Last summer, out of a longing I could not express even to myself, I took the family off to Granada, in Spain. I spent long days in the Alhambra, the famous palace overlooking the city that was conquered and ruled with legendary civility by the Moors from 1238 to 1492. Surrounded by exquisitely carved panels, inscriptions, tiles and paintings, I felt deeply restored as I watched my daughter, Leila, playing with the water in the fountains. For us Muslims who are now in the west, though not yet of it, this place offers historical entitlement to call ourselves European (in the face of a white fortress mentality) and tells us that Muslims did not always lead joyless lives thwarted by anger, protest and sterile rules. Apostates appear to draw comfort from this, too. Just read Tariq Ali's Shadows Of The Pomegranate Tree and Salman Rushdie's The Moor's Last Sigh. On such journeys to a different time and place, we remind ourselves that we were once known for our great art and invention, poetry and elegance.
This must be why young British Muslims are flocking to Granada. You see them with their grey hijabs and tight, often self-righteous faces, which visibly flower as they walk around. The record of miserable leadership in our own communities and aggressive western hegemony are jointly responsible for this sense of failure that so many of the one-and-a-half million British Muslims feel today. Even here in Granada, the standard tourist guide (published in 1993) informs us that the Christians had "artistic sense" compared with the Moors, who were only capable of "caprice".
Navid Akhtar, a young British-trained architect and television producer, recalls how his tutors at a London college, who knew nothing about the global importance of Islamic aesthetics, assumed that people such as him were "uncultured". "You hit a brick wall. Architecture and design are white, middle-class professions, I was told not to design a mosque because there was nobody there who could judge it." His own people could do little to redress the balance: "They have no notion of kitsch. People, when they moved here, became disconnected from their living arts. Life was hard. They had little time or money left over. The irony is that young people like myself saw the carpets and various antique objects made by Muslims and saw them belonging to white purveyors at Liberty's. Not for us."
Muslims rank among the poorest people in Britain today; for years they have had to keep a low profile for fear of racial attack, praying in unmarked shops and warehouses, struggling to survive. It is understandable that escapist Bollywood films rather than high art give them respite. But those Muslims who are rich or powerful show, if anything, even greater indifference to the arts.
One of our most successful painters is Libyan-born Ali Omar Ermes, who recently presented to Tony Blair one of his powerfully poetic paintings (which now fetch a fortune, though you wouldn't know this from the modesty of the man and his house in Acton, west London). The work I love best of Ermes is a triptych, with three words painted in dramatic black and red. They are "No", "Yes" and "But" in Arabic. It is a commentary on the chicanery of leaders. He finds the philistinism among fellow Muslims utterly depressing. "Instead of being producers of beauty, we have become consumers of cheap western replicas. We don't look for inspiration within our own legacy. Instead, we buy mock regency furniture and hang tasteless pictures on the walls."
Almost suddenly, however, this is all beginning to change. Creative Muslims are striking out. The young Londoner Vaseem Mohammed started off selling his intriguing paintings - which are indisputably Islamic yet executed in a ruthlessly modern style - in Spitalfields market. Now, he has a wide range of admirers. Saleem Arif, a graduate of the Royal College of Art, has won accolades from people such as Sarah Wilson of the Courtauld Institute. He rejects the confines of the square or rectangle and makes his pictures as interlocking shapes on the wall. Every breath he takes, says Wilson, comes from his faith and this is what makes his pictures unique. Women artists are emerging. Zarina Bhimji, whose pieces have been bought by the V&A, creates disturbing, highly-charged, defiant images using unlikely materials such as pubic hair. Erstwhile biologist Soni Zuberi-Shah has set up her own gallery, featuring artists such as Sundus Omar Ali, a British-Iraqi printmaker, and Shaheen Ahmed, whose multi-media work includes computer-generated images.
Then there are the architects who are rehabilitating Islamic design. The new King Fahad mosque in Edinburgh uses Scottish stone and slate and has been designed to represent both modern-day Islam and an independent Scottish nation. The Guardian's Jonathan Glancey (who is usually impatient with transplanted onion domes) says this simple, geometric building is not only strikingly beautiful but it gives out the message that it is at home.
