Overview

Revealing what is 'Islamic' in Islamic art, Shaw explores the perception of arts, including painting, music, and geometry through the discursive sphere of historical Islam including the Qur'an, Hadith, Sufism, ancient philosophy, and poetry. Emphasis on the experience of reception over the context of production enables a new approach, not only to Islam and its arts, but also as a decolonizing model for global approaches to art history. Shaw combines a concise introduction to Islamic intellectual history with a critique of the modern, secular, and European premises of disciplinary art history. Her meticulous interpretations of intertextual themes span antique philosophies, core religious and theological texts, and prominent prose and poetry in Arabic, Persian, Turkish, and Urdu that circulated across regions of Islamic hegemony from the eleventh century to the colonial and post-colonial contexts of the modern Middle East.

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9781108474658

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Reviews

'This book is exactly what art history needs when it attempts to think about Islamic art. Instead of asking what properties make an image Islamic, this book asks, what is an image in Islam? When art history begins to understand its secularism, concepts like art, image, vision, matter, and history necessarily change. Shaw gives us a different perceptual culture, one that begins from Islamic discourses, and gradually becomes visible as art and history. It is the first book of its kind, and I hope there will be many more.' James Elkins, School of the Art Institute, Chicago

Author Information

Wendy M. K. Shaw is Professor of the Art History of Islamic Cultures at the Freie Universität Berlin. Her work focuses on the impact of coloniality on museums, archaeology, preservation, and historical, modern, and contemporary art, with emphasis on the Ottoman Empire, the Republic of Turkey, regions of Islamic hegemony, Sufism, and transregional art historiography. She is the author of Possessors and Possessed: Museums, Archaeology, and the Visualization of History in the Late Ottoman Empire (2003), and Ottoman Painting: Reflections of Western Art from the Ottoman Empire to the Turkish Republic (2011).

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