ABSTRACT
If we are to imagine Islamic heritage emerging from Islamic thought – not a heritage of the Islamic world, but a concept of heritage that is Islamic – then how can we envision a museum emphasising perpetuation over preservation? Reflecting on Platonic, Islamic, and modern European discourses of perpetuating Truth through embodied form (as speech rather than as writing), this chapter theorises a mode of heritage messaging that shifts from dominant models of objective heritage preservation towards models of embodied heritage perpetuation. Decolonising the category of Islamic heritage and redefining it as perpetually re-emerging through the reconstruction of the past with an eye to the future, it proposes non-linear strategies of exhibition that stage multimedia forms and information in the complex matrix of cultures surrounding forms engaged in display.
