When we started studying Islamic art some thirty years ago, there were no good introductory textbooks that undergrad¬uates could read. When we started teaching the 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 the whole field and had to resort to obscure and uneven publi¬cations. For example, K.A.C. Creswell's massive tomes im¬plied that Islamic architecture ended in 900 C.E. except in Egypt, where it suddenly stopped four hundred years later in the middle of the Bahri Mamluk period, although the Mam-luk sequence of sultans persisted until 1517 and there was ample evidence for a glorious tradition of Islamic architec¬ture in many lands besides Egypt.1 The venerable Survey of Persian Art, originally published in five massive volumes in the 1930s, continued to define that field although many of the chapters were woefully out of date when the series was re¬printed, faute de mieux, in the 1970s.2 In short, despite the exponential growth of interest in the Islamic lands generated by the oil boom and crisis of the 1970s, Islamic art remained a rather esoteric specialty field taught in a few elite institu¬tions.Today the situation could not be more different. Courses in Islamic 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 the 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 Islamic art, awk¬wardly inserted somewhere between the periods of late an¬tiquity and early medieval and the geographically defined fields of India, China, and Japan. There are now several introductory texts devoted exclusively to Islamic art, and specialist books and articles proliferate to such a degree that scholars and graduate students cannot possibly keep up with everything published in the field. It is, perhaps, a measure of the popularity of Islamic art that the Pelican History7 of Art volume on the subject, commissioned in the 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 the course listings, survey texts, and specialists' articles on Islamic art proliferate, scholars of the subject have put the fundamental definition of their field under close scrutiny. From the vantage point of the early twenty-first century of the Common Era (or the early fifteenth century after Muham¬mad emigrated with a small company of believers from Mecca to Medina), we may now ask: What exactly is Islamic art? How well does this category serve the understanding of the 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 the subject is defined, how it got to be that way, and how it has been studied.4The Definition and Historiography of Islamic 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 lands, 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 the art produced over fourteen centuries in the "Islamic lands," usually defined as the arid belt covering much of West Asia but stretching from the Atlantic coast of North Africa and Spain on the west to the steppes of Central Asia and the Indian Ocean on the east. These were the lands where Islam spread during the initial conquests in the seventh and eighth centuries C. …

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

During the last decade, the curation of Islamic art and artifacts has been crossed by tensions at both the theoretical and practical level. Not only has it been continuously grappling with the Orientalist legacy, but it has also been operating in a global contemporaneity affected by multiple conflicts engendering a misperception of Muslims and Islam by non-Muslims. With this heavy background, this curation has been pursuing three main objectives: educating the public, decolonizing the museum, and reaching out to the Muslim communities and refugees living in non-Muslim societies. However, in the West, which remains worldly influential in the domain of heritage management, the first two objectives drove curators to engage in problematic practices, most notably the suppression of what we may call the “religious plot” in the exhibits’ narrative. Moreover, while the educational impulse led to a secular didactic scholasticism erected as the supreme exhibitory norm, the decolonizing enterprise took on an ideological turn in the form of a neo-postcolonial discourse at odds with a reality that has considerably changed since the seventies. Contesting the “being Islamic” of the material curated, this discourse separates religion from culture, thus relegating the faith to a theme among other multiple themes in the museum displays. That this state of affairs is problematic appears in crude light as, in the last decade, a new Muslim-led curatorship has been challenging this secularist curatorial politics. Re-centering Islam in the representational emplotment regarding Islamic culture in the exhibitory space and experimenting in the installations’ design to this effect, this curatorship, this essay’s author believes, holds the future of Islamic museology.

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The Religious Plot in Museums or the Lack Thereof: The Case of Islamic Art Display

The recent global surge of public- and museum-initiated interest in Islamic art has been interpreted broadly as having a direct correlation with diplomatic imperatives. Since the onslaught of the so-called migrant crisis, German institutions, in particular, have sought to socially engage refugees with the existing collections of Islamic arts and artefacts in Germany. But how can museums showcase and contextualise the arts of Islamic lands across time and space, in a way that is attentive to the traumatic experiences of displacement, migration and forced exile? In assessing various integrationist and assimilationist discourses, this chapter seeks to examine the gravity and consequences of museums’ pivotal role in providing an empathic and dignified space in society, where it is otherwise absent.

Objects, Storytelling, Memory and Living Histories: Curating Islamic Art Empathically in an Era of Trauma and Displacement

The book under review, which may be loosely translated as The Non-Ark of Adel Abdessemed and other sweeping changes, broadly considers the complex ethical dimensions, subject position, and metaphor...

Les Sans Arche D’Adel Abdessemed et autres coups de balai: by Hélène Cixous, Paris, Gallimard, 2018, 128 pp. (51 ill.), €16.80 (softcover), ISBN 978-2-07-277029-6

Nancy Demerdash-Fatemi

Papers

Objects, Storytelling, Memory and Living Histories: Curating Islamic Art Empathically in an Era of Trauma and Displacement

Les Sans Arche D’Adel Abdessemed et autres coups de balai: by Hélène Cixous, Paris, Gallimard, 2018, 128 pp. (51 ill.), €16.80 (softcover), ISBN 978-2-07-277029-6