Preface to the First Edition

Grabar, Oleg

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Preface to the First Edition

Oleg Grabar

Islamic Art and Architecture: 650–1250

~It was in 1959 that the late Professor Richard Ettinghausen asked me to collaborate with him on a Pelican volume devoted to Islamic art. Over the following five or six years, we planned the book and wrote a great deal of it. But somehow, when we had in fact completed nearly every chapter up to the Mongol conquest of the thirteenth century, other pressures...

Author

Oleg Grabar

PublisherYale University Press

Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-20105

Preface to the First Edition

It was in 1959 that the late Professor Richard Ettinghausen asked me to collaborate with him on a Pelican volume devoted to Islamic art. Over the following five or six years, we planned the book and wrote a great deal of it. But somehow, when we had in fact completed nearly every chapter up to the Mongol conquest of the thirteenth century, other pressures and commitments took over and the book remained unfinished. At that time it was difficult to argue that a presentation of Islamic art required more than one volume. Over the past twenty-odd years, however, a considerable amount of new information, some imaginative scholarship, a deepening specialization within the study of Islamic art, and especially a greater interest in the world of Islam in general has warranted the decision to deal separately with the properly medieval Muslim art up to circa 1260, on the one hand, and the centuries of the great empires, on the other.

The basic framework for this first volume was ready and all that was needed was to bring up to date chapters written sometimes over twenty years ago, to choose new and additional illustrations, and to improve the technical apparatus. Dr Sheila Blair and Dr Estelle Whelan agreed to help in the accomplishment of these tasks and for much of the merit of the work I am in their debt. They looked at texts written long ago with a sense of new requirements and an awareness of new scholarship; they decided on appropriate illustrations and especially were always available when help was needed. I must also record the good-humoured and charmingly competent Judy Nairn and Susan Rose-Smith, the pillars of the series, without whose patience and devotion this book would not have been completed. On a more personal note, I would also like to record the constant support and concern of Dr Elizabeth Ettinghausen.

Professor Ettinghausen and I had from the very beginning conceived of this book as a survey and as a manual, not as a vehicle for speculation and for broad cultural interpretations. The point of a survey is to provide, as clearly and interestingly as possible, the basic information on the monuments of an artistic tradition, to suggest something of the major unresolved scholarly issues; although possibly incompletely and erroneously in several places, I trust that this objective has been met. The point of a manual is to make it possible for students and readers to pursue such questions as may interest them; much of this possibility lies in the notes and in the bibliography derived from them. The latter, with some omissions no doubt, is meant to reflect the state of the field until 1985. Throughout our concern has been historical, to identify and explain what happened in specific areas at specific times. Without denying the value of the interpretative essays on Islamic art cutting across regions and periods which have become so popular over the past decades, our position is simply that this is not what this book set out to do. It is a traditional history of the art of a culture – something, curiously enough, which has, with a few short and unsatisfactory exceptions, not been attempted for Islamic art since the twenties of this century.

It is not, I suppose, possible to dedicate a book to the memory of one of its authors, Yet in this instance I do want to do so and to recall the memory of Richard Ettinghausen. I do so first of all on a personal level, in order to record how much I have owed to him over the years and to express my gratitude to him for having trusted someone who was not even thirty years old then with the task of helping him with a survey of Islamic art. And then it is only fitting to recall that, after the generation of the great pioneers in Islamic art (Max van Berchem, Ernst Herzfel, Ernst Kühnel, Thomas Arnold, Georges Marçais), it was Richard Ettinghausen and the only slightly older Jean Sauvaget who charted the new directions taken by the study of Islamic art towards an understanding of the cultural meanings of objects and of monuments of architecture and towards precise definitions of the characteristics of specific times and places. This book, I trust, reflects the directions.

OLEG GRABAR

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