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    Take notes Madonna

    Shining a light on Islamic mysticism: MFAH's new Sufis exhibit shows it's morethan Kabbalah

    Joseph Campana
    May 15, 2010 | 6:16 am
    • Pouran Jinchi, Untitled, etching 1998
      © Pouran Jinchi, courtesy Art Projects International, New York
    • "Five Holy Men" (detail), c. 1670, signed by Riza ´Abbasi
    • "Portrait of a Dervish," possibly Antoin Sevruguin of Qajar, Iran

    You don't have to be Madonna to be interested in mysticism. Lately, a number of highly publicized celebrity dalliances with Kabbalah shed light on contemporary interest in religious practices dating from the Middle Ages. The Museum of Fine Arts Houston's "Light of the Sufis: The Mystical Arts of Islam" trains its powerful spotlight to great effect on this fascinating if lesser known aspect of Islamic faith.
     
    The show, which runs Sunday through Aug. 8, demonstrates the museum's relatively recent (some might say long overdue) commitment to fill a noticeable gap in its holdings. According to MFAH director Peter Marzio, the museum is now positioned to build an "ecumenical" as opposed to a "encyclopedic" collection honoring the arts and culture of a faith that stretches across many continents and centuries

    Islamic artistic and cultural traditions are now at the forefront of the museum's fundraising and curatorial agenda.
     
    "Light of the Sufis" was curated by Ladan Akbarnia of the Brooklyn Museum for a NYC festival last summer called Muslim Voices. The show, which opens substantially expanded by the MFAH's recently-hired Islamic curator Francesca Leoni, demonstrates that ancient mysticism speaks just as well to contemporary Houston.

    The tantalizing possibility of mysticism, an experience of communion with the divine, took the form of meditation, discipline, philosophy, and poetry. This philosophy unites many otherwise discordant world religions, including Judaism, Islam and Buddhism. The show places Islam at the center of the development of overlapping traditions stretching from present-day Eastern Europe to China, India and beyond.
     
    "Light of the Sufis" takes its title quite seriously by tracing the analogy between divinity and light articulated in the Quran to explore how material objects attempt to capture the spirit of mysticism through a play of light and darkness. Viewers of the show will encounter everything from mosque lamps, candlestick bases and torch stands, which literally convey light, to paintings, photographs, drawings and sculptures of practices designed to bring enlightenment.
     
    Here are a few things to keep in mind as you follow the path of the ancient Sufis right into everyday Houston:
     
     1.) Communion with the divine is impossible to depict. How can any object, whether a painting or a poem, represent the ineffable?

    This defining contradiction was not inhibiting to practicing mystics and artists. It was invigorating. Certainly, the show features wonderful depictions of ascetics. The late 1st-century Five Holy Men represents the broadly ecumenical nature of Sufism, which attracted reverence from man and women of many nations, even those who were not followers of Islam.

    And don't miss the haunting immediacy of two late 19th-century photographs: Family of Dervishes and the solitary Dervish. These photos anticipate wonderful contemporary works that struggle to represent devotional practices. Contemporary Turkish artist Mehmet Günyeli's startling series "Dervishes" seems to concentrate circles of these iconic practitioners, seen from above in the midst of an utterly black background, to their signature conical hats.
     
     2.) The term "sufi" is believed to derive from "suf," which refers to the wool making up the coarse garments of mystics. It is fascinating that a religious practice dedicated to renouncing the material world would inspire such sumptuous objects.

    Note the three traditional begging bowls crusted in silver, carnelian, and turquoise. These bowls were and made of rare coco-de-mer shells that would wash up on the shores of southern Iran from the waters of Indonesia.

    The impoverishment characteristic of mystical practice leads was supposed to lead to the riches of enlightenment. But if you think those begging bowls are opulent, try contemporary Iranian artist Farhad Moshiri's Esgh (2007). Hundreds of luxurious Swarovski crystals glitter on an uneven black surface. The crystals form a milk way like swirl out of which emerges the Persian word "Esgh," which refers to passion for the divine.

    There's rich illumination in Moshiri's gorgeous composition, and also a signal that many forms of Islam are entirely about love.

    3.) You know more about Islamic mysticism than you think. Take, for instance, the works of 13th-century Persian poet Rumi, which now adorn so many greeting cards and calendars it would be hard not to have heard of him.

    But greater subtleties abound in "Light of the Sufis" than the reduction of poetry to slogans. For Rumi, union with the divine could be described in the language of passionate or erotic love.

    There's love aplenty in the story of Majnun and Layli, whose tumultuous affair might remind us of medieval romances. This love drives Majnun's madness and exile and represents the sufi's humility, impoverishment, and dedication to divine love.

    You'll find this represented in a wonderful page from an illuminated Iranian manuscript Layli u Majnun. The arts of calligraphy and book-making enabled the representations and transmission of Islamic mysticism. Nothing adapts Rumi's own love of the ineffable as well as Kelly Driscoll's Fragments of Light.

