lord of Mosul and Aleppo in 1146, moments before he is slain at Jabar Castle by a servant he insulted. He is best remembered for his conquest of Edessa from the Crusaders in a bloody slaughter of Christians thought by the Jihadis to be retribution for the atrocities perpetrated on Muslims by Christians in the sack of Jerusalem forty years earlier. The Path to Cairo by Wael Shawky, HD video, 2013.Shawky may not have the means or production skills of such masters, but we shouldn’t underestimate his modest sets, deceptively-unassuming humor and the beguilingly-cute horde of marionettes packed into his films as signifiers of lapsed seriousness, especially given that in the totality of Cabaret Crusades there is barely a face or a figure that appears onscreen without personifying some manner of lacerating and intolerant, often mercenary sociopath. The sting of Shawky’s three films, of course, is the after-realization that the sheer number of sociopaths in succession in his films imply that each of us contains the germs of intolerance and the will to authoritarian power that can turn our loftiest ideologies into coercive indoctrinations to the point that our most inspired sentiments become at best corrupted and hypocritical, and at worst hardened and autocratic dogma

1098 CE / 490 AH: The Seljuk Sultan at Baghdad lets the Fatimids respond to the arrival of the First Crusade, given that the Fatimid Caliph of Cairo has just seized Jerusalem and other territory from the Seljuks. As the Sultan expects, the consequence of the shifting borders make Antioch the Crusaders’ first objective and conquest. The Horror Show File by Wael Shawky, HD video, 2010. Read more at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/g-roger-denson/egyptian-artist-wael-shaw_b_7769604.html