The playwright and actor Ayub Khan-Din (who is mixed race and wary about being described as a Muslim artist because of all the unwelcome expectations this then imposes on creative life) is now regarded as one of theatre's most exciting new talents. His East Is East, which has recently been made into a highly-praised film, did brilliantly well at London's Royal Court last year. It is a funny, perceptive portrayal of a northern, working-class family in the 60s, where a white woman is married to a Muslim man: he is in conflict with his children who are impatient with traditional ways, such as arranged marriage, yet uncertain of their own identity. The play drew in new audiences; white people who had never been inside Muslim family life, and Muslims who had never before stepped inside a theatre.
Ahdaf Soueif, the Egyptian novelist who writes in English, was shortlisted for last year's Booker Prize for an ambitious and gripping novel - her fourth - A Map Of Love. It is a moving exploration of love between Byronic Arab men and western women a century apart, in a world where nothing can ever be simply personal and where politics is the third person in the bed. Her books kick aside the abiding images of an ancient and romantic Egypt portrayed in Hollywood films. Her Egypt struggles with liberation and modernity. Her characters are chaotic, sophisticated, and full of irrepressible desires and sensuality.
Razia, an art student in London who makes fabulous blue pots, believes these are the first shoots of a renaissance. "I did not know the word for what is happening until I went to art school. I think we Muslims have been in a terrible mini dark age, which got even darker when that damned book was burnt in Bradford. Now we are coming through. And I think that, just like the western renaissance period, some of us are churning out fantastic devotional work, while others are questioning what we have been brought up to believe. We have been burning with shame, and so many of us are using art to make some sense of what has happened to us."
It is not that simple. You cannot invent art out of circumstance, any more than you can invent love. Yet something is definitely in the air. Various national events exploring the theme of British Muslim art have been organised. The British Council, the Arts Council, the V&A and a host of other reputable institutions have made it their business to encourage the process. Prince Charles has embraced the development with the enthusiasm of a convert, perhaps because it provides some succour in the midst of the postmodern jungle he clearly finds trying. The Prince's Institute of Architecture supports Visual Islamic and Traditional Arts (VITA), in which graduate students from around the world produce work grounded in Islamic aesthetics. Professor Keith Critchlow, who runs the institute and is the author of Islamic Patterns: A Cosmological Approach, believes that geometric forms, patterns and colours as manifested in Islamic art embody "the beauty of the permanent which shines through the world of the transient" and represent something of "a more profound order".
Many of the new Muslim artists I met reflect upon this profundity. Narcissism and hedonism are not part of the world they inhabit. They feel a fervent desire to change and challenge and to create a different discourse. I sat for hours on embroidered cushions in various homes, drinking thick sweet coffee (sometimes illicit wine) and hot samosas, and listening to writers, painters, designers and publishers locked in intellectual debate. How does a diasporic artist relate to the home country? Who says "bloody, stuffed sheep and stinking piss on canvas" is art? Why did western art move so carelessly from the soul to the senses? What constitutes true and honourable art (alien concepts for those who think that art is one long masturbatory act of self indulgence - although remember that it was Norman Mailer who said that the final purpose of art is to intensify, even exacerbate moral consciousness)? How can artists save the world from environmental destruction and globalisation? Is figurative art blasphemy? How did that hiatus between past glories and present sterility come to be? And why has the history and tradition of Muslim art been lost to memory?
Culturally, British Islam and Christian Britain have been inextricably linked, and this is something barely understood by either side. That history is not simply one of mutual and continuous hatred dating back to the Crusades. A fascinating new book, Islam In Britain: 1558-1685, by Nabil Mater, claims that through the Renaissance and beyond "Muslims and their Arab-Islamic legacy were part of the religious, commercial and military self-definition of England". In drama and theology, in churches and in fashionable coffee houses (coffee was brought from Turkey and called the Mahometan berry), among merchants, weavers, writers and painters, Islam was ever present and exerted a subliminal influence. It was the fear and fascination epitomised by Othello. The frescoes in the House of Commons and many Mogul miniature paintings reflect the mutual respect felt by two civilisations when they first encountered each other. White collectors loved so much of what they saw in Muslim countries, they took vast amounts of it. The British Library, the V&A and the British Museum between them hold the greatest collections of Islamic manuscripts and paintings in the world.
