The Moorish Revival And The Arab Spring
It is autumn now and the Arab spring is still a work in progress, but that is probably how it was always going to be. It took hundreds of years for democracy to take hold in the West and even with a template to look at it would be expected that it will be a step by step process in the Arab world. Although the desire for more freedom and self determination in the Arab world is clear the shape of their democracy will not necessarily be the same as ours, it will be impacted by their history, geography and culture. It will also be influenced by the particular challenges of living in a part of the world fought over by competing religions and still bearing the marks of Western interference.
Much has been made of the assistance given to mass protest movements by mobile communication technology, the iPhones and iPads and the like, and the social networking applications that run on them, products of Western culture, at least the technological and industrial part of it. While it is probably true, even in the West, that we haven’t fully assimilated this technology in to our wider culture, it is clear that it has the potential to widen and enhance our daily experiences. There are certainly many more depressing, as well as some more inspiring, aspects of modern Western culture.
Although, in architectural terms, the ‘Moorish Revival’ reached its height in the 1920′s, elements of Moorish style are adopted by Western designers on a more or less continuous basis. Why create pastiches of other peoples style and nail them on to places they don’t belong? some might argue. This is unnecessarily negative, the genius of Moorish garden design, particularly in the transitions between indoor and outdoor spaces has a huge amount to offer to traditional English garden design, without ever needing to be copied slavishly. The colour combinations used in Moorish art, textiles and interior design including, but certainly not limited to, the classic contrast of Adobe with deep indigo and slightly bone white ceramics work perfectly. This is true whether or not you have seen them is situ, in the killing sun and dense shadows of Moroccan courtyards for instance.
So what is the point of linking together the Moorish revival and the Arab spring? Simply that the parts of one culture that transpose usefully or aesthetically into another should be celebrated. As well as implicitly pat ourselves on the back for developing the technology that aided the Arab spring, as the Western media have been apt to do, we should acknowledge the mathematics developed by Arabian scholars that underpinned this technology in the first place. And, while talking of the combination of communication technology and Moorish design, check out this combination of both in iPhone covers and Kindle covers, just one example that works, there are probably many more.
