About 50 miles away, just over the Saudi Arabian border, a woman cannot drive a car or show her face in public. Yet here in Doha, the capital of Qatar, in a vast executive suite, a 25-year-old woman is running a multibillion-dollar organization. Yes, her dad rules the country, but by various accounts, Her Excellency Sheikha Al Mayassa bint Hamad bin Khalifa Al-Thani isn’t just coasting in her position as boss of the Qatar Museums Authority, which this November will unveil its first venue, the 377,000-square-foot Museum of Islamic Art, designed by I.M. Pei.
Dressed in a black abaya and head scarf and seated behind a massive desk, Mayassa, as she is called informally, at first seems dwarfed by her surroundings. But rising from her chair, she grows in stature as she speaks about her museum’s mission. “There is a big misconception about what Islam is and the geographic location of it,” she says in her British-inflected English. “Originally, Islam was a culture. It wasn’t just a religion.” The objects in the collection of the MIA, as it is known, span 13 centuries and three continents, with pieces originating from Spain to Uzbekistan. “You had so many people who looked different, spoke different languages and had other religions, but all lived under the umbrella of Islam.”
One of seven children fathered by the Emir, now 56, with his second wife (he has another 20-some children with his two other wives), Mayassa took up her position nearly three years ago, fresh out of Duke University. She readily admits that her naïveté about the challenges involved made plunging in easier. “I didn’t really realize what this job required,” she says, laughing. Giving birth to a son nine months ago, following her January 2007 marriage to her cousin Sheikh Jassim, doesn’t seem to have slowed her down, either.
The political-religious stance of the museum and the unusual responsibility of Mayassa speak volumes about Qatar and how it differs from its close neighbors. A country about the size of Connecticut, it occupies a peninsula of sand dunes and salt flats that juts out of Saudi Arabia into the Persian Gulf, with Iraq and Iran just across that troubled water. To the east lies the United Arab Emirates, including glitzy Dubai, which has become a sort of Mideast Las Vegas, and Abu Dhabi, which has been making a heavily publicized bid to become the cultural hub of the region, with branches of the Louvre and the Guggenheim slated to open around 2013.
Qatar has been just as ambitious in its aspirations to become a cultural center, but by starting with a focus specifically on Islamic culture, the country has been doing it in a more homegrown way. Unlike Abu Dhabi, furthermore, Qatar is not renting art (the arrangement with the Louvre, for the use of its name and loans of art, will reportedly cost Abu Dhabi $1 billion). During the past decade, representatives of the Al-Thani family—most famously, an art- and antiquities-obsessed cousin of the Emir, Sheikh Saud—have purchased almost every significant piece of Islamic art that has come on the market. Meanwhile, planning for the country’s other major institution, a Qatar National Museum designed by Jean Nouvel, is well under way.
Comments
Post a Comment