Professor William Gallois
Director (HoD)
Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies
Professor of the Islamic Mediterranean & Director of the Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies
I am currently engaged in a major research project looking at the production of images in the Islamic world 1880-1945 C.E. This work aims to upend a series of commonly-held beliefs about art- and Islamic art in particular - in the modern age. It is centred on the production of a quintet of monographs, alongside a series of public interventions in the form of exhibitions, articles and translation projects. The first book in this series - Qayrawān - The Amuletic City - was published in February 2024 by Penn State University Press:
It has already garnered significant critical attention, with James Downs writing in Photographica World that, "This is a remarkable piece of writing, one that breaks new ground in methods of approaching and interpreting the vast corpus of photographic imagery that has been produced by colonial occupiers of the Arab world. . . .Qayrawān: The Amuletic City shows how photo-historians can move beyond these issues to enrich our understanding of the creative, religious and cultural practices of the past.”
In the Journal of Islamic Studies, Amira Bennison writes of the book's thesis and significance, suggesting that it offers:
"A refreshing conclusion which opens up new avenues of thought and thus further possibilities for research into artistic practice according to local canons rather than dominant Western assumptions about the nature of art and its producers. In sum, this is a brave and unusual book. It is, to a degree, speculative but in an informed way that uses an almost entirely untapped archive to explore a mysterious phase in the history of Qayrawān when wall murals appeared almost overnight on the walls of the great mosque and other locations, only to gradually fade away again over the ensuing decades. Gallois invites us to see these murals, appreciate them and think about the unique historical circumstances that produced them from a range of new perspectives that question assumptions about power, art and artists in a thought-provoking way. It is beautifully illustrated and will be of equal interest and value to art and architectural historians, scholars of Middle Eastern and Islamic history and all those involved in the endeavour to rethink assumptions and consider societies on their own terms."
Similarly, Allen Roberts, the preeminent pioneer of studies of modern Islamic visual cultures, has commented, "Gallois’s magnifying-glass-close archaeology of late nineteenth-century photographs, postcards, and related ephemera provides an ideologically engaging model for rethinking visual cultures of colonized people. Details accidentally captured in hegemonic images reveal push-back tactics and truths too long ignored. Unobtrusive graffiti on the walls of the Great Mosque and other buildings of Qayrawān (Kairouan), Tunisia, was talismanic expression by local women seeking to protect their communities from the ignominious physical and epistemic violence of racialized French pretense. Brilliant."
