A salient concern that emerged across the festival\u2019s twelve panels (which seems a term too formal for the intimacy and conviviality of the event), keynotes, and performances was how to balance tradition with innovation. A subtext was preservation of Islamic art and culture(s) in the face of an increasingly globalized world, which runs at a pace prone to aestheticizing complexities into superficial and commodifiable proxies of authenticity. The festival was a collective challenge to this trend of simplification and othering; the strategies, desires, and observations offered by participants were laced with a mix of frustration, enthusiasm, and cautious optimism.<\/p>\n\n\n\n When the subject was preservation, numerous presenters, from manuscript specialists to artists to anthropologists, acknowledged that this practice carries colonial vestiges that must be recognized across disciplines. In the session dedicated to museum and archival practices, Dr. Nur Sobers-Khan, a curator and cultural heritage professional with expertise in Islamic art and manuscript collections from the Middle East and South Asia, asserted that even the label \u201cIslamic art\u201d is problematic in that it is, first and foremost, a scholarly, institutional, and colonial construct. To avoid constructing this thing called \u201cIslamic art,\u201d which is often a reproduction of classist identities, Sobers-Khan argued, we must understand how this portrayal was arrived at in the first place.<\/p>\n\n\n\n A subset of this discussion continued in a panel called \u201cCity as Art,\u201d in which memory was considered as both a tangible and an intangible signature of Islamic heritage. Historian Rana Safvi described architecture as embodying material memories of the past by serving as witness to a scaled spectrum of events from intimate prayer to collective uprisings, and she argued that historical narratives should not be formed exclusively of the latter. Alex Shams, writer and PhD student of anthropology at the University of Chicago, observed that heritage has been weaponized by various political movements or by governments to make certain claims and produce a certain image of history to the exclusion of others, particularly for religious nationalist or ethno-supremacist projects. Interrogating the notion of the archive, Dr. Sara Ann Knutson, an assistant professor of teaching and a historian and archaeologist at UBC, cautioned that \u201carchiving\u201d is a loaded term, as many practices associated with the archiving process are in fact extractive.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The balance between past and present, between spiritual and material, arose again in \u201cThe Future of Traditional Arts,\u201d in which artists and educators Nagihan Seymour, Sandy Kurt, and Fadhila Al Dhahouri described the delicate balance between innovation and tradition needed to safe-keep Islamic art, which includes making contemporary work that appeals to twenty-first-century audiences while ensuring that practitioners have access to experienced mentors and affordable high-quality tools. A strategy exuberantly shared by all three panellists was education\u2014directed at adults and children alike\u2014which would empower people to produce traditional art and artisanry at a level of proficiency that preserves authenticity. I consider Bayt Al Fann\u2019s first Islamic Art and Culture Digital Festival a success according to the metrics of accessibility, contribution to knowledge, variety of fields included, and quality of the presenters. I congratulate the organization for making this an online event, which honours inclusivity and mitigates the environmental harm produced by travel required for an in-person international event. The host platform was user-friendly and afforded an opportunity for networking among participants and presenters. <\/p>\n\n\n\n In future iterations, I would love to see more interdisciplinary panels, putting, for example, urban historian Rana Safvi in direct conversation with artists Ali Yayc\u0131o\u011flu and Ahmet Faruk, who draw cities and who spoke of Cairo and Istanbul in a lexicon of line and texture, while acknowledging the diverse histories and traces of geography held in architectural details such as minarets. As a scholar of landscape, I would also appreciate sessions dedicated to landscape traditions and light, both of which are distinctive expressions of the diversity of the Islamic world. Overall, the strength of the festival was in conveying that complexity is necessarily understood through the granularity of details such as the angle of geometry, the curve of script, and the minerals in pigments, and that each possesses histories that are at once humble and noble.<\/p>\n\n\n\n![\"Sandy-Kurt_pattern\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/12\/webzine_decembre_Valcourt_Sandy-Kurt_pattern.jpg\")
Photo: \u00a9 Sandy Kurt<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n![\"Ali-Yaycioglu_Roots\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/12\/webzine_Decembre_Valcourt_Ali-Yaycioglu_Roots.jpg\")
Roots<\/em>, 2018
Photo: courtsey of the artist<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/12\/Ahmet-Faruk_HeirloomsfromthePast_2022-scaled.jpg\")
Heirlooms From the Past<\/em>, 2022.
Photo: courtesy of the artist<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n![\"Nagihan-Seymour-AutomnLeaves-2022\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/12\/webzine_Decembre_Valcourt_Nagihan-Seymour-AutomnLeaves.jpg\")
Autumn Leaf<\/em>, 2022.
Photo: courtesy of the artist <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n![\"Joumana-Medlej_RemoverofFear\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/12\/webzine_decembre_Valcourt_Joumana-Medlej_RemoverofFear.jpg\")
Remover of Fear<\/em>, 2015.
Photo: courtesy of the artist<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n![\"Joumana-Medlej_HeavenlySphere\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/12\/webzine_decembre_Valcourt_Joumana-Medlej_HeavenlySphere.jpg\")
Heavenly Spheres<\/em>, 2015.
Photo: courtesy of the artist<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/12\/Ahmet-Faruk_ArchesofAlhambra-2020-scaled.jpg\")
Arches of Alhambra<\/em>, 2020
Photo: courtesy of the artist<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/12\/Ahmet-Faruk_OrnamentsoftheCities_2022-scaled.jpg\")
Ornaments of the Cities<\/em>, 2022.
Photo: courtesy of the artist<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/12\/webzine_decembre_Valcourt_Saks-Afridi_SpaceMosque.jpg\")
Scout 1<\/em>, from the series SpaceMosque<\/em>, 2018.
Photo: courtesy of the artist<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n