2018 Avicenna Peace Award Laureate
Dr Michael A. Barry
Affiliation at the time of the award: Professor, American University of Afghanistan (AUAF)
Prize motivation: Michael Barry received the award for his humanitarian works during the Soviets War in Afghanistan and his endeavor for promoting intercultural harmony through his research on the Herat School of Art.
Life
Born in New York City in 1948 and raised in France to American parents based in Paris (with UNESCO), Dr Michael Barry is an internationally recognized scholar in Islamic art and civilization. Dr Barry holds higher degrees in Arabic and Persian studies and social anthropology from Princeton University (USA), Cambridge University (Britain), McGill University (Canada), and the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (France). After teaching for sixteen years at his alma mater Princeton in the United States, Dr Barry has now been serving since autumn 2017 as the Distinguished University Professor at the American University of Afghanistan. Dr Barry also advised the current displays of Islamic art at the Metropolitan Museum in New York and at the Aga Khan Museum in Toronto. In addition to his expertise in art, Dr Barry holds fifteen international awards for his excellence in writing or teaching from the US, France, Iran, and now - with great pride - from Afghanistan.
He has dedicated much of his life to the service of his beloved Afghanistan, which he first visited as a child in 1963. Beginning his parallel humanitarian career with his USAID work in famine relief in the then drought-stricken provinces of Bâdghîs and Ghôr in 1970-1972, he went on to research war conditions in the Afghan field between 1979 and 1985.
From 1985 to 1989, Dr Barry was further asked to coordinate the relief missions inside Afghanistan of the French medical organization Doctors of the World (Médecins du Monde), a daunting task which included accepting steep personal risk as much for himself as for his mainly French and Swedish brave fellow volunteers, such as riding as team leader with his medical patrols for months on end, on horseback, deep into the insurgent Afghanistan countryside, despite Soviet bombings and even through hails of Soviet rocket fire. Today, Dr Barry considers education, with his work as a teacher at AUAF in Kabul, no less a humanitarian priority for Afghanistan than food or medicine.
In his profound concern to promote Afghanistan's cultural heritage and the country's both national and international dignity, he notably organized the exhibitions of Afghanistan's magnificent medieval paintings now scattered throughout world collections - but here superbly reproduced upon state-of-the-art metal panels - in Herât Castle in 2017, and in Bâbur's Gardens in Kabul in early 2018. In addition to the works now on permanent display in Herât Castle, this unique collection will also be reproduced and housed for the permanent education and delight of the public in Kabul's Dâr-ul-Amân Palace, now under restoration, for inaugural day coinciding with celebrations of the centenary of Afghanistan national independence, on 17 August 2019.
Works on Herat School of Art
The works and career of Herât's master painter Kamâluddîn Bihzâd (AD 1465-1535), the single most prestigious and influential artist of the book in all Islamic civilization, place late medieval Khurasan's imperial city of Herât securely among the most important and productive cultural centres in all the world in that period.
Dr Barry's research has traced every surviving painting of Bihzâd in Near Eastern, European or North American collections for reproduction in Herât and Kabul. Written in four languages - Persian/Darî and Pashtô as well as in English and French - the current wall captions, and the forthcoming comprehensive catalogue, recount how Bihzâd finally became the leading artist of the School of Herât founded in AD 1426 by Prince Bâysunghur, a royal sponsor of genius who first gathered in the western Afghanistan royal metropolis - at the heart of the Silk Route - the finest known painters from all Islamic Asia. Bihzâd combined the various influences of Byzantium, China and even Renaissance Venice, into a glowing art of brilliant surface patterns and chequered geometric architectural structures, enlivened with vivid figures of humans and animals sharply observed from life. But Bihzâd further invested these pictures with profound mystical meaning. His every rock, tree, flower, bird, horse, peasant at his plough, or prince and princess in a palace, convey a Sufi symbol. Through his Sufi approach to painting, Bihzâd revolutionized Islamic art. Dr Barry has thus been able to uncover precise visual proofs of the close relation of friendship between the artist, and the most eminent Sufi thinker and poet then living in Herât (and who was also spiritual adviser to the sultan), Mawlânâ Jâmî (AD 1414-1492). Jâmî openly endorsed Bihzâd's art by allowing his own verses to appear in the master's very paintings, and by implying that Bihzâd - like the Qur'ânic Christ - had received from God the gift of endowing inert matter with life:
"Ba-sang, ar sûrat-i murghê kashîdê - Subuk! Sang-i girân az jâ parîdê!"
"Upon a stone, were he to draw the image of a bird, / lightly, this heavy stone itself [would sprout wings and,] from its place, would take flight."
Jâmî's explicit reference to Christ's miraculous breathing of life and soul into a clay bird (Qur'ân 5:113), and by Jâmî now just as clearly applied to Bihzâd himself - who became in turn (just like Jâmî) also revered as a Sufi saint (walî) - was repeatedly paraphrased by later 16th-century Persian-language writers on the arts like Khwândamîr of Herât in 1522.
"Mû-yi qalam-ash, zi Ôstâdî, "Jân dâda ba-sûrat-i jamâdî."
"A hair from his brush, through sheer Mastery, / might quicken with soul even mineral form in an icon!"
Or like Mîr Sayyid Ahmad of Tabrîz in 1564, in turn repeated by Qâzî Ahmad of Qum in 1596 :
"Bûd sûrat-i murgh-i û del-pazîr, "Chû murgh-i Masîhâ shuda : rûh-gîr!"
"The very bird he painted - an icon dear to hearts! / Like to the very bird of Christ took soul!"
Bihzâd's influence on the pictorial arts of the Islamic world lasted throughout the 16th century and well into the 17th: from the royal workshops in Istanbul and Tabrîz, to the courts in Kabul, Lahore, Delhi and Bukhârâ. Bihzâd's influence was miraculously revived in Europe in the early 20th: when leading French painter Henri Matisse first saw works by the Master of Herât in the pioneering Western exhibitions of Islamic art held in Paris in 1903, in Munich in 1910, and again in Paris in 1912. Bihzâd's impact on Matisse completely transformed the French Master's style - and through Matisse, has thus come, indirectly, to influence all modern world art.