    Laser-etched on overlapping panes or pages of glass, you'll find Rumi's unforgettable verse: "The window of my soul opens fresh in delight." Poetry about the light of the divine is perhaps best conveyed through the transparency and fragility of glass.
     
     4.) The idea that art is either Islamic (and therefore religious) or contemporary is entirely false. The most compelling pieces, including those by Driscoll, Moshiri, and Günyeli make this abundantly clear.

    But don't miss Parviz Tanavoli's ode to what mystics call the darkness or apparent absence of God that precedes illumination. Heech, a sculpture of the Persian word for nothing, rises in the center of the gallery like the bodies of lovers as depicted by Brancusi.

    And just behind this hang Afruz Amighi's 99 Names, a curtain of beads whose overlapping textures spell out the 99 names of God, the reciting of which remains an important devotional practice. And Pouran Jinchi has blossomed more or less directly from the ancient practice of calligraphy into a gorgeous textual art in works like Untitled (1998), in which characters swirl up from scarcity to abundance, like a tornado or a whirling dervish.
     
     5.) Houston may be late to the collection of Islamic art, but it is trying to make up for lost time. Curator Leone acquired Portrait of 'Ali, Hasan, Husayn, and Nur 'Ali Shah Ni'matullahi, which depicts Muhammad's cousin and son-in-law, in a halo of mystic light.

    And she managed to discover and identify a rare 18th-century dragon carpet in the Bayou Bend collection, which was purchased by Ima Hogg in 1960. As usual, Houston's original patrons displayed admirable foresight.

    It's hard to imagine a better time for the MFAH to continue the work of educating Houston about the rich and varied traditions of the Islamic faith.

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    Movie Review

    'I Know What You Did Last Summer' reboot lacks energy or thrills

    Alex Bentley
    Jul 17, 2025 | 2:00 pm
    Sarah Pidgeon, Madelyn Cline and Chase Sui Wonders in I Know What You Did Last Summer
    Photo by Brook Rushton
    Sarah Pidgeon, Madelyn Cline and Chase Sui Wonders in I Know What You Did Last Summer.

    When the original I Know What You Did Last Summer came out in 1997, it was riding the coattails of Scream, which came out in 1996. Like that film, it featured hot young actors of the time, albeit with a story that was much more standard than the inventive Scream. Still, it made enough of an impact for some studio executive to think it was worth reviving nearly 30 years later with its own legacy-quel.

    In the new I Know What You Did Last Summer, a group of five high school friends — Danica (Madelyn Cline), Ava (Chase Sui Wonders), Milo (Jonah Hauer-King), Teddy (Tyriq Withers), and Stevie (Sarah Pidgeon) — have reunited at the engagement party for Danica and Teddy on the 4th of July. While on an impromptu trip to watch fireworks on a twisty road in the nearby hills, Teddy goofs off in the middle of the road, causing a truck to swerve and drive off the cliff.

    A year later, having sworn to each other to not speak of the accident to anybody, they start getting stalked by a mysterious person in a fisherman’s slicker carrying a hook. With Teddy’s rich father, Grant (Billy Campbell), actively trying to cover up what his son did (as well as the fallout), it’s up to the group to figure out who is coming after them and how to stop that person.

    Written and directed by Jennifer Kaytin Robinson, and co-written by Sam Lansky, the film doesn’t try to reinvent the wheel; in fact, it barely builds something that can roll. It might just be the laziest and most incompetent attempt to capitalize on an existing piece of intellectual property. There is almost zero effort put into establishing a connection between the members of the friend group, making them feel like strangers for the entire film.

    It doesn’t help that the young male actors in the film — which grows to include Wyatt (Joshua Orpin), a new fiance for Danica — serve no purpose other than to be generically good-looking. The most impactful of the men in the film is the returning Freddie Prinze, Jr., who — along with Jennifer Love Hewitt — has his old character from the first two films shoehorned into the new story. The filmmakers undercut any good feelings from their return by giving them hardly anything to do and then having Hewitt deliver the line, “Nostalgia is overrated.”

    The film as a whole never has a sense of momentum. The inciting incident is so tame — they even attempt to save the driver before the truck goes off the cliff — that the guilt they feel and the anger of the person going after them doesn’t feel warranted. Once the attacks start, it is shocking at how low-energy the sequences are, providing no sense of suspense or thrills. The filmmakers resort to the lamest of horror movie tropes, turning the film into a paint-by-numbers affair.

    Cline (one of the stars of Netflix’s Outer Banks) and Wonders (The Studio on Apple TV+, Bodies Bodies Bodies) are the clear stars of the film, but their characters are made into inert scream queens, negating any acting talent they possess. Hauer-King, Withers, and Pidgeon don’t bring anything interesting to their characters, existing merely to have someone else for the killer to go after.

    Even the worst films can have some kind of redeeming value if you look hard enough, but the only thing I Know What You Did Last Summer has to offer is that it becomes so comically bad by the end that you can’t help but laugh at its ineptitude. Both fans of the original and fans of horror movies in general will feel cheated by the experience.

    ---

    I Know What You Did Last Summer opens in theaters on July 18.

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