The Mirage of Islamic Art: Reflections on the Study of an Unwieldy Field

Abstract

When we started studying art some thirty years ago, there were no good introductory textbooks that undergrad¬uates could read. When we started teaching subject nearly a decade later, there were still none, and we had to make do with stacks of photocopied articles and chapters assigned from one book or another in an attempt to present students with a coherent narrative. So little survey material existed that even graduate students had difficulty getting a grasp on whole field and had to resort to obscure and uneven publi¬cations. For example, K.A.C. Creswell's massive tomes im¬plied that architecture ended in 900 C.E. except in Egypt, where it suddenly stopped four hundred years later in middle of Bahri Mamluk period, although Mam-luk sequence of sultans persisted until 1517 and there was ample evidence for a glorious tradition of architec¬ture in many lands besides Egypt.1 The venerable Survey of Persian Art, originally published in five massive volumes in 1930s, continued to define that field although many of chapters were woefully out of date when series was re¬printed, faute de mieux, in 1970s.2 In short, despite exponential growth of interest in lands generated by oil boom and crisis of 1970s, art remained a rather esoteric specialty field taught in a few elite institu¬tions.Today situation could not be more different. Courses in art are regularly offered at dozens of colleges and universities in North America, and many university depart¬ments of art history mint doctoral candidates in specialty. General art history survey books and courses, though still heavily Western and chronological in orientation, often in¬clude one or two chapters or lectures on art, awk¬wardly inserted somewhere between periods of late an¬tiquity and early medieval and geographically defined fields of India, China, and Japan. There are now several introductory texts devoted exclusively to art, and specialist books and articles proliferate to such a degree that scholars and graduate students cannot possibly keep up with everything published in field. It is, perhaps, a measure of popularity of art that Pelican History7 of Art volume on subject, commissioned in 1950s and pub¬lished in 1987, has already been reissued in a new and expanded edition.3 The horrific events of September 11, 2001, have only increased public curiosity for all things con¬nected to Islam, art included.As course listings, survey texts, and specialists' articles on art proliferate, scholars of subject have put fundamental definition of their field under close scrutiny. From vantage point of early twenty-first century of Common Era (or early fifteenth century after Muham¬mad emigrated with a small company of believers from Mecca to Medina), we may now ask: What exactly is art? How well does this category serve understanding of mate- rial? Does a religiously based classification serve us better than geographic or linguistic ones, like those used for much of European art? To begin to answer these questions, we must first review how subject is defined, how it got to be that way, and how it has been studied.4The Definition and Historiography of ArtIslamic art is generally held to be the art made by artists or artisans whose religion was Islam, for patrons who lived in predominantly Muslim or for purposes that are re¬stricted or peculiar to a Muslim population or a Muslim setting.5 It therefore encompasses much, if not most, of art produced over fourteen centuries in Islamic lands, usually defined as arid belt covering much of West Asia but stretching from Atlantic coast of North Africa and Spain on west to steppes of Central Asia and Indian Ocean on east. These were lands where Islam spread during initial conquests in seventh and eighth centuries C. …