Archis sent out the letter below to several authorities on the inside to ask about the cultural power of the Islamic world and about the possibilities for interaction and exchange with the West. Carlos Betancourth explored what the cultural model of cosmopolitanism contains and how it compares to Islamic cultures to discover the possibilities for development.

Edward Said wrote ‘Orientalism’, a demonstration of the limited Western thought that sees the other (Eastern) as a cliché. Ian Buruma and Avishai Margalit wrote Occidentalism, which shows that a tenacious tradition of a similar sort of reductionist thought exists among the enemies of the West. And Samuel Huntington wrote ‘The Clash of Civilizations’, a grim exploration of history that starts again after the avowed end. Although there are subtleties to be found in these books, the overall effect of their success is the rise of a global simplification of thought. George Bush used images of Arabic-appearing men during his speech about terrorism. Rebels in Iraq point to Abu Ghraib to explain their rage against the West. The irony is that modern-day intellectuals contribute to an enormous animosity even while they are trying to deconstruct it.

There is hardly a more tenacious cliché in the world than Islam. When you talk to people in the Islamic world, they are all very different and derive their identity from different sources, even different religious sources. The Qur’an is a text that can be taken literally to varying extents, and the hadiths can be understood as guidelines rather than rules for conduct. But according to the world news, people of the West portray Islam as a monolithic threat while Muslims prefer to emphasise the link between sharia and jihad.

In this context Archis was curious about two aspects.

First of all: what can be said about the contemporary productive contribution of Islamic cultures to the global civilisation? And which voices are contributing to an intelligent debate on mutual cross-fertilisation instead of the clash of civilisations?

The second question was: can Islam be shown to be a brand that can be found in the souvenir shops around St Peter’s Basilica in Rome, the Golden Temple in Tokyo, the Buddhist altars in Bangkok and other places of worship? Can we create a visual essay of Islam not as an existential and spiritual necessity, but as ‘nice to have’? Can Islam also be funny, ironic, carefree or even kitsch? In other words, can Islam simultaneously be an act of enlightenment and suffer from its own dialectic?