CUBISM IS DIVINE: Rasheed Araeen's universalism and rebuttal of Eurocentric art history

This chapter discusses the UK-based artist and writer Rasheed Araeen’s claim that Islam is at the heart of modernism by consulting his art, writing, and himself. There is no ambition to pass judgment on the soundness of his ideas. Rather, the chapter demonstrates how his intellectual project explains his relation to Islam at different times of his long career. Rasheed Araeen mobilizes Islam, Islamic semiotic resources, and Muslim identities for three main reasons: first, to mirror how racism others Muslims simultaneously, as well as identities such as Arab, Pakistani, Indian; second, to draw parallels between modernism, minimalism, cubism, and Islamic art in a criticism of Eurocentrism; third, to include a particular understanding of the ethical as well as the aesthetical traditions of Islam in a universalist, modernist project meant to efface tribalism and Eurocentrism. His use of Islam, Muslim identities, and Islamic semiotic resources only fully makes sense in relation to Rasheed Araeen’s lifelong project that sees modernism as the platform for universal equality. The research is part of a project with the overall aim to investigate how aesthetics and ethics of Islam are reimagined by individual artists in relation to non-traditional art forms.