 I have a really tough time with creating video content that is visually enticing. Sorry, let me clarify. If you don't know this already, but my content is strictly focused on Middle Eastern and Muslim topics, and the reality is that Muslim culture is very poor in its visual content. For example, whenever part of my content references some Western component or context, I whist through the identification and selection of the raw visuals, and the eventual generation of that section of my content happens with maximum efficiency and speed. Picture here, image there, all done smoothly. For the sections pertaining to Arab or Muslim commentary or narrative, it's not quite so simple. It's more like going to the dentist, slow and painful. Simply put, the unfortunate reality is that either Arabs haven't produced enough visually over the ages, or haven't documented and protected it enough to retain its existence into modernity. In either case, this reality reduces the power and wealth of Arab identity. This has been my discovery and predicament, and so I've decided to make a short video about it. In order for us to understand the situation better, we need to go back in history to the dawn of Islam, actually, even before that, to pre-Islam, when idolatry was the prominent practice of the Arabian Peninsula. And with its rise in the 7th century, Islam aggressively wanted to distance itself from the various faiths of the times that practiced the worship of idols as deities, including pagans, Jews, and Christians. But when looking closer within the Quran, there were clear-cut positions concerning idols. But that was it. There were no references or limitations to any visually creative and expressive artforms as long as there weren't any associations to these artforms with the practice of worshipping Allah. But this fact didn't alleviate the unease at the times by the Prophet Muhammad, regarding Muslims potentially falling back into their previous habits of venerating idols, as had other Abrahamic worshippers. But with this great concern, the Prophet spoke various hadiths, sayings in Arabic, explaining the disapproval of visual depictions of sentient beings, in all shapes and forms. No one but Allah had the right for such creation. No matter how imperfect or seemingly perfect man-made representations were, they could not come close to the divine prerogative. Consequently, Islamic anaconism was born. And from the mid-century onwards, Islam and its followers would shy away from the visual representation of any natural form. Any art, whether drawings, paintings, sculpture, mosaic, and so on, were all taboo. Geometry and calligraphy would be the only expressive artforms for many, many generations to come. Fast forward nine centuries later, the Ottoman Empire would overwhelm the Arabian Peninsula and become the leading Muslim superpower. Thereby compounding the theological restrictions on visual expression, with added strategic rehabilitations that impacted the Arab Muslim psyche well into the 19th century. With its prominence over the region, the Ottomans attempted to recondition and reform Arabs to be more in line with Turkish identity and history, while at the same time suppress Arabs through a systematic lack of education and intentional widespread illiteracy. So what did the abolishment of art over the centuries and practically all its forms due to the Arab Muslim world? Well, first of all, there were no visual narratives emanating from the various and diverse cultures of the Middle East. And there was no counter to any visual representation that was being produced in the West that told their version of history, even when the history of the Middle Eastern region was at stake. For example, Jesus, his apostles, and all those in their periphery, and most, if not all, Western depictions were all white. Not necessarily an extremely accurate depiction of the region's genetic fabric at the time. Would art have had an important role in 6th and 7th century Muslim societies? Maybe the visualizations of religious personalities would have had a totally different look to them. And if we extrapolate this notion that things were being misrepresented to suit a certain narrative, then we can safely say that without art in the Muslim world, identity, theft, and cultural appropriation ran rampant during these stages of history. The historic Western imagery's power forced Arab Muslims to believe incorrect expressions and take them for granted, things we only now question. If Muslims had their own art form and expression, it would have introduced a reality far more accurate than what is commonly accepted as fact today. And this carried on well beyond the age of enlightenment in Europe, when Orientalism became a newer way to represent Arab Muslims, their way of life, their simplicity, their barbarism, and their value to global society. Even to the extent that Arab Muslims today still learn their own history from a vantage point of a Western Orientalist. How else did this hurt Muslim Arabs? Well, we definitely have a weaker connection to our history and identity. It's drastically impacted our creativity by either substantially reducing or totally preventing any inspiration. And quite critically, during that long period of history, from the 6th century onwards, seeing was much easier than reading. Actually, it was the only way. Western illiterate societies still had their stories, heritage, and culture passed along the generations through both verbal and visual mediums, a relationship that the Arab Muslim nation never experienced nor benefited from. And when art mimics historic life, in all its variations of society, politics, or religion, it explains, records, and expresses life in ways words couldn't. There was no opportunity for the Muslim nation to mimic anything. And hence beyond the written form, everything was left for the imagination, or regrettably, ended up being forgotten. If you know, you know, and if you don't, will we present content about Middle Eastern history, culture, and heritage? In the mid 19th century, and with the arrival of the Arab Age of Awakening, the Al-Nahva, and mainly with the Islamic modern reformations, key religious figures such as the Grand Mufti of Egypt, Muhammad Abdul, argued that images and statues were not un-Islamic, but rather were one of the most effective tools of learning. With the import of new educational theories and systems during Al-Nahva, it was necessary to accept the usage of imagery as a tool to facilitate learning. With this newly granted perspective, the arts blossomed in all its ways, but most vital was the sudden new license to create and use visuals and imagery for expression and education. The art movement and evolution needed to catch up fast though, and millennia of missing expressive arts had to be condensed into a mere decades, from a status of extreme illiteracy to full-blown independent visual expression. Over the decades and into the 20th century, catching up with the creation of visual content was a great positive achievement for Arab Muslims, but with the implementation of one solution, arrived the birth of another problem. Creating the new was an exciting exercise, but the new issue that came to be was the oversight in the preservation and documentation of the old. And when I say old, I mean anything that preceded the expressive movement of the time, be it drawings, paintings, photographs, lithographs, and so on. Left with a lack of leadership and guidance, the decay and destruction of visual content that reminded Arab Muslims of their past took place from the beginning of the 20th century to well into the late 1990s. Both public and private institutions would either trash their rich depositories of imagery or would tuck them away deep within their bureaucratic labyrinths, never meant to survive or to be found. Going back to Mohammed Abdu, there's quite an ironic and lighthearted story about how he lamented the lack of interest in heritage preservation in Arab countries, contrasting it with European practices. He wrote, If I were to give you the whole narrative of what we have lost and what they have preserved of our books of learning, I would have to write a whole book on the subject, a book that would also be lost and then found in the hands of some European in France or elsewhere in Europe. Now imagine that same loss of learning and knowledge that Abdu refers to, but in the visual expressive form. That's our reality. There's a direct correlation between the maturity, civility and modernity of a nation and how it records documents and cherishes its history, good or bad. And it's vital for the Arab Muslim nation to look deep into its soul and recognize that only with the rediscovery of the old will its knowledge, wisdom and identity be protected for ages to come. And the only way to achieve this is with an almost pseudo-archeological approach in rediscovering what has been hidden for so long, diving deep into the archives, dusty and damp warehouses, any and everywhere. And however buried these visual assets of culture and heritage might be, we must find what has been lost, to find our art and to find our lost history.