Creative geographies of Islam: the case of Islamic and traditional visual arts scene in Istanbul
Bibliographic record
Abstract
While research on geographies of creativity have proliferated in the last few years, there has been scant attention to religious cultural and artistic practices, particularly in the context of the Middle East. This research seeks to address such gap with a focus on the Islamic and traditional visual arts scene which has flourished in Istanbul in the past decade and a half along with the rise of political Islam in Turkey. Rendered obsolete through the Western-oriented and secular cultural politics since the early republican era, art forms such as Arabic calligraphy ( hat), miniature ( minyatür), and illumination ( tezhip) have now found currency as ‘authentically Turkish and Islamic’ in an art scene that emerged alongside Islamist politics. This paper examines the trajectory of Islamic and traditional visual arts through the lens of cultural and creative industries starting from the cultural politics of Islamic urban governance through the 1990s and 2000s, and to the emergence of an Islamist-nationalist authoritarianism in the past decade. In doing so, it aims to situate Islamic and traditional visual arts on the map in studies on geographies of creativity, particularly in the Middle Eastern and Islamic context, where limited attention has been paid to cultural and artistic practices. With ethnographic reflections from the field, it highlights the internal dynamics of an art scene and the potential it bears in unsettling the core concepts of Turkish Islamic nationalism from within.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.017 | 0.011 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".