Vase (Iznik pottery) from early 16th century.

Muhammad Yusuf, Features Writer

The Mshatta facade is the largest exhibit in the Museum of Islamic Art, Pergamon Museum, Berlin. The monumental piece of architecture will be renovated from March 2022 and prepared for a move to the north wing of the museum and opened for public view in 2026.

The facade, approximately 1,300 years old, comes from the colossal Qasr al-Mshatta palace in present-day Jordan, 30 kilometres south of the capital Amman. It includes two gate towers, is almost entirely decorated with impressive stone carvings and once adorned the entrance to the caliph’s throne room.

The construction is part of a chain of more than thirty “castles in the desert”, stretching across Bilad as-Sham, Iraq and Saudi Arabia. With a square enclosure wall measuring 144 metres on a side, the Mshatta Castle is one of the largest of its kind. Its construction was probably begun during the reign of the Umayyad Caliph al-Walid ibn Yazid (743-744), but remained unfinished after he was assassinated. A later earthquake further damaged the unfinished structure.

 Sicilian-Arabic casket from the Museum of Islamic Art.

While part of the complex is still in Jordan at its place of origin — right next to Amman Airport — the 33 metre long and approximately five metre high main facade of the southern outer wall, came to Berlin at the beginning of the 20th century. The mammoth object was a gift from Ottoman Sultan Abdülhamid II to Kaiser Wilhelm II.

The grand offering arrived in Berlin in 1903, broken up into 459 parts. This highlight of the Museum of Islamic Art is now being examined and restored, so that later in the archaeological tour of the Pergamon Museum, it can be placed in a direct spatial relationship with the other large buildings in the building. In future, visitors will be able to follow the work in a publicly visible demonstration construction site.

The facade is the largest and perhaps the most important work of Islamic art in a museum worldwide. After it arrived in Berlin, it was shown a year later in a small space in the Kaiser Friedrich Museum (today’s Bode Museum). Its affiliation, however, was discussed intensively: did it belong as an Islamic facade in the ‘foreign’ Asian Museum or did it belong to antiquity perceived as ‘European’? It was disputed at the time that antiquity also formed the basis of Islamic art and culture.

It was classified in the Pergamon Museum, where it has been on display since 1932. The Mshatta facade symbolises the transition from Byzantine and ancient Iranian, to Islamic art. With its hybridity and history of migration to Berlin, it embodies topics that are of great relevance today: cultural models, migration and provenance. As planned, the room with the Mschatta facade will be closed to visitors from March 1, 2022. Also, on the occasion of the forthcoming restoration, German-Syrian artist Ali Kaaf enters into a contemporary dialogue with the facade with his installation ‘I am a stranger.

Two times a stranger’ in the Pergamon. To run till Feb. 20, the artist’s work is a contemporary dialogue with the facade of the Jordanian Caliph’s palace. It creates a field of tension and a space of ambivalence in the in-between – between facade and intervention, history and the present, known and foreign, visible and invisible. In this way, a directly perceptible emotional physical access to the building, which was built around 740 AD, is created.

Kaaf studied at the Institut des Beaux-Arts in Beirut and the University of the Arts in Berlin and currently teaches at the Kunsthochschule Berlin-Weissensee. The eventful history of the Mshatta facade serves as a metaphor for him to think about migration, integration, homeland and identity. In his installation, he works with perspectives and insights into the monumental facade.

The relationship to space, to be noted, is fundamental to Kaaf’s work. The title of his composition comes from a poem by the philosopher and poet Abu Hayyan al-Tawhidi, who lived in Baghdad in the 10th century. “From his perspective and at the time he was alive, to be a stranger meant, first and foremost, voluntarily separating oneself from society so as to achieve contemplative silence,” said Kaaf in an interview. According to Gnostics and Islamic Sufis, it also indicated an estrangement from the self in the attempt to attain spiritual union with the world.

“For me, the Mshatta facade mirrors my own fate, migrating and arriving in a new culture, where that arrival is never complete.” Kaaf grew up in Damascus, but his family spent time in southern Syria, home to many ruins, as well as ancient Roman and Byzantine cities. The original site of the Mshatta facade was just 200 kilometres from where he lived. The Museum of Islamic Art exhibits diverse works of Islamic art from the 7th century to 19th century, from the area between Spain and India.

Excavation activity in Ctesiphon (ancient Iranian city, now near Baghdad), Samarra (Iraq) and Tabgha (Palestine), as well as acquisition opportunities, led to Egypt, the Foreign Orient (Middle East) and Iran in particular, being important focal points. Other regions are represented by collection objects or groups, such as calligraphy and miniature painting from the Mughal Empire or Sicilian ivory works of art.