04/03/2026
What we divide today into East and West once lived within a shared collective consciousness, where empires borrowed from one another and culture travelled freely. A Kufic Qur’an folio from 9th century North Africa echoes in the halo of the Virgin Mary painted 500 years later. Islamic muqarnas ceiling appear in a Norman Christian king’s chapel in Sicily. Islamic carpets became so admired that European painters immortalized them, and we now name those carpet designs after the Western artists who painted them. The divide between west and east was constructed to create an illusion of difference but the more we delve into history, the more we realize we are collectively the same, always have been, always borrowing, always absorbing, always reflecting each other. There is no west and east, and that illusion has never served us.
During these testing times, let’s remember our shared humanity before the lines that try to divide it.
As James Baldwin says ‘The person you are looking at is also you’
