In 1969, soon after he had arrived at Harvard's Fine Arts Department, Oleg Grabar presented a... more In 1969, soon after he had arrived at Harvard's Fine Arts Department, Oleg Grabar presented a paper at the international colloquium celebrating the millennium of Cairo in which he proposed a new and provocative explanation for the prominence of figurai iconography in Fatimid art.1 Following the publication of the article three years later, in the fall of 1975 he conducted a graduate seminar on the art of the Fatimids and two years after that published a reassessment of Fatimid art.2 Several of the students in that seminar, myself included, went on to work further on the subject of Fatimid art and architecture, and five years later, after extensive travel around the Mediterranean, I presented a dissertation on early Fatimid art in North Africa and Egypt.3 Its scope (I covered only the years before 400 AH) was limited principally by Professor Grabar's insis tence that I finish writing quickly and get my degree. Otherwise, he feared my project might continue for many more years, if not decades. In the following years I published several articles on various aspects of Fatimid art, some of them extracted from chapters in my dissertation and some of them representing new work, but I never felt that the dissertation itself was worthy of publication.4 Professor Grabar himself returned occasionally to the subject of Fatimid art and dealt with it somewhat uneasily in the revised edition of Islamic Art and Archi tecture: 600-1250, the Pelican History of Art volume he had coauthored with Richard Ettinghausen and revised with Marilyn Jenkins-Madina.5 The authors had a problem with Fatimid architecture and art, which straddles almost all the categories they had established for early Islamic art (i.e., architecture/decorative art, early/late, east/west). They placed most but not all of it under the rubric "Medieval Islamic Art of the Cen tral Islamic Lands," noting in their preface, To these organizational divisions we made one partial exception. The rich and brilliant period of the Fatim ids (909-1171) could not, we felt, be cut into separate temporal or regional components in order to fit into our broad order of Islamic history. It belongs to the Muslim west as well as to the area of the central lands and it flourished during a period covered by both of our broad categories. We ended by putting most of its art in the Medieval Islamic section and in the central lands for reasons that will be explained in due course, but some early Fatimid objects are discussed under western Islamic lands in the earlier period. This is, no doubt, a shaky accommodation to a reluctant history.6 I myself, after many years exploring other aspects of Islamic art, have recently returned to the art and architecture of the Fatimids in a book that attempts to finish what I had begun several decades earlier.7 One of my conclusions is that the medium of fine woodwork, which scholars have often overlooked, is remarkably important throughout the Fatimid period, with literally dozens of dated or datable examples that document the evolution of styles of writing, carving, and decoration in religious and secular milieux. (A notable exception to the overall scholarly inattention to this medium is the survey by Ettinghausen, Grabar, and Jenkins-Madina, who discuss and illustrate sev eral examples of Fatimid woodwork.8) Just when I had nearly finished the typescript of my book, I was asked by the Nederlands-Vlaams Instituut in Cairo (NVIC) to consult on a Getty Foundation-funded project con cerning the advisability of restoring the al-Fakahani ("Fruitsellers"') Mosque. This apparently Ottoman-era mosque has two pairs of Fatimid-style wooden doors, presumably dating from an earlier Fatimid mosque on the site. These had already been noted by such scholars as Max van Berchem and K. A. C. Creswell.9 Over a century ago van Berchem declared that the building was "enti?rement restaur?e ? l'?poque turque et n'offre d'autre int?r?t arch?ologique que la date de sa fondation,"10 while Creswell reported that the two sets of doors were "decorated with good crisp Arabesque carving of the Fatimide period, and may well be the original ones."11 A close reexamination of the doors sheds surprising light not only on a lost
When we started studying Islamic art some thirty years ago, there were no good introductory textb... more When we started studying Islamic art some thirty years ago, there were no good introductory textbooks that undergraduates 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 publications. For example, K.A.C. Creswell's massive tomes implied 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 Mamluk sequence of sultans persisted until 1517 and there was ample evidence for a glorious tradition of Islamic architecture in many lands besides Egypt.' The venerable Survey of wieldy neologisms have not found widespread acceptance.7 Rather, most scholars tacitly accept that the convenient if incorrect term "Islamic" refers not just to the religion of Islam but to the larger culture in which Islam was the dominant-but not sole-religion practiced. Although it looks similar, "Islamic art" is therefore not comparable to such concepts as "Christian" or "Buddhist" art, which are normally understood to refer specifically to religious art. Christian art, for example, does not usually include all the art of Europe between the fall of Rome and the Reformation, nor does Buddhist art encompass all the arts of Asia produced between the Kushans and Kyoto. This important, if simple, distinction is often overlooked. And what about art? Islamic art is generally taken to encompass everything from the enormous congregational mosques and luxury manuscripts commissioned by powerful rulers from great architects and calligrapher-painters to the inlaid metalwares and intricate carpets produced by anonymous urban craftsmen and nomad