Preface

Blair, Sheila S.; Bloom, Jonathan M.

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Preface

Sheila S. Blair, Jonathan M. Bloom

The Art and Architecture of Islam: 1250–1800

Preface

Author

Sheila S. Blair, Jonathan M. Bloom

PublisherYale University Press

https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00124.002

Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-15657

Preface

When The Pelican History of Art first commissioned a work on Islamic art, Sir Nikolaus Pevsner envisioned a single volume covering the 1400 years and forty-odd countries where Islamic art and architecture were produced. Richard Ettinghausen asked Oleg Grabar to collaborate on the project in 1959, and they began to write it together, with Grabar writing largely about architecture and Ettinghausen about the “minor” arts. Within twenty years, however, interest in and knowledge about Islam in general and Islamic art and architecture in particular had grown so enormously that Ettinghausen and Grabar felt that the first half of its history was sufficient to fill a single volume (which Grabar finished after Ettinghausen’s death in 1979). The first volume was published in 1987, but other commitments made it impossible for Grabar to continue the project and he suggested that Pelican approach us, a team of independent scholars, to write Volume II. We enthusiastically agreed to undertake the project in 1987 and met with the two editors of the series, Peter Lasko and Judy Nairn, who provided encouragement and advice about how to approach such a large and complex project. Susan Rose-Smith, the indefatigable picture researcher responsible for the images illustrating the first volume, agreed to take on the task for the second. In early 1992, a year after the death of Judy Nairn (who had been the mainstay of the series), Penguin Books, for decades its publisher, announced that The Pelican History of Art had been acquired by Yale University Press in London. We are pleased that our volume is one of the first to appear in Yale’s new and expanded format, and Susan Rose-Smith has cheerfully and ably expanded her search for color photographs to illustrate it.

When Yale University Press announced that it would continue to publish the Pelican series, some critics wondered about the value of surveys and handbooks in an age of multiple and competing critical approaches to the history of art. In the half-century since the series was conceived as the first comprehensive history of art in English, the study of the history of art has evolved enormously from such formalist concerns as the description of works of art, their attribution to masters, and the delineation of careers to broader questions not only about the roles the arts play in the societies in which they are made and exhibited but also about the nature of the investigation itself. Once the purview of a handful of rich collectors and connoisseurs, the study of the history of art has expanded to become a staple of college curricula everywhere and its popularity has exploded the numbers of museum-goers.

In the thirty-five years since Pevsner commissioned a book on the subject, the study of Islamic art has metamorphosed, not only because of new approaches to the history of art in general and discoveries in Islamic art in particular, but also because of the changed political and economic positions of many lands where Islam is the dominant religion. Thirty-five years ago the study of Islamic art was almost exclusively the bailiwick of Europeans and Americans interested in a somewhat alien and exotic world; today Islamic art is increasingly studied by scholars from that very world, who quite naturally see it in a different light and ask of it different questions. Unlike some critics who see any approach by European and American “Orientalists” as a vestige of nineteenth-century colonialism and an attempt at domination, we do not question the validity of one culture trying, however inadequately, to “understand” or “explain” the other. We do, however, realize that our position and method are relative and take note that ours is but one possible approach of many.

Paradoxically, while much of the Islamic world has been intent on rediscovering and validating a tradition of Islamic art, equivalent in the grand scheme of things to, say, Chinese or Greek art, other scholars, particularly in the West, have come to question the validity of such concepts as “Islamic” art. In their view, the concept of an Islamic art is the equivalent not of Chinese or Greek art, but of a Christian or Buddhist art, and the study of Islamic art, which is supposed to explain not only Morocco but Malaysia, makes as much sense as the combined study of Ravenna and Raphael or the Kushans and Kyoto. The concept of a unified “Islamic” art or culture is largely a creation of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in the West, when scholars looked back to a golden age in the eighth and ninth centuries and projected it onto the kaleidoscopic contemporary world. This appealing idea has been accepted somewhat uncritically by newly empowered countries seeking to validate their position in the twentieth century and create connections with past glories. Scholars have recently begun to look at continuities and discontinuities in the arts of such well-defined entities as the Mediterranean or the fifteenth century, without prejudice to the confessional or political allegiances of the participants.

The nature of the Pelican series and the desire to continue the story begun in the first volume have prevented us from addressing such issues. Constraints on the size of this book have forced us to omit discussion, let alone illustration, of Islamic art and architecture in sub-Saharan Africa, both west and east, the Balkans, China, and south-east Asia. We have limited our coverage to the traditional Islamic belt stretching from Spain across North Africa and Egypt to Syria, Arabia, and Turkey, and across Iran to Central Asia, Afghanistan, and India. We have also continued the arbitrary and somewhat old-fashioned method of treating architecture separately from the other arts. We believe, nevertheless, that this methodology and type of book are still valuable, for the study of Islamic art is comparatively young, and there are few accessible sources to which the interested reader or student may turn. Even for experienced scholars in other fields, it is often difficult to distinguish the forest from the trees, and we hope that this book will provide a balanced overview for a wide audience, including art historians in many fields, students of the Middle East and Islam, and the general public.

No project of this size could be accomplished without outside support. We would like to acknowledge financial support from the National Endowment for the Humanities, an independent federal agency; the Aga Khan Program for Islamic Art and Architecture at Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; and the Getty Grant Program. The unparalleled resources of the Harvard University Library were made available through the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard and its Director, William Graham. The American Institute for Indian Studies provided hospitality, accommodation, and assistance for our travels in India. We have also benefitted from much recent scholarship made available as a result of our editorial work for The Dictionary of Art. In addition many colleagues and friends contributed to the completion of this project in various ways; in particular we would like to thank Mohammad Al-Asad, James Allan, Tulay Artan, Catherine and Frederick Asher, Michael Bates, Maureen Blackledge, Mary and Bill Blair, Hal Bloom, Richard Born, Mary Carruthers, Walter Denny, Kevin Duval, Massumeh Farhad, H.-O. Feistel, Annette Fern, Leonor Fernandes, Carol Fisher, Kjeld von Folsach, Lisa Golombek, Oleg Grabar, Ernst Grube, Klaus Herdeg, Renata Holod, Anatol Ivanov, Dickran Kouymjian, Thomas Lentz, Judith Lerner, Robert McChesney, Michael and Viktoria Meinecke, Elizabeth Merklinger, Gülru Necipoǧlu, Pen and Courtney Nelson, Amy Newhall, John Nicoll, Bernard O’Kane, Richard Parker, Julian Raby, András Riedelmeyer, Sally Salvesen, Barbara Schmitz, Margaret Ševčenko, John Seyller, Eleanor Sims, Abolala Soudavar, Jeff Spurr, Tim Stanley, Wheeler Thackston, Daniel Walker, Cary Welch, Estelle Whelan, Caroline Williams, Robert Williams, David Wise, Filiz and Şahin Yenişehirlioǧlu, and Karen Zitta.

Richmond, New Hampshire
12 January 1993

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