Stacks of books bound with rubber bands are set on a table seemingly at random. Some lie horizontally; others stand vertically. But when the light hits them, the silhouettes they cast on the wall take the shape of the New York skyline of a decade ago, with the Twin Towers at its center. Forming the towers are the shadows of two slim volumes of the Koran printed in Arabic.

This table of books is Save Manhattan, 2006–07, part of a series by the Moroccan artist Mounir Fatmi. Last October it sold for £12,500 ($25,600) at the first post-9/11 sale at Sotheby’s London devoted solely to modern and contemporary Arab and Iranian art. The session’s top lots tripled their estimates. Christie’s followed a week later with an international modern and contemporary sale in Dubai in which the vast majority of works were by artists from the Middle East and other Arab regions. The results, says William Lawrie, Christie’s Dubai-based expert in charge of the auction, were “just phenomenal.” The success prompted the house to plan an expansion of its new Dubai office and to add further sales in this category to its schedule. In March 2008, Bonhams’s inaugural Middle East auction, in Dubai, set three records, including the first $1 million sale of a work by a Middle Eastern artist: the Iranian Farhad Moshiri’s glittering calligraphic painting Eshgh (“Love”), from 2007.

September 11, 2001, focused Western attention on the Arab world as never before. The ripples from that day are still evident, not only in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq but also in the popularity of books and films relating to the region, such as The Kite Runner and Persepolis, and in the growing interest in works by Muslim artists.

Yet despite auction triumphs and a flood of museum and gallery exhibitions featuring these pieces, many art world denizens aren’t sure how to categorize them. This is partly because the market is so new and partly because of the ambiguity of the terms Arab and Islamic.

Is the appropriate rubric “art from the Middle East”? Museum exhibitions and auction sales with this theme generally exclude Israeli Jews but embrace Muslims from North Africa. That raises the question of who should be included in the category, whatever its name. “Arab and Iranian,” the moniker preferred by some auction houses, excludes Turkey and the largely Muslim countries of Southeast Asia. And what about the many Muslim artists born in the Middle East and now settled in the West, or those who divide their time between the two?

Because of the difficulty of resolving such questions, the category remains undefined — and controversial. Maysaloun Faraj, an acclaimed Iraqi painter and ceramist and the owner of Aya Gallery, in London, dissects one frequently proposed solution: “Islamic contemporary.” This encompasses, she says, “art created from the essence of Islam. But not all the artists are Islamic. They draw from an Islamic heritage and from poetry and calligraphy, but the artists from Islamic countries are not necessarily creating Islamic art.”

Saleh Barakat, who organized the Lebanon Pavilion at the 2007 Venice Biennale and founded Beirut’s Agial Gallery, which focuses on work by Lebanese artists, adds that national identities complicate the issue. A Syrian artist, for instance, will not necessarily follow the same cultural or aesthetic influences  as an Egyptian artist; this results in distinctive national styles and tastes. In fact, it is only recently that—stimulated in part by Christie’s arrival in Dubai—buyers from one Middle Eastern country will consider purchasing works by artists from another.

One thing is certain: However it is labeled or delimited, the market for Muslim artists is burgeoning. Experts generally credit a confluence of causes for this growth. “To some extent, it reflects the general boom in contemporary art,” says Dalya Islam, the Arab and Iranian specialist for Sotheby’s London. With few unexplored niches left in the contemporary-art world, Islamic works are on the verge of becoming the next big discovery. “People always turn to what is new and fresh. We’ve seen it already with China and Russia,” says Islam. “The Middle East is so topical at the moment.”

Indeed, few of the Middle Eastern artists whose works now fetch prices of more than $50,000 were known even as recently as eight years ago. Only two years ago, auction houses were still incorporating works by such artists into their international contemporary sales.

Moreover, interest in art and culture has grown exponentially within the Middle East itself as the region’s wealth has exploded. This is evidenced by the plans for branches of the Guggenheim and the Louvre in Abu Dhabi and by the scheduled November opening in Doha, Qatar, of the Museum of Islamic Art, the brainchild of Sheikha Al Mayassa bint Hamad bin Khalifa Al-Thani, the board chair of the Qatar Museums Authority.

