`Al-Hallaj Camera` and `Al-Sabbah Camera`

http://muraqqa.com/shezad-dawood.html
‘Al-Hallaj Camera’ and ‘Al-Sabbah Camera’
by Shezad Dawood
October 2009
Based on a conversation conducted between artist Shezad
Dawood and Muraqqa editor Alexander Barakat modified into a
personal statement exploring Dawood’s two works ‘Al-Hallaj
Camera’ and ‘Al-Sabbah Camera’.
The 'Al-Hallaj Camera' and the 'Al-Sabbah Camera' both use
iconic phrases by key Islamic mystics - or some might say
‘heretics’ - to look at ideas of perceptual consciousness, in a
specific context. I am particularly interested in the way in which
perceptual consciousness is discussed as a mode of both
initiation and metaphor in Sufism. For example, Rumi says:
'Before my visible Form you flee into the invisible...
But truly my hearth and swelling are in the Invisible...'
(Mathnawi, Book iii, 3706 ff.).
Shezad Dawood
Al-Sabbah Camera, 2009
Vintage Praktica camera with engraved lens, velvet cushion, plinth and
framed contact sheet.
Courtesy of the artist and Paradise Row London
It is interesting to note the capitalisation of ‘Invisible’ in the
second line but not in the first, and this parallax is precisely what
led me to the camera works. It is essentially the idea of what is
hidden and what is revealed, existing in tandem.
The lens of the 'Al-Hallaj Camera' is inscribed with the phrase 'My
Mother gave birth to Her Father, What a Rare Marvel Indeed',
which is one of the several apocryphal pronouncements of the
9th Century Iranian Sufi mystic Mansur al-Hallaj. His most
controversial statement, which led to his execution, was ‘An-Al
Haqq (I am the Truth)’, and which uses one of the 99 names of
God. While this statement was perceived by his supporters as
an abandonment of the self over to God, it was viewed by his
detractors as heresy.
One of the reasons for al-Hallaj’s controversial position was his
stance on teaching mysticism to the masses, whereas normally it
would have only been reserved for the elite. It was the
connection between this socialist mysticism and the complex
tensions within the Arab world in the aftermath of the colonial
period that led me to use the East German 'Praktica' camera in
both cases.
What captures my interests in this regard is the very general
idea of the tensions between an elite and the masses as
embodied in the classical Islamic empires, as much as in the
more closed schools of Sufism and other mystic traditions. In
that way, one can see very different embodiments of Islamic
thought, actually operating within similar structures. With
regards to the post-colonial Arab world, part of the movement
towards independence in many countries or states was a mass
socialist drive, which often identified very strongly with the left.
And yet how many former 'colonies' have a popular left
government? These connections across time interest me in an
oblique manner. The fact of the matter is that even mysticism
can and must be examined in light of the social and political
structures that surround it. For the 'Al-Hallaj Camera', the
images are all shot in both old and new districts of Dubai, and so
the phrase contains particular relevance in terms of the amazing
speed with which the city has evolved in the desert.
Hassan-i-Sabbah, as many people know, was an 11th Century
mystic who founded the assassins from his mountain fortress of
Alamut, in what is now modern-day Syria. Sabbah is famous in
legend for inducing visions of paradise into his followers in order
for them to go out and kill for him. Through the use of hashish
and women, his pronouncements have been appropriated and
caricatured in many works of Western fiction to a degree that he
has almost become the cliché of the intransigent Arab in the
west, and is as alive in the contemporary Western imagination as
ever. Here I take his most iconic and revolutionary phrase
'Nothing is True, everything is Permitted', later appropriated by
such figures as Aleister Crowley and William Burroughs, and the
images to accompany this camera are all taken during my travels
in contemporary Syria, including Damascus, Palmyra and the
crusader castle at Crac-des-Chevaliers.
I was interested in mapping out a multiple layered history of
Syria as a site, and like other areas of the 'Middle East', it is rich
with many, and varied narratives from the Roman period to the
Crusades, taking in some key figures and moments in religious
and other history. These layers open up to a vast pluralism and
intensity, whether that fits with the contemporary mapping of
the Arab world or not. And it is these contradictory facets of the
modern Arab world and sectarianism, that interested me in
referencing Hassan-i-Sabah for you have this figure who is
considered to have practically become a pastiche of Western
perceptions of Islamic extremism. Yet theologically, he was
actually looking to overturn a number of doctrines of mainstream
Islam, and therefore was radical in two respects at once, as both
a Nizari Ismaili against what he saw as a more decadent Islam;
but also in favour of a more transformative mystical gnosis. As
such, he has even been an inspiration to writers and
personalities as curious as Nietzsche, Roger Zelazny and Robert
Anton Wilson, and nothing is, I suppose quite as simple as it
seems.
With regard to the effect the engraving had on the images, and
to go back to my opening remarks about perception, typically, as
the focal length is too short the phrases in Arabic do not appear
on photographs taken with these cameras. The idea being that,
as with any mystical truth, somehow it is beyond the field of
literal or physical perception. Each camera comes with a contact
sheet of film shot through the camera, and what I wished to
convey was that somehow rather then merely being imprinted on
the literal images shot by the camera, each phrase was somehow
transmuted into the aura of the work: the space between the
camera, the contact sheet and the viewer somehow pregnant
with the possibilities embodied by each phrase.
Shezad Dawood
Al-Hallaj Camera, 2009
Vintage Praktica camera with engraved lens, velvet cushion, plinth and
framed contact sheet.
Courtesy of the artist and Paradise Row London
Photography by Sueraya Shaheen