Oasis home page

Return to Sony Gallery main page

Adham center home page

The early 20th-century North African photographs of Lehnert and Landrock reflect the particular concern of Lehnert (the actual photographer) for the desert, the oasis, and women. In contrast to the studied eroticism of his Tunisian courtyard portraits and tableaus staged with young prostitutes, Lehnert’s desert, oasis, and women of the oasis photographs are often extraordinary.

The oasis is central since it promised spiritual as well as worldly comfort for the people of the desert.

Here were to be found the great awliya—the saints—either buried in domed tombs but still accessible, or their living heirs who mediated between rival nomadic tribes from the neutral territory of the oases shared by all, and the Ouled Nail, the amazing tribal geisha caste whose women danced in the cafes of Bou Saada and other Algerian oasis towns and who foretell, for the single, the joys and luxuries as well as the religious correctness of marital life.(1)

Across North Africa (which, for the curious, begins just west of Alexandria) are to be found, in wilderness as well as in oases, the simple domed tomb containing the remains of a wali Allah—literally the friend of God, as in one who is close to God and who enjoys, in his lifetime, the fondness or friendship of God (a state which extends beyond apparent death for those—the awliya—who live for His sake and die with His Name upon their lips.

But these tombs, notable indeed haunting survivals of the traditional Maghrebi landscape (see pictures 2-7), are usually found in what were oasis towns that often sprang up at the edge of sparsely inhabited date palm groves next to the ribat of a living saint (hence the Franco-Maghrebi corruption marabout for the saint who inhabited the ribat). The ribat could contain his austere home and inevitably his equally austere tomb as well as a prayer hall and zawiya where he or his descendents would lead the circles of dhikr—the invocation of the Divine Names—formed by his disciples. This sort of relationship reminds us how Cairo’s most traditional neighborhoods take their name and, in a lingering sense, still take their central raison d’etre in deriving worldly benefit and offering ongoing spiritual service to such ahl al-bayt (the Prophet’s immediate family and archetypes of Muslim sainthood) as Sayedna Hussein, Sayeda Zeinab, and Sayeda Fatima Nabawiya, or is reminiscent of the great early medieval market towns of Europe, which often arose in the outer shadow of a great monastery’s walls.

It was baraka (spiritual grace) and karama (miraculous powers endowed in the saint by God) that determined a saint’s popular canonization in his lifetime and drew disciples to his zawiya, and if these powers were married to methodical spiritual training, as was often the case, then the saint would be the starting point sustaining still another chain of spiritual transmission that established the Sufi tariqa as the critical institution in pre-colonial, traditional Islamic, and in particular, traditional Maghrebi life.

Precisely because the wali Allah and his lineage transcended tribal loyalties and his disciples were drawn across tribal lines, the wali or Sufi sheikh and his immediate environment was considered neutral as well as sacred ground, and it would be to the oasis that the tribal factions would come seeking his mediation.

The Ouled Nail, geishas of tribal caste, not marginalized prostitutes as many were to be reduced to in the later years of colonial administration and colonial clientele, honored the shrines and holidays of the awliya like all other pre-colonial and pre-modern Maghrebi Muslims. Indeed in at least one of the great Algerian oases the dancing cafes and pied a terres of the Ouled Nail shared the same street as the zawiya and tomb of the town’s patron saint. This mutual recognition or co-existence of the sacred and the profane scandalized the slowly emerging fundamentalist current that followed inevitably in the wake of colonial conquest as both the product of and the reaction to European conquest and, along with the extension of central authority undermining the mediating role of the wali, would eventually contribute to the obliteration in Algeria (where the colonial process was most severe) of traditional Islamic consciousness, at a cost to be paid in oceans of blood over the past decade.

