This webpage provides context for the exhibition The Beards of Muslim Men by Shiraz Ahmed.
Exhibition Announcement
Selected by Duke Chapel as this year’s C. Eric Lincoln Fellow in Theology and Arts, graduate student Shiraz Ahmed explores how and why local Muslim men wear beards in his exhibition The Beards of Muslim Men. The exhibition, which will be on display in the Chapel from April 12 to May 5, places photographic portraits of bearded Muslim men on stylized backgrounds.
Ahmed was chosen from among a competitive applicant pool to be this year’s C. Eric Lincoln Fellow. The fellowship provides funding to a student to complete a sacred art project that reflects on the work and legacy of the late Duke professor C. Eric Lincoln, a poet, minister, and scholar who chronicled the Black American religious experience in Christianity and Islam in groundbreaking books including The Black Muslims in America and Race, Religion, and the Continuing American Dilemma.
At a reception on Tuesday, April 25, at 6:00 p.m. at Duke Chapel, Ahmed will give remarks about his exhibition. The reception is free and open to the public.
Shiraz Ahmed
C. Eric Lincoln Sermon
In his artist statement for the exhibition, Ahmed quotes from a sermon preached by the Rev. Dr. C. Eric Lincoln in Duke Chapel in 1979: We often “conclude that since the wall [of people different from us] is not going to crack according to the diagram of our personal interests ... we simply withdraw. We suddenly discover the beauties of ethnicity, the satisfactions of racial identification, the hideous chauvinism of the rituals of tribalism, and we consider ourselves as saved by the reinforcement of the psychological clones conjured up behind these walls of race or ethnicity or religious denomination.”
The Sermon Manuscript