To marvel at Islamic art and design you have only to go to Leighton House in London's Holland Park, where entire rooms are packed out with such loveliness it makes me cry. From Brighton Pavilion to William Morris prints, Islam has inspired those who were supposed to hate it. We are forever grappling with such contradictions. There is what one commentator, William Dalrymple, has called "a peculiarly British strain of headbanging hostility to Muslims", yet well-heeled aficionados still flock to sales at Christie's to buy that gold-plated Koran, medieval Persian vase or 15th-century Mamluk brass lamp. Always present, too, is the "Orientalism" that Edward Said writes about, by which he means a kind of historical and artistic dread of the east, for its supposed barbarism, violence and lack of culture.
Rana Kabbani, in her book, Imperial Fictions, shows how Europeans portrayed Muslims negatively in order to justify their colonial ambitions. Popular painters such as Edwin Long (The Babylonian Slave, 1875), John Faed (Bedouin exchanging a slave for armour, 1857), even Ingres (Le Bain Turc, 1862) did much to promote the idea of the Islamic east as dangerous, lewd and irrational. But bigotry is never the whole story. For their part, the present crop of Muslim artists reject simplistic ideas about the east and west and are also questioning what seems to them a senseless disengagement with anything western. Wijdaan Ali, author of the priceless Modern Islamic Art, shows how a productive exchange - unmarred by prejudice - became possible, and how western aesthetics and art stimulated many Muslim artists.
Canvas and paint came into their lives for a start. Egypt opened a school of modern art in 1908, and influential Arab artists publicly condemned the Nazi demonisation of Bauhaus painters such as Paul Klee. Surrealism, Cubism and Abstract Expressionism were embraced. Beirut, Baghdad, Tehran and Amman flourished as centres of artistic excellence. Look at the brilliant paintings (Mother and Child, for example) of the Algerian painter, Mohammed Issiakhem, and you can see just how fecund this relationship between the colonised and the colonisers had become in spite of the great inequality between them.
But it could not last. The architect Ayub Malik thinks this cross-fertilisation led to "art in drag", which was pretending an authenticity it had given away the day it dislocated from a living artistic tradition to become an accessory to the west. "Art sitting on its bottom in a gallery, painted with paints that no ordinary Muslims would ever be able to afford. Do you call this Islamic art?" Many artists came to understand that they could never be wholly western or carelessly hybrid. Some felt they had amputated their roots and resented the implications that they were forever in the process of catching up. A void was created that affected British Muslims, too.
The oil crisis in the 70s created unimaginable wealth for some Muslims, and new stereotypes emerged of rich, fat Arabs in sunglasses. This deeply affected Sheikh Zaki Yamani, the dashing Saudi spokesperson, who refused to defer to those who thought they owned the world, and so the oil in his country. He set up the Al Furqan Islamic Heritage Centre in south London, which has become an important collection point for Muslim manuscripts, thinkers and critics. Their current project is to salvage the precious ancient Islamic manuscripts, many of which were deliberately damaged by Serb soldiers in Bosnia. The director of the centre is the novelist Ahdaf Soueif herself.
The Islamic Arts Foundation was set up in 1981 for similar reasons. It publishes the glossy periodical Arts And The Islamic World. It is not simply about the past, says Jalal Uddin Ahmed, a man steeped in knowledge and a lust for beauty: "British Muslims cannot ever abscond from their heritage or hide in it. You must transform the past, but you must know it first. And this is happening. Dr Ahmed Moustapha is the world's greatest calligrapher, whose work is in the Vatican. He lives here now. His creations meet a need for a new identity among our young who are still seeking their place. From his great work they learn that, to influence mainstream society, you have to deserve it. Understand, deserve before you desire, that is what I tell those who are searching for that new identity."
What is fascinating is how this search for an identity is leading to three distinct artistic responses. You have the reclaimers, the rebels, and the people who are trying to make new artistic settlements with their adoptive country.
The reclaimers would include Ermes. For him, art is an act of worship. Unfortunately, these days you are as likely to find his pictures in the lobbies of Malaysian hotels as in the British Museum. Of the three Abrahamic faiths, only Christians have broken the holy injunction not to create the image of God or the prophets. And, although others disagree, Ermes believes that any figurative painting is just as wrong: "We are not in the business of worshipping icons. How can this gift be wasted by painting the face of a queen? We must discover new shapes, new modes of reflecting the spiritual. Why replicate nature which God has made?"
