The third edition of Arab Narrativity Days, organized by the King Faisal Center for Research and Islamic Studies, opened on Sunday, December 7, 2025, with an inaugural lecture delivered by Professor Dr. Idham Hanash, Director of the Calligraphy and Manuscripts Center at the Islamic World Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (ICESCO). The lecture served as the intellectual point of departure for this year’s conference proceedings.

At the outset of the event, Dr. Abdullah Hamidaddin, Assistant Secretary-General for Scientific Affairs at the Center, delivered a welcoming address in which he greeted the conference guests from within the Kingdom and abroad. He emphasized the importance of scholarly cooperation with Arab institutions within the framework of the Arab Narrativityproject, launched three years ago by Her Royal Highness Princess Maha AlFaisal, Secretary-General of the Center. The project seeks to highlight the role of the Arabian Peninsula and Arabs in the achievements of Arab-Islamic civilization, as well as in human civilizations more broadly. It is concerned with the frameworks that have shaped Arab cultural and civilizational identity, the Arab individual’s perception of their own cultural and civilizational self, and the Arab understanding of their history and society.

Hamidaddin explained that the theme of the third Arab Narrativity Days conference revolves around the formation of narratives that shape our concept of art, rather than the analysis of artworks themselves. He noted that answers to questions such as: What makes a work “art”? and Which values determine its significance? depend on the story human beings tell about themselves, their identity, and their civilizational potential. From this perspective emerges the contrast between the Orientalist narrative, which framed the concept of Arab-Islamic art within external paradigms, and Arab narrativity, which seeks to reclaim its own authentic aesthetic perspectives and liberate the concept from methodological constraints inherited from Orientalism.

In his lecture, Dr. Idham Hanash addressed the transition from the Orientalist narrative to Arab narrativity in the study of Arab-Islamic art. He reviewed the theoretical and methodological problems entrenched by Orientalist discourse from the seventeenth century through the early twentieth century, when Arab art was labeled with terms such as “arabesque” and “Islamic art,” and interpreted as a static, museum-bound field detached from its philosophical and aesthetic roots.

Hanash noted that Orientalist studies—despite their early contributions—were grounded in a vision that marginalized the Arab agent and reduced art to archaeological remnants incapable of expressing the underlying vision of Islamic creativity. This gave rise to widespread misconceptions, such as the notion of an artistic void prior to Islam, the alleged incompatibility between religion and art, or the denial of Arab originality and innovation. Hence emerged the need for a profound Arab reassessment that restores the value of Arab aesthetic philosophy and reclaims the role of the Arabian Peninsula—particularly Mecca and Medina—in the formation of these artistic traditions through architecture, calligraphy, and the Qur’anic manuscript.

Hanash also outlined the features of the shift from “Orientalist aesthetics” to attempts at Arab theoretical grounding, culminating in the necessity of approaching “Arab-Islamic art studies” as a field of knowledge capable of interpreting art from within its own aesthetic, spiritual, and civilizational logic, rather than through external comparisons or rigid classificatory methodologies.

Dr. Hanash’s lecture provided the intellectual foundation for the subsequent conference sessions, offering a critical framework that re-reads Arab-Islamic art beyond the traditional molds imposed by Western scholarship. He called for dismantling inherited assumptions that have treated Islamic art as a static phenomenon or as subordinate to surrounding imperial traditions. He emphasized that Arab narrativity—with its reflective engagement with self and world—enables a new approach that integrates aesthetic experience with historical consciousness, granting both researchers and artists the ability to reformulate their questions and methodologies away from the centrality of the Orientalist gaze.

Dr. Hanash concluded by highlighting the civilizational dimension of intercultural dialogue among the arts, stressing that reclaiming Arab narrativity in art does not aim at insularity, but rather at strengthening the presence of the Arab vision within global artistic dialogue and empowering the Arab artist to express their self and identity within a broad human horizon.