I was taken to this exhibition by a Lebanese Muslim friend who always wears a headscarf and traditionally-influenced but stylish and expensive clothes. This time she was wearing pink, revealing a sense of the dramatic, as we looked like we had walked out of one of the paintings in the first room that explored ‘The Orientalist Portrait’. Many of the paintings showed Western men, sometimes in Arabic dress, and sometimes with Europeanised Arab or real Arab women.

We sat on a bench in the mock up of a harem in the penultimate room, across from Frank Dicksee’s ‘Leila’ (1892), a languid, exotic but sexually-controlled Western-looking woman in a red silk Arabic dress. It soon became embarrassing, as if we were a living part of the exhibition, like the runners who sprint down the corridors as part of Martin Creed’s conceptual art piece No 850. But we were less embarrassing than this exhibition of minor works of art.  Why was it being put on? Who would come to see it?

The exhibition is rather like one of the paintings on display, not the sensual ‘Leila’, but William Holman Hunt’s ‘The Scapegoat’ (1894), which shows a pathetic, almost comic creature tethered out by the Dead Sea as a religious sacrifice. The exhibition itself is less a sacrifice to the gods than one to the vain hope of doing away with contemporary political reality.

The Lure of the East is an exhibition that presents the Middle East and Islam as people would like to find them. It’s decorative, colourful and exotic. Landscapes are full of minarets towering over crowed towns, and shaded courtyards housing saintly Islamic scholars whose inner serenity tames predatory (but domestic) animals. The people at the exhibition were intriguing. They were affluent, middle-aged or elderly. There wasn’t another Muslim amongst them. Was it elderly voyeurism or the Disneyfication of Islam they were looking for? 
   
They got both, because what the exhibition presented to its audience, despite the academic pretensions in the glossy catalogue, was a politically correct view of the Islamic world with all its challenging and threatening aspects removed, thus reflecting the sentimental and sanitised view that the old left and Guardian readers have of Islam. No imprisoning of women in the home – the ‘private sphere’ as my friend called it using an old-fashioned ‘Islamic Feminist’ phrase - no censorship of thought or literature, and a ‘culture’ entirely open to other ‘cultures’.

Even the portraits of the Arab slave markets, which might have seemed anomalous in this PC ‘orient’, are fairly innocuous, and for the most part soft pornography. One paining shows a slave market where the naked girls on offer are of every race and skin tome from deepest black to a snowy white, which was obviously titillating to the Victorians, but now looks like any of the PC photographs we have become accustomed to in publicity brochures and advertisements.

All very charming, but the exhibition was like an Islamic Disneyland, and slightly embarrassing all round. As we walked back past the unsightly rubbish tip that constitutes Brian Haw’s ‘anti-war’ protest in Parliament Square, having missed Mark Wallinger’s recreation of it in the Tate, it felt even more embarrassing. A fantasy Islam to go with a fantasy anti-war protest.

Both tell us more about the West than the East. Both reflect the illusory images that fill the minds of the left and liberals in the West, of a sentimentalised Islam and an effective anti-war movement. This PC exhibition of an Islamic dream world is over now, but the nightmare for the ordinary people of the ‘East’ that is the illusion of an ‘anti-war’ movement in the ‘West’ persists. It’s time to pack it up and start trying to understand the ‘East’ as it is today without any illusions. That would be the first step towards building a real movement in solidarity with the real people who live there.

Exhibition website: http://www.tate.org.uk/britain/exhibitions/britishorientalistpainting/default.shtm