Museums worldwide have also played a part in the rise of this market. Inspired by a desire to build bridges between Islam and the West after 9/11, the institutions have in recent years taken pains to exhibit art, both contemporary and ancient, from Muslim countries (primarily Middle Eastern), thus bringing such works to the attention of Western audiences. In 2006, for instance, MoMA staged “Without Boundary,” displaying videos, paintings, sculpture and even comic-strip drawings by 15 Islamic and two American artists that reflected on the visual and spiritual traditions of Islamic art, from Arabic calligraphy to Persian miniatures. Later that same year, “Word into Art,” at the British Museum, presented paintings by 80 artists who work with Arabic script and lines from Sufi and other Arabic poetry.

Many artists shown in these exhibitions — including Maysaloun Faraj, the Egyptian Ahmed Moustafa and the Iranians Mohammed Ehsai and Charles Hossein Zenderoudi — are, in fact, among the top sellers in this category. Paris-based Zenderoudi brought the second highest price at Bonhams in March: $504,000 (est. $150–200,000) for his 1968 Untitled, in which lines of thickly scrawled Arabic march across a multihued canvas; Ehsai’s Zekre Allah, 2007, sold for $336,000 (est. $100–120,000), putting it in the top 10 for the night. Dealers specializing in this material are also emerging, from London’s Aya gallery to Pomegranate Gallery, in New York.

Whatever economic and cultural factors have boosted interest in the category in general, the artists themselves take several distinct approaches in their work. Many of them, for instance, address the conflict between the West and fundamentalist Islam.

Iranian-born Shirin Neshat, who has lived in the U.S. since 1974, is one of the best-known of these practitioners, having been shown in New York at the Guggenheim, the Whitney Museum of American Art and Barbara Gladstone Gallery, as well as at the Tate Gallery, in Britain, and the Hermitage, in St. Petersburg. Neshat frequently superimposes traditional henna patterns or erotic or violent texts, written in Persian calligraphy, across the hands and faces of Muslim women in photographs and films that address cultural and individual, particularly female, identity. Lalla Essaydi, a Moroccan artist based in New York, drapes women in white and, using henna, writes passages from her diary in Arabic on their bodies, hands and faces, then photographs them posed against sheets also covered in calligraphy — traditionally a man’s art, forbidden to women. Often the artist, who exhibits with New York’s Edwynn Houk gallery and Schneider Gallery, of Chicago, adds other items, such as eggs or lilies, again adorned with script. (A large number of the political artists are women, perhaps because women are most affected by the constraints of conservative Islam.)

Also concerned with political issues is the Iraqi artist and activist Rashid Selim, nephew of Jewad Selim (1919–61), an icon of the Iraqi modernist movement known especially for the Freedom Monument, which still stands at the center of Baghdad. The younger Selim is one of the most celebrated of the contemporary Iraqi artists. His paintings, performances and installations, some of which were included in “Word into Art,” comment on his nation’s battered history and culture. Selim’s compatriot Hana Mal-Allah — who, like Selim, exhibits both at Aya and at Pomegranate Gallery — burns, creases and folds paper to express the ruin and desecration of Baghdad. (Mal-Allah recently relocated from Iraq to London.)

By contrast, some Muslim artists celebrate Arabic culture, riffing on ancient Islamic decorative and calligraphic traditions. Moshiri’s record-setting Eshgh, for instance, consists of the titular word scrawled in Farsi script and smothered in thousands of Swarovski crystals. The Egyptian painter Ahmed Moustafa, especially popular among Middle Eastern collectors, bases his prismatic explorations of hue and form on the geometric perfection of the cube, the shape on which Arabic calligraphy is grounded. At Christie’s October sale in Dubai, his 1995 Qu’ranic Polyptych of Nine Panels, in which dense Arabic script floats across shimmering bands of color, brought $657,000 (est. $300–350,000), breaking the then record for contemporary Islamic art.

