Over a year ago my six-year-old grandson Henry Flynn rushed home from his multi-ethnic south London school playground in Streatham with a solemn but urgent question for his father, an art historian, as it happens. So far as is known, incidentally, mainly Anglo-Saxon and Celtic blood flows in young Henry’s veins. ‘Am I a Muslim, dad?’ he asked.
Now, at the well-planned eight-year-old Sharjah Art Museum in the United Arab Emirates until the end of February, there is a British Council travelling exhibition involving 22 artists from nine separate countries which is also about the quest for identity.
Many of the exhibits are photographic portraits and one of them is of an Englishman from Streatham, south London, who has married a Muslim woman and converted to Islam, thereby making my grandson’s query amazingly pertinent. ‘Nick Higgins, London 2003’ — the head and shoulders of the green-shirted subject caught looking thoughtful under a chandelier against an orange background — is one of a series of images capturing converts to Islam.
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