For many admirers of Lehnert and Landrock’s work (and even in the case of at least one critic, Nigel Ryan, who dismissed most of the work as “posturing” and “ tourist trade spin-offs”) the most powerful photograph and catalogue cover of our very first Lehnert and Landrock show (L’Orient,” October 1999) is a portrait of an exquisitely beautiful young Ouled Nail girl staring directly into the camera, and by extension, and more than as a metaphor, into our very own souls. It is a haunting experience, and it is at such a moment that art regains its original magical power. Her picture is the starting point for this show, but this time around, interestingly, not as a photograph but as a detail from what has become an underground poster classic—the L’Orient show poster. Its luminosity testifies to the care that went into its preparation, which involved four-color separation printing from a black-and-white negative, and a second run of black. Her image (picture 1--Sayedat Ouled Nail, Southeast Algeria) is an homage to our two earlier Lehnert and Landrock shows, “L’Orient” and “Lehnert and Landrock in Palestine 1924-1930,” much as this essay is in part a response to Lehnert and Landrock’s critics.

Nigel Ryan, in his response to “L’Orient” (Al-Ahram Weekly, Oct. 14-20 1999) (2) is convinced “there is no reason to assume that these images make any greater claim to veracity than the reconstructed Nubian village in the garden of a five-star hotel.” How incredible that sounds to anyone who traveled in the Maghreb four decades ago. Then the frayed social-aesthetic fabric of traditional pre-colonial society (particularly in Morocco) had not yet disintegrated into total disarray, unraveled by the colonial and post-colonial experience, and above all by television, which could penetrate interiors of home and soul that had been relatively barred to colonial penetration.

The outstanding and at times almost primordial sense of beauty that one encountered over and over again in the dress and manners, in the very stance, of traditional Maghrabis at one with both states of nature and spirituality were invariable openings to the most breathtaking of vistas. It was a world of refinement, poise, and equilibrium that recalls the hadith al-qudsi “God is Beautiful and Loves Beauty”—no doubt states of being that the modernist perspective as well as the Enlightenment project that Ryan curiously alludes to could and do so easily deride.

It is not a coincidence that the greatest of the Orientalist painters, who were deeply moved by the majesty and beauty of the East, turned expatriate, or at least turned to the East precisely at that moment when the ugliness and pollution of the Industrial Revolution and the commodity value of finance capital had triumphed with such finality in Europe. Yet these artists were still so sufficiently close to their own pre-industrial heritage—like the Pre-Raphaelites who overlap with the Orientalist movement—that they could respond so wholeheartedly as artists, and often as converts (like the painter Etienne Dinet and the many other Europeans who would keep their conversion and Sufi affiliations secret).

Lehnert was using turn-of-the-century cameras that were very slow; his subjects had to be photographed when standing or sitting with that stillness, that quiet meditative-like state that is not at all uncommon in traditional cultures, which is not the same as those of his models in Tunis who he obviously dressed and posed. Two women from the Ouled Nail (repeated in this show as picture 23, The Kef of the Ouled Nail, Southeast Algeria, 1904) are sitting on the ground and drinking tea from “implausibly dainty, fluted china teacups. The imported chintziness,” according to Ryan, “must certainly have been provided by the photographer. The effect is comically surreal.”

But we know that among the modish pretensions of the Ouled Nail performers by the turn of the century was constantly to be seen, when not dancing, with a cigarette dangling from their lips or hands. It is precisely the incongruity of these out-of-place teacups, part of that evolving universe of artifact where colonialism encounters tradition and proceeds at the level of artifact to master it that the picture—not a terribly engaging picture perhaps, for all that—establishes at least its authenticity. Lehnert obviously loved Berber jewelry, and at times overpowered his Tunisian models with it even when they were in otherwise varying states of undress. So the presence of the teacups in this picture, Ryan to the contrary, must be Lehnert’s artistically unfortunate commitment to some sort of documentary-like authenticity.

There is still one other area of critical response to Lehnert and Landrock that I would touch upon, a critical response that deconstructs heterosexual romance not out of the usual effete fashion designer consciousness but rather from what reads like an almost social realist take.

