‘Arabist’ is one of those words you’ll normally find only on the CVs of Cambridge University graduates headed for the Foreign and Commonwealth Office or MI6, or in biographies of coves like TE Lawrence and 20th century author and explorer Sir Wilfred Thesiger. In a sniffy article last year, The Spectator even lumped David Cameron in with what it called “the long history of the posh Arabist.”

But the subject is bigger than that, and in its widest and most urgently modern form the study of Arabic culture – and in particular the art and artefacts it produces – is currently being propelled out of its once narrow academic silo and onto our streets and galleries. Yes, geo-politics has something to do with it. But that’s not the whole story.

Few will have missed the opening in Edinburgh last month of the Palestine Museum. Located on Dundas Street in the New Town, it is devoted to contemporary Palestinian art and is the first of its kind in Europe. And if you make the journey across the Tay to visit the excellent Garden Futures exhibition at V&A Dundee you’ll find a chunk of the show devoted to garden design as a force of cultural expression in various places, including in the Israeli-Occupied West Bank. In the same show there’s also a massive, wall-mounted mosaic panel in yellows and blues showing floral motifs and dating from the 17th century. It was originally sited in Isfahan, the ancient city in Iran renowned for its Persian-Muslim architecture.

Elsewhere Iranian film director Jafar Panahi won the Palme d’Or for It Was Just An Accident, shot secretly in his homeland, and No Other Land, by the Palestinian-Israeli team of Basel Adra,........

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