Mohammed Ehsai fills his canvases with lush, sinuous calligraphy that strikes a visual blow: power and spirituality made manifest in color, form and volume. Similarly, Charles Zenderoudi infuses his work with richly chromatic signs, symbols and Farsi calligraphy that dance on the page. And at his recent exhibition at Gagosian L.A., the Iranian-born Y. Z. Kami, who has also shown with Deitch Projects, in New York, presented architectonic collages of sacred texts in Persian, Hebrew and Arabic. In all these works, the impact derives from the form of the writing; one needn’t understand the texts to appreciate the paintings or to find in them the artists’ profound love for the heritage of Arabic poetry and design.

Some artists avoid voicing Islamic or Arab identity entirely. Paul Guiragossian (1926–93), an Armenian refugee raised in Jerusalem and Beirut, is widely considered the master of Lebanese modernism. In his paintings, which command prices in the range of $60,000 to $70,000, he bucked Islamic restrictions against representation with abstract, often despairing canvases in which figures cluster tightly, like shrouded women drawn together in their mourning. Similar melancholy permeates the poignant portraits and street scenes of the Syrian modernist Louai Kayyali, whose 1974 Untitled (Shoe-Shine Boy) (est. £20–25,000; $41,000–51,200) sold for £38,900 ($79,700), among the highest prices fetched at the Sotheby’s London sale.

Different styles, of course, appeal to different collectors. Before the Dubai sale, the Bonhams expert Mehreen Rizvi-Khursheed, who organized the first Sotheby’s sale in this category in May 2001, correctly predicted that the record-breaking Moshiri would not appeal to Westerners. “Arabs like flash and bling,” she says, “but Western collectors probably think it’s tacky or kitsch.”

While Sotheby’s Islam feels calligraphic works sell better to Middle Eastern collectors, both in Europe and in Dubai, Rizvi-Khursheed notes that her first sale to a Western buyer, a known collector, was in this category. “He wanted that piece because it wasn’t like other modern art,” she says. “Calligraphy is what makes it different — a calligraphy that is modern and larger scale, more pattern than it is word.” Still, she does not expect such buyers to be a major force at auction yet: “Westerners really start coming after the prices go up.” An exception may be issue-oriented works, which command a strong Western audience—as seen in the soaring careers of Essaydi and Neshat. Both outstripped expectations at Christie’s, where Essaydi’s Converging Territories #14 (2003) brought $43,000 (est. $8,000–12,000) and Neshat’s Guardians of Revolution, 1994 (est. $60–80,000), sold for $240,000.

It isn’t only their political expression that drives interest in these pieces. “We work with private collectors who respond aesthetically to the work first,” Edwynn Houk director Julie Castellano observes of Essaydi’s oeuvre. “They have to love looking at it. The topics that she’s dealing with can be difficult, but she does it in a way that is approachable.”

Whether the popularity of these pieces extends to Middle Eastern as well as Western buyers is difficult to judge. “It’s important to remember that in some [Muslim] countries, there is political censorship of art,” cautions Islam, “so it can be hard to tell if the reason people aren’t buying it is because they don’t like it or because it’s not permitted.” Indeed, Jacob Witzenhausen, who represents Essaydi in the Netherlands, encountered mixed reactions when he presented her work at the Istanbul Contemporary Art Fair last December. “Most people were enthusiastic,” he says — but there were threats. One visitor told Witzenhausen’s assistant he shouldn’t show such imagery, causing the gallerist to fear reprisals.

Even in the West, some political artists have faced problems. Iranian-born filmmaker-photographer Sooreh Hera, who now lives in the Netherlands, received death threats when her photograph of a gay couple wearing masks of the prophet Mohammed and his son-in-law, Ali, was selected for an exhibition at the Gemeentemuseum Den Haag in late 2007. Dutch Muslim groups called for a boycott of the institution and warned of riots if the work was shown. The piece was withdrawn, but the threats to Hera continue.

Reactions may evolve as the art gains exposure and the sociopolitical changes already taking place solidify. Certainly the financial outlook seems good. As Bonhams’s Rizvi points out, in 2001 “$60,000 was a huge amount [for these works]; now the record is over $1 million.” Islam agrees, noting plans for another Sotheby’s London sale in October. “I think there’s only one direction this is going to go,” she says, “which is up. I can feel it.” 

"Leaps of Faith" originally appeared in the May 2008 issue of Art+Auction. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Art+Auction's May 2008 Table of Contents.