Thus Malek Alloula, an Algerian critic, inspired by Roland Barthes’ writing in French and publishing in France, reproduces in his work Le Harem Colonial: Images d’un Sous-Eroticism the picture of one Ouled Nail dancer hugging another in the chapter devoted to “Oriental Sapphism.” (3) The two girls (picture 25, Ouled Nail Women, Algeria, 1904) could easily be sisters or cousins and obviously are friends, and the gesture, like family men holding hands while walking in public or hugging each other when they meet, was (and in the contemporary backwaters of Arab-Islamic society still are) commonplace—unlike public physical expressions of affection between the sexes which, being so intense, was never to be seen. But to the social puritan, as to the culturally naïve Euro-American homosexual, these gestures are falsely perceived.

I also refer to Amina Elbendary’s comments in her review of the “Lehnert & Landrock in Palestine 1924-1930” show (4) in which the poise and exquisite dress of Lehnert’s young Palestinian women, so apparent to those (particularly other women) who have attended traditional weddings or the “dress-up” women’s social gatherings before the hidden miniskirt replaced the kaftan, recognizes the reality of these photographs which cannot be dismissed simply for being “so typical and so staged.” However hard the life, however insistently conformist the outer public dimension of Islam, the traditional culture of domesticity heeded the Prophet’s hadith: “Vanity in a man is a vice; vanity in a woman is a virtue.”

For it is precisely our sense in these far uglier times of the importance of the residual picturesque that sends us to those vanishing backwaters that have not yet succumbed or at least preserve forms that remind us of the beauty of vanished times, a beauty that is increasingly to be found only in the preserved domain of monumental cathedral and mosque. It is precisely this hidden nostalgia, intrinsic to our nature even when no longer part of our apparent consciousness, that can be stirred and/or exploited by a film like Star Wars, with its allusions to chivalry in the service of a princess and its Jedi knight dressed and mannered like a Maghrebi saint—or exploited in the most pathetic and maudlin way by Disneyland reconstructions.

As Ananda Comoonswami observed, only an aestheticism driven by the need for “originality” and with personal emotional satisfaction as its criteria for beauty could dismiss the beauty of the Mosque of Ibn Tulun viewed through its arches for its over-familiarity, for its trick of the trade foregrounding. (5)

I rarely read travel pieces, but there is one that I clipped and filed from The Times (London) three years ago because of a quarter-page color picture of St. Cirq Lapopie, a stunning Romanesque village in the Midi that the travel writer Brian James had passed through. He writes: “It (St. Cirq Lapopie) disputes with Cordes the title of France’s prettiest village…If you visited high-season, you would grimace at the gawpers. Now in this time of quiet (early October) with villagers sharing the sunset with the dozen visitors still toiling up and down the slopes between gingerbread houses that emit real smoke, you sag beneath the discovery that once people really did live in picture books.”

S. Abdallah Schleifer

(1) See the author’s earlier essay “L’Orient of Lehnert and Landrock,” Sony Gallery Catalogue October 1999, available online in the Sony Virtual Gallery at http://www.aucegypt.edu/adhamcenter/sonygallery.htm

(2) Nigel Ryan, “Tea and Sepia.” Al-Ahram Weekly, Oct. 14-20, 1999. Available in the Sony Virtual Gallery, in “L’Orient” essays, at http://www.aucegypt.edu/adhamcenter/sonygallery.htm

(3) Translated and published as The Colonial Harem, trans. by M. Godzich and W. Godzick, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1986. Original French language edition, Editions Slatkine: Geneve-Paris, 1981.

(4) Amina Elbendary, “Other Palestines,” Al Ahram Weekly, Nov. 12, 2001. Also available online in the Sony Virtual Gallery, http://www.aucegypt.edu/adhamcenter/sonygallery.htm

(5) Ananda K. Coomaraswamy, Christian and Oriental Philosophy of Art, Dover Publications, Inc., New York, 1956 (formerly entitled Why Exhibit Works of Art? Luxac, London, 1956). See also Nigel Ryan, “Tea and Sepia,” Al-Ahram Weekly, Oct. 14-20, 1999.

(6) Brian James, “Beauty Enough to Bedazzle a Renoir,” The Times, London, August 6, 1989.