women. However, much of what man)y historians of Islamic art normally study-inlaid metalwares, luster ceramics, enameled glass, brocaded textiles, and knotted carpets-is not the typical purview of the historian of Western art, who generally considers such handicrafts to be "minor" or "decorative" arts compared with the "nobler" arts of architecture, painting, and sculpture. While architecture is as important in Islamic culture as it was in Western Europe or East Asia, visual representation, which plays such an enormous role in the artistic traditions of Europe and Asia, is a relatively minor and limited component of Islamic culture, and sculpture is virtually unknown. In sum, then, the term "Islamic art" seems to be a convenient misnomer for everything left over from everywhere else. It is most easily defined by what it is not: neither a region, nor a period, nor a school, nor a movement, nor a dynasty, but the visual culture of a place and time when the people (or at least their leaders) espoused a particular religion. Compared with other fields of art history, the study of Islamic art and architecture is relatively new. It was invented at the end of the nineteenth century and was of interest primarily to European and later American scholars." Unlike the study of Chinese art, which Chinese scholars have pursued for centuries, there is no indigenous tradition in any of the Islamic lands of studying Islamic art, with the possible exception of calligraphy, which has enjoyed a special status since the seventh century, and by extension book painting, which was collected since the sixteenth.9 There is no evidence that any artist or patron in the fourteen centuries since the revelation of Islam ever thought of his or her art as "Islamic," and the notion of a distinctly "Islamic" tradition of art and architecture, eventually encompassing the lands between the Atlantic and the Indian oceans, is a product of late nineteenth-and twentieth-century Western scholarship, as is the terminology used to identify it. Until that time, European scholars used such restrictive geographic or ethnic terms as "Indian" ("Hindu"), "Persian," "Turkish," "Arab," "Saracenic," and "Moorish" to describe distinct regional styles current in the Indian subcontinent, the Ottoman Empire, Iran, the Levant, and southern Spain. Such all-embracing terms as "Mahommedan" or "Mohammedan," "Moslem" or "Muslim," and "Islamic" came into favor only when twentieth-century scholars began to look back to a golden age of Islamic culture that they believe had flourished in the eighth and ninth centuries and project it simplistically onto the kaleidoscopic modern world. In short, Islamic art as it exists in the early twenty-first century is largely a creation of Western culture.10 This all-embracing view of Islam and Islamic art was a by-product of European interest in delineating the history of religions, in which the multifarious varieties of human spiritual expression were lumped together in a normative notion of a single "Islam," which could be effectively juxtaposed not only to heterodox "variants" such as "Shiism" and "Sufism" but also, and more importantly in the Western view, to equally normative notions of "Christianity" or "Judaism." This twentieth-century view, enshrined in countless books, is all the odder considering that there is no central authority that can speak for all Muslims, although many might claim to do so. No matter what newspapers-and many books-say, there never was, nor is, a single Islam, and so any attempt to define the essence of a single Islamic art is doomed to failure.1' To the 1970s Western views of Islam and its culture were formed in the crucible of colonialism, as foreign powers expanded economically and politically into the region during a period when traditional local powers-notably, the Ottoman Empire in the eastern Mediterranean and the Mughals in northern India-were weakening. Colonialism was not limited to Western European imperialists. In the nineteenth century the Chinese and the Russians absorbed the Muslim khanates of Central Asia. The Chinese province of Xinjiang (literally, "New Territories") was carved out of Silk Road oases controlled for the last millennium by Muslims. The Russians, who sought warm-water ports, pushed south into Central Asia, Iran, and Afghanistan. Colonial expansion, which was initially motivated by a desire for raw materials and markets for manufactured goods, was enormously complicated in the twentieth century by the discovery of huge deposits of petroleum throughout the region, from the Algerian Sahara through Kurdistan and the Arabian Peninsula to Sumatra, and its consequent development as the world's major source of energy. These global events had several ramifications for the study of Islamic art. For at least a millennium, European travelers had brought back souvenirs of Islamic handicraft and given them new meanings. Itienne de Blois, commander of the First Crusade along with his brothers Godefroy de Bouillon and Baudoin, returned to France and became patron of the abbey of St-Josse near Caen. He apparently brought back with him the glorious samite saddlecloth made in northeastern Iran for the commander Abu Mansur Bakhtegin in the late tenth century (Fig. 1), for it was used to wrap the bones of the saint when he was reburied in 1134.12 The spectacular rockcrystal ewer made in Egypt for the Fatimid caliph al-Aziz (r. 975-96) must have had a similar history before it became a prized relic in the treasury of S. Marco.'3 During the sack of C6rdoba in 1010, Catalan mercenaries probably looted the
... Apart from the few instances when a ruler was won over to Isma&am... more ... Apart from the few instances when a ruler was won over to Isma'ilism, its pro-ponents concentrated mainly on the mass of ordinary people. The daC Abu CAbd Allah won his first converts in North Africa among Kutama Berbers, not among the ulema of Qayrawan. ...
