Artists Set Islamic Futurism Into Motion
Islamic visual traditions have long made space for realities beyond direct perception, and these artists work in calligraphy, installation, and speculative image-making to carry them forward.
What might a Muslim future look like? Who gets to imagine it, and on what terms?
In the visual arts, these questions are unfolding in real time across studios, exhibition spaces, and online platforms. Artists are drawing from Islamic philosophy and long-standing visual traditions in expanded ways, working through code, installation, digital environments, and speculative image-making. Some embrace the terms “Islamic” or “Muslim futurism”; others move alongside it. What’s taking shape is a living framework grounded in inheritance, tracing back to medieval Islamic astronomers who mapped the skies, and oriented toward what comes next.
Of course, Islamic futurism does not emerge in isolation. Afrofuturism established a powerful and inclusive precedent, demonstrating how subaltern histories and cosmologies could be mobilized to imagine collective futures. The term “Islamic” does not describe a single culture or aesthetic, nor does it refer only to religious practice. It moves across regions shaped by Muslim presence, trade, scholarship, and empire. Rather than fix the term in a single place, it may be more useful to treat it as a proposition — one that asks how historical consciousness shapes visions of the future informed by global Islamic art.
Calligraphy offers a clear point of entry: As the visual medium of Qur’anic revelation, it carries devotional authority and formal discipline, shaping manuscripts, objects, and architecture across centuries. Long before the term “Islamic futurism” circulated widely online, Sudanese modernist painter Ibrahim El-Salahi was already asking what that script could become.
Often described as a pioneer of the Hurufiyya movement — in which artists across Southwest Asia and North Africa brought Arabic letterforms into modern painting in the 1950s to ’70s — El-Salahi folded calligraphy into modernist composition, drawing on his training in London. Over time, legible letters loosened into fragments, stretching and unfolding until faces and animals surfaced from fields of abstraction. He often begins with prayer and meditation before beginning what he calls a “seed” drawing that expands across the canvas.
“I have finally arrived at the conclusion that the work of art is but a springboard for the individual intellect,” El-Salahi wrote in an essay for the catalog accompanying his 2013 show at Tate Modern. “The picture floats freely … an invitation to visual meditation and to a better knowledge of the self.”
El-Salahi’s abstraction marks one trajectory of calligraphy and a mode of introspection. Artist Soraya Syed, who is of mixed Pakistani-French origin, represents another, demonstrating how the form’s classical foundations remain alive and dynamic.
Long captivated by Arabic calligraphy, Syed undertook a seven-year apprenticeship in Istanbul and earned her icazetname — a formal license certifying mastery and authorizing transmission of the classical form — making her the first British person to receive this distinction.
For Syed, the relationship between the human body and the letterform is foundational.
“I was never convinced by the idea we were taught at university that Islamic calligraphy flourished simply because figurative art was restricted,” she told Hyperallergic. “The classical system itself is proportioned through bodily geometry.” Within this system, letters are measured through ratio and movement; transcribing them correctly requires an embodied understanding of how the hand, breath, and pen align. Script, in this sense, is choreographic.
In Syed’s collaborative animation installation “Hurriyah” (2013), set to music by Nitin Sawhney and accompanying dance by Salah El Brogy, and in later immersive works, the letter leaves the page and enters the environment. In these contemporary translations, Syed insists on rigor. “Remaining in dialogue with tradition does not mean preserving it unchanged,” she reflected. “It means understanding it deeply enough to respond to it.”
Like calligraphy, architecture emerged from a philosophical understanding of order. Architectural forms often labeled “Islamic” — domes, arches, intricate surface patterning — draw on Byzantine, Roman, and Sasanian precedents that predate Islam, later reoriented within sacred and civic settings. Across mosques, palaces, and manuscripts, interlocking stars and tessellations extend without a central figure. Within Islamic thought, geometry articulates tawhid, the unity of all things, and mizan, the principle of balance that governs creation.
Islamic intellectual traditions understand geometry as a bridge between the material and spiritual worlds, translating metaphysical principles into proportion and pattern, and that lineage continues in the practice of Zarah Hussain. Since the mid-2000s, the artist has used digital systems to extend geometric traditions and animate Islamic patterns through programming languages such as C++, grounded in the cosmology of structure and expansion. Mathematical sequences generate motion from within the work itself. By programming structures that never repeat, Hussain activates the spiritual logic embedded in Islamic geometry, with infinity gesturing toward a universe beyond human control.
“I want the artwork to move people,” Hussain said. “You should not have to read a wall text to understand it.” She compares the experience to walking into a mosque or cathedral: One does not need to share the faith to feel awe.
In the work “Infinite Light” (2024), a sculpture in Bradford, England, activates at sunset, aligning the installation with the celestial rhythms that structure Islamic time and marking the precise moment of iftar during Ramadan, when the setting sun signals the breaking of the fast. Her 3D light sculpture “Numina” (2016), inspired by traditional muqarnas in architecture, similarly transforms sacred geometry into a walkable field of repeating arches, where modular forms extend outward as if infinitely generative, projecting a future built from the logic of Islamic design.
“Islam asks us to be in touch with the sun and the moon, to be reminded that we do not have any power over the timings of the day, there is a divine order to things,” Hussain added.
Islamic visual traditions have long made space for realities beyond direct perception. In Qur’anic cosmology, djinn — beings made of smokeless fire — inhabit parallel realms alongside human life. That metaphysical register surfaces powerfully in Fabrice Monteiro’s landmark series The Prophecy (2013). Through 13 large-scale photographs, the Dakar-based photographer merges fashion and documentary to confront environmental crises across West Africa.
In each image, an ornately dressed djinn emerges from landscapes marked by pollution and extraction — garbage heaps, eroded forests, contaminated waters — its presence rendering visible what has long been ignored. The djinn becomes a witness who reveals the spiritual and ecological consequences of human action, aligning with Qur’anic teachings that link corruption on land and sea to human action and urging humility in the face of creation.
“We are living through a critical moment in human history. If we continue reinforcing artificial divisions, we will not be able to change the dangerous systemic path we have been following for too long,” Monteiro explained. “Solidarity is essential.”
For MIPSTERZ, this same principle of collectivism has shaped both language and practice. Founded during Ramadan in 2012 by Yusuf Siddiquee, Abbas Rattani, and Shimul Chowdhury, the collective began as a response to the absence of spaces for Muslim artists and cultural workers seeking community in New York City. Informal iftars into an online network — a “digital ummah” — and early projects such as the short film “Somewhere in America” (2013) circulated widely, sparking similar gatherings across cities.
“We were nervous,” Siddiquee recalls of first using the term “Muslim futurism” on a call with Hyperallergic. “We’re not academics. We were trying to talk about something we were observing.” He explained that the 2022 ALHAMDU digital conference, which brought together participants from multiple regions, consolidated conversations around Muslim futurisms. “For us, the process of working together felt more important than the end product,” he added.
That ethos continues to shape their work. Through exhibitions and convenings that include artists across generations — from up-and-coming voices such as Anum Awan, Aisha Shillingford, and Tijay Mohammed to established figures like Shahzia Sikander — MIPSTERZ treats Muslim futurism as a collective practice.
Perhaps the better question, then, is not what a Muslim future looks like but what it feels like. Across these artists and organizations, it emerges as a space capable of holding difference — attentive to inheritance, open to those who enter.
Islamic or Muslim futurism, in this sense, does not collapse in on itself; it expands. It resembles a dome that gathers without confining, a mihrab that directs without dictating who may stand before it.
