French Museum Showcases Sufi Art of Persia

PARIS (Le Monde) -- From the outside, the manor house on the banks of the Seine, protected by high gilded gates, looks like the other villas in this affluent enclave of Chatou, a western Parisian suburb. 
The courtyard offers a wonderful view of the Island of Impressionists that was spared from the real estate industry’s voracious appetite. In the garden’s maze of roses and jasmine, the soft splash of a fountain imbues the air with a gentle tranquility. A soothing melody fills the rooms. 
In the Museum of Sufi Art and Culture, which opened on September 28, everything was done to create an atmosphere of luxury, calm and delight.
Financed by the MTO Shahmaghsoudi School of Islamic Sufism, the venue showcases a reassuring environment for a tolerant brand of Islam. Finely crafted traveler’s canes and beggars’ begging dishes carved into coconuts bear witness to a mystical quest whose precepts are delivered in Persian by the hologram of a Sufi master. Even the tabarzins, a kind of axe, have been stripped of their warlike nature. “They’re used to symbolically cut the ties with the material world and with our ego,” explained Claire Bay, the museum’s young Sufi president.
These ritual objects are paired with works by living artists with varying degrees of familiarity with mysticism. Some are Muslim, like Morocco’s Younès Rahmoun and Iran’s Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian, others are not. “Sufism’s aura can be felt in all of these creations, from which a thousand threads can be drawn beyond questions of religion and geography,” asserted museum director Alexandra Baudelot. In her view, “what fuels the most toxic fantasies is a lack of understanding.” Claire Bay concurred: “People hear music, they see calligraphy, they see works of art, and they think: ‘Oh, so this is Islam?’”