Cosmopolitan Reflections: Critique and Imperial Afterlives in the British Museum’s Islamic Gallery

Since 2018, the Albukhary Foundation Gallery of the Islamic World has invited visitors to the British Museum to experience its treasures and reflect on their histories. The British Museum, and others like the Metropolitan, have turned to border-crossing ideas such as “Islamic art” to style themselves as keepers of shared humanity’s shared heritage. Such moves have provoked scholars critically museums’ reception and retention of the material inheritance of empire. In this paper, I argue that while the Islamic Gallery and similar spaces do serve a vital part in the 21st-century imaginary of the “universal museum,” they should not be simply understood as imperial treasure-troves rebranded as liberal institutions. Through its decolonial co-determination and self-critical representation, the Islamic Gallery rather serves as instruction to visitors in how to be reflective cosmopolitans, disquieted by, and yet at home in, a persistently unequal world.