Summary
The second scene opens two weeks later. Emily sits at her dining table with coffee and the New York Times newspaper. Amir stands opposite her. Emily reads a quote from a news story about Imam Fareed’s trial, reciting a description of how the imam was defiant while surrounded by a “gauntlet of attorneys” and how Amir Kapoor supported the imam by stating that there isn’t a case, and that the Justice Department ought to start making a case if they have one.
Amir takes the paper and expresses anger at the way the article implies he is one of the imam’s defense attorneys and therefore supported the imam’s defiance. Amir worries what people will think of him appearing to support an alleged terrorist and hopes people will see his name and know it isn’t a Muslim name. Emily reassures him that he did the right thing by going to the imam’s trial, saying Abe and Mort will be proud. Amir rejects the idea.
The intercom buzzes and Emily says it is Isaac—a curator from the Whitney who is over for a studio visit. Emily asks Amir if he is annoyed with her. Amir expresses frustration that Emily is dismissing his concerns about the article, and he reminds her that it is hypocritical for her not to want to make a painting of him after they encountered a racist waiter but for her to not worry about Islamophobia affecting his career.
Amir goes to the bedroom to find his phone. Emily opens the door to Isaac—40, white, attractive. Amir slams around off stage while Emily and Isaac make small talk. Amir enters and thanks Isaac for a wonderful weekend in the country, referring to a recent trip. Amir says he has to get to work, and Isaac says he will probably get there before his wife; Amir says he always does. Amir gives a cold goodbye to Emily, who reassures him everything will be fine.
Once Amir exits, Isaac asks if it is a bad time. Emily says it isn’t, and exits to retrieve coffee from the kitchen. She returns with mugs and Isaac says he has been thinking about their discussion from last weekend. Emily asks if he means the discussion about her being a white woman with no right to use Islamic forms, adding she thinks he might be wrong about it.
Isaac agrees he was wrong, saying he found a few images of her work online and read Jerry’s review. Isaac inspects a painting above the mantel, commenting on how the surface tends to the convex, bending the picture plane. Emily says mosaics in Andalusia were bending the picture plane four hundred years before Bonnard, adding that Muslims gave Western art visual perspective, and that Muslims “gave us Aristotle.”
Isaac is impressed by the earnestness of Emily’s statement, and the lack of irony, but reminds her that she’s going to be accused of orientalism, particularly with a brown husband. Emily says the art world is too wrapped up in the optics, and they’ve forgotten to look at things for what they really are. Emily insists the Islamic galleries in the Victoria and Albert Museum will change the way he sees art. Emily speaks of a profound submission to the pattern and repetition of Islamic tiling tradition.
Isaac says she sounds like a mid-century American minimalist trying to obliterate the ego. Emily says the Islamic tradition has been doing so for a thousand years, and pardon her for thinking they have a better handle on it. Emily says it is time to wake up and stop paying lip service to Islam and Islamic art, reminding Isaac that Western art draws on the Greeks and Romans but forgets that “Islam is part of who we are, too.” The scene ends with Isaac taking in Emily’s position with some surprise. He says it’s good, what she has said. Emily agrees. The lights go out.
Analysis
While the first scene leaves the audience on a note of ambiguity as Amir faces the question of whether to carry out Abe’s request, Scene 2 opens two weeks later, moving ahead to the aftermath of Amir’s decision. While Emily reads out an article from the New York Times, it becomes clear to the audience that Emily succeeded in convincing Amir to appear in court to support Imam Fareed, as Abe had wanted. However, Amir is frustrated that he has been misrepresented by the article, which implies that he was one of the imam’s attorneys. In fact, Amir had simply been at the trial to show his support for a man whom he believed was being unjustly tried as a consequence of the American hysteria around Muslim terrorism.
Although Emily tries to reassure Amir that his bosses will be proud of his support of the imam, Amir is unswayed by her logic. The moment is significant because it foreshadows the eventual revelation that Amir has been hiding his Muslim background from his bosses. In hindsight, it will become evident to the audience that Amir’s concern over the article is about more than being misrepresented as the imam’s lawyer. Amir is paranoid that his bosses will learn of his duplicity.
After Isaac arrives and Amir leaves for work, the subject of Scene 2 shifts to Emily’s art. In addition to being a friend of the couple’s, Isaac is a curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art, a prestigious museum in Manhattan (at the time of the play, the Whitney was located in the same Upper East Side neighborhood in which the play is set, in a building now known as the Met Breuer). Inclusion in a Whitney exhibition would be a boon to Emily, and the implicit power of being able to launch Emily’s career as a world-renowned artist contributes to a sense of tension between Isaac and Emily.
But despite the power imbalance between Isaac and Emily, Emily is resolute in her conviction that her adoption of Islamic traditional art forms is not an ironic or oblivious act of cultural appropriation but a sincere embrace of a sacred artistic tradition. Isaac reminds Emily that she, as a white woman using South Asian and Middle Eastern forms in her work, will be accused of orientalism. He jokes that she even has a “brown husband,” by which he implies that Emily’s aesthetic preferences will seem even more fetishistic when critics learn her husband is descended from the people whose art she finds inspiring.
Emily refutes the notion that she is an orientalist by insisting that Islamic tradition already informs Western art to the same, if not a greater, degree than the ancient Greeks and Romans. In saying that “Islam is part of who we are,” Emily makes an argument for viewing Islam through a lens that inverts the Islamophobia of the post-9/11 era: Rather than pit Islam as an enemy of Western culture, Emily seeks through her art to remind Americans that Islam is just as foundational to Western culture as are Greek and Roman culture, and the influence has been erased in order to support an 'us versus them' narrative. Although Isaac enters the conversation with a high degree of skepticism, by the end of the scene it seems he has been persuaded by Emily’s argument.
