Back to The Future: Islamic Art in Space

by Mercedeh Baroque

When it comes to researching Islamic art, whether to inspire myself or simply educate myself about my heritage, I see a plethora of information about the history of our art and what we have produced in the past. While it is important to keep Islamic artistic traditions such as calligraphy, carpet-making, basket-weaving, and mosaics alive and healthy, there is something I rarely see portrayals of: Muslims in space. Muslim time travellers. Muslims in alternate dimensions trying to make their parents fall in love again. Muslims meeting a sentient floating rectangular prism. Muslims leading a rebellion against mankind’s enslavement by a malevolent artificial intelligence network.

And this is a problem. I’ve always wondered why we Muslims have been so obsessed with our past, so attached to proving who we have been and where we have come from rather than imagining a place for ourselves in the future. In my eyes, I feel that any society that fails to imagine themselves in the future places their youngest generation in a precarious situation. How are we to express our identities as we grow and imagine ourselves as confident and amazing Muslims 50 years into the future if we are completely invisible in a fictionalized future?

Here’s something I always entertain myself with: What if Star Trek had been written by a Muslim? How would our perceptions of aliens change if they were written from a different cultural perspective? How would a post racial humanity be portrayed by a currently racialized people?

I first started thinking of an Islamic future when I attended a lecture by Skawennati, a Kanien’kehá:ka artist who imagined her people time travelling from a sovereign future. In her miniseries Time Traveller ™ I took a journey through indigenous Canadian history with a Kanien’kehá:ka bounty hunter from the year 2121.

Likewise, there is a sub-genre within science-fiction known as afro-futurism that has existed for almost as long as science fiction itself. The most striking and successful afro-futuristic work in recent years has been musician Janelle Monae’s multi-album Metropolis project, which combines many different musical genres and literary allusions to tell both an epic science-fiction story, but to also comment on many cultural and political issues that affect the Black community today.

Even Mel Brooks, the great comedy film-maker from the sixties and seventies, jokingly explored this topic in his anthology film History of the World, Part I, with a short musical segment near the end called “Jews in Space.” It seems like many other racialized groups have found ways to imagine stories of their communities set in future or in alternate worlds, so why are Muslims left out?

Without any perception of a people’s future, they have nowhere to go. We begin by asking ourselves who we want to be; through the direction of arts and culture, we can lay the groundwork for our future destination.