I personally love the idea of art for God's sake. There is something so looming and overwhelming about these artists. At VITA, Claire Cooke, who embroiders shawls (yes it is art, not merely craft) says, "The sacred has gone out of our society. This is transcendental art. It has a deeper meaning." Martin Moller, the Danish glass blower, is transformed by a new sense of spirituality. David Fuerestien, an Anglo-Swiss traditional artist - in the sense that his art is devotional, though modern in style - believes that there is too much ego in modern western art and that "there is an emptiness. This art - my tiles, my fountain - is bigger than me or you. The complexity of sacred geometry puts you in your place in the universe."
Others grapple with these bigger questions on a smaller scale. Fatima Zahrah Hassan paints miniatures in the Mogul style, but in order to personify the music she loves or the things she believes in. Her pictures are delicate and unexpectedly insolent, especially if you look at the faces of the women. But they are still part of a lost-and-found tradition.
Then there are the rebels, whose art reflects the anger of always having to explain their position to their own as well as those on the outside. But that discontent itself generates a creativity that is edgy, interesting and thankfully devoid of complacency. The rebels do not rate the reclaimers. According to architect Ayub Malik, "Art should be a moving, traumatic experience. British Muslim art is mostly fossilised in the past, the Prince Charles syndrome. It is being made for the sake of filling a space. Some spaces are better left empty. Only people lacking in self esteem look behind to the Taj or make fake gold domes to impress. We are in a state of formativeness and our art needs to reflect that." He is driven towards the future, and you can see this in his designs, which use glass mercilessly and then surrender to tradition with a tiny sculpture.
It is that struggle of modernity versus memory that moves the novelist and playwright Ruksana Ahmed, too: "Even if you have a distant relationship with Islam, your life is embattled by the values. There are lines of conduct. I am an individual, feminist, a writer and you do struggle against the forces which would deny you any of these." Yet she knows that everything that is authentic to her comes from that memory of a Muslim life lived once in Pakistan. Her play, River Of Fire, which is the Antigone story set in Mogul India, embodies these tensions. You would put Zarina Bhimji's disturbing work in this bracket. Or the provocative paintings of Farzana Adamjee, a small, strong woman with an unapologetic feminist agenda. She paints women all attempting to subvert their allocated spaces in life, letting their spirits out. Benazir Bhutto has just bought one work, a painting of women in chadors, where the garments are painted with such ferocious sensuality that, instead of de-sexing them, the women are turned into powerful temptresses.
For some in this group, the responses to Salman Rushdie's Satanic Verses have left an indelible mark. Ahmed, for example, says, "I felt that the reactions against Rushdie were unnecessarily harsh. It made many of us petrified of our communities and the hideous self-censorship which was imposed. The imagination must be free of strictures and I resent what happened." You sense that this is what worries playwright Ayub Khan-Din, and so it should. There are those who have been busy gathering up protest against his film.
The last group consists of those who feel that something new can be created out of two old traditions. The Al Furquan Centre is one symbol of this. When their building was first acquired, the good people of real England were not well pleased. It was their Jacobean house, albeit run down. Years were spent on re-building, looking for the right old beams, lovingly putting together the daunting fireplaces. It was only after the restoration was complete that subtle Islamic artefacts and fabrics were introduced. This is a living monument to Islam as part of the soul of Britain.
There are other examples of this integration. Opposite the V&A is the discreet Ismaili Centre, used by Shia Muslims who follow the Aga Khan. Sitting upstairs in the tranquil and very Islamic roof garden, with the sound of water and scented flowers, the noise of the street below disappears, and the skyline affirms the incontrovertible diversity of London. Outside, the place is modest, underrated. Islam does not encourage ostentation. Inside, you meet surprise and ethereal beauty. White and blue are the dominant colours, and the building has a magnificent prayer hall, office and public space for seminars, exhibitions, even plays.
Dr Nanji, an expert on the building, says everything here tells the people that they are now living in a different context and that cultural continuity can only be sustained if there is some change. Saul Bellow once said, "I feel that art has something to do with the achievement of stillness in the middle of chaos." This building and much of the work I looked at when researching this article did exactly that. Uniquely and in ethereal ways.
It is extraordinary how these developments have barely registered on the national consciousness. In Paris, the deeply impressive Institute du Monde Arabe has enabled that consciousness to grow. Yet here we mostly ignore our Muslim artists even though they are of immense importance - because they represent not only a reawakening of old fruitful relationships but a bursting forth of a new British Muslim creativity with roots in old Islam, old Britain and the houses of tomorrow.