... The present study makes use of that documentation in presenting a thorough physical de-script... more ... The present study makes use of that documentation in presenting a thorough physical de-scription of the monument near Sarvistan in order to determine its position in the history of Persianarchitecture. The dearth of relevant contemporary sources enhances the importance of ...
... Apart from the few instances when a ruler was won over to Isma&am... more ... Apart from the few instances when a ruler was won over to Isma'ilism, its pro-ponents concentrated mainly on the mass of ordinary people. The daC Abu CAbd Allah won his first converts in North Africa among Kutama Berbers, not among the ulema of Qayrawan. ...
... The Nasser D. Khalili Collection of Islamic Art. Post a Comment. CONTRIBUTORS: Author: Raby, ... more ... The Nasser D. Khalili Collection of Islamic Art. Post a Comment. CONTRIBUTORS: Author: Raby, Julian. ... PAGES (INTRO/BODY): SUBJECT(S): Nasser D. Khalili Collection of Islamic Art; Catalogs. DISCIPLINE: No discipline assigned. LC NUMBER: N6264.G7 L667 1992. HTTP: ...
... d. 652-53); this would suggest that the drawing came from an early Islamic book about ... at ... more ... d. 652-53); this would suggest that the drawing came from an early Islamic book about ... at this date.32 The drawings have little or nothing to do with contemporary representations on ... or elev-enth-century Egypt, for example, would have learned to draw on ceramics by practicing ...
... Ml 'Cordoba Oranadaf (Aniuba Biskra :/ .Damascus &am... more ... Ml 'Cordoba Oranadaf (Aniuba Biskra :/ .Damascus 'Baqh '7J "Jerusalem Karba Naj THE ISLAMIC WORLD 15OO18OO ... It may be more difficult to perceive that such works as the blue-and-white ceramic charger [295], the inlaid brass basin made for al-Nasir Muhammad [129 ...
In 1969, soon after he had arrived at Harvard's Fine Arts Department, Oleg Grabar presented a... more In 1969, soon after he had arrived at Harvard's Fine Arts Department, Oleg Grabar presented a paper at the international colloquium celebrating the millennium of Cairo in which he proposed a new and provocative explanation for the prominence of figurai iconography in Fatimid art.1 Following the publication of the article three years later, in the fall of 1975 he conducted a graduate seminar on the art of the Fatimids and two years after that published a reassessment of Fatimid art.2 Several of the students in that seminar, myself included, went on to work further on the subject of Fatimid art and architecture, and five years later, after extensive travel around the Mediterranean, I presented a dissertation on early Fatimid art in North Africa and Egypt.3 Its scope (I covered only the years before 400 AH) was limited principally by Professor Grabar's insis tence that I finish writing quickly and get my degree. Otherwise, he feared my project might continue for many more years, if not decades. In the following years I published several articles on various aspects of Fatimid art, some of them extracted from chapters in my dissertation and some of them representing new work, but I never felt that the dissertation itself was worthy of publication.4 Professor Grabar himself returned occasionally to the subject of Fatimid art and dealt with it somewhat uneasily in the revised edition of Islamic Art and Archi tecture: 600-1250, the Pelican History of Art volume he had coauthored with Richard Ettinghausen and revised with Marilyn Jenkins-Madina.5 The authors had a problem with Fatimid architecture and art, which straddles almost all the categories they had established for early Islamic art (i.e., architecture/decorative art, early/late, east/west). They placed most but not all of it under the rubric "Medieval Islamic Art of the Cen tral Islamic Lands," noting in their preface, To these organizational divisions we made one partial exception. The rich and brilliant period of the Fatim ids (909-1171) could not, we felt, be cut into separate temporal or regional components in order to fit into our broad order of Islamic history. It belongs to the Muslim west as well as to the area of the central lands and it flourished during a period covered by both of our broad categories. We ended by putting most of its art in the Medieval Islamic section and in the central lands for reasons that will be explained in due course, but some early Fatimid objects are discussed under western Islamic lands in the earlier period. This is, no doubt, a shaky accommodation to a reluctant history.6 I myself, after many years exploring other aspects of Islamic art, have recently returned to the art and architecture of the Fatimids in a book that attempts to finish what I had begun several decades earlier.7 One of my conclusions is that the medium of fine woodwork, which scholars have often overlooked, is remarkably important throughout the Fatimid period, with literally dozens of dated or datable examples that document the evolution of styles of writing, carving, and decoration in religious and secular milieux. (A notable exception to the overall scholarly inattention to this medium is the survey by Ettinghausen, Grabar, and Jenkins-Madina, who discuss and illustrate sev eral examples of Fatimid woodwork.8) Just when I had nearly finished the typescript of my book, I was asked by the Nederlands-Vlaams Instituut in Cairo (NVIC) to consult on a Getty Foundation-funded project con cerning the advisability of restoring the al-Fakahani ("Fruitsellers"') Mosque. This apparently Ottoman-era mosque has two pairs of Fatimid-style wooden doors, presumably dating from an earlier Fatimid mosque on the site. These had