Inclusive Cultures Blog – Missing Lineages of Thought in Creative Spaces
2024 Inclusive Cultures participant Maryam Abdullah reflects missing lineages of knowledge in the arts and cultures sector.
Oneness and interrelatedness of all things is a governing principle in many ‘religious’ knowledge systems, including my own. At the heart of all things is a Divine Essence known as the source of all light, from which everything emanates and to which everything returns—a cyclical process of nourishment, compassion, and care.
Why begin with this?
I’m very conscious that talking about ‘faith’ and ‘religion’ in artistic and cultural spaces often triggers discomfort, resistance, or concern. After doing the Inclusive Cultures course, I feel more comfortable asking colleagues, peers and practitioners to step into that discomfort and explore its roots.
I have started off by putting ‘faith’ and ‘religion’ into quotation marks because I’d like to invite readers to consider their associations with these words. Faith and religion to me include philosophy, cosmology, ontology, knowledge, intellect. They indicate a whole ‘life-world’ which asks questions of reality, behaviour, art and existence.
As a cultural programmer working closely with community groups, artists, and individuals, I’m immersed in an area where over 80% of the population identify with a faith. It is woven into their lives, yet it is often absent from conversations about artistic practice.
Often children and adults interact with art in a faith space – where the beauty and conception being presented is a way to interact with the beauty and reality of a Divine Creator and the manifest (and un-manifest) universe. It has always been strange and sad to me that in the wider creative community, this is still not seen as a form of artistic practise which is just as valuable, contemplative and beautiful as art created in other spaces.
Decolonial scholars argue that racism operates on two fronts: the de-valuation of certain bodies and the erosion of the knowledge they carry. I don’t mean personal knowledge here, but the entire knowledge systems that people inherit. For example, in the West, it is widely believed that consciousness stems from the mind but this is not an uncontested truth when put in conversation with global knowledge systems. Consciousness might reside elsewhere—like the heart in Islamic philosophy. I bring this in because it is a knowledge I have inherited and forms the principles of my own practise.
Our understandings of reality, the cosmos, and existence are shaped by where we come from and what we choose to accept as truth – this is something that must be included in our thinking about diversity.
Can any space truly be diverse or inclusive if we’re unwilling to step outside our cognitive frameworks?
Can we have a genuine diversity that values where people come from, including their spiritual and philosophical lineages?
Colonial systems successfully framed the intellectual traditions of non-Western cultures as ‘barbaric’ or ‘savage,’ denying their philosophies, sciences, and artistic contributions. This has continued to cast long shadows in cultural spaces today although the language has altered slightly to calling these knowledge systems ‘airy-fairy’ ‘mythical’ ‘irrational’.
The reason why this is so important to understand is because by ignoring religious realities completely, so many practises like co-creation and creative health are considered ‘new’ when in truth, they have a long human history. Religious and spiritual communities worldwide have long used artistic forms to share knowledge and meet the diverse needs of people. Practises that are being framed as ‘new’ are actually deeply rooted human traditions which span centuries.
My provocation during the course and after is this: let’s refuse the colonial mind-set that frames non-Western traditions as merely ‘dance’ and rediscover the missing lineages of knowledge threaded into our histories. In doing so, we create spaces that are not only diverse and inclusive but truly reflect the reality of human existence, knowledge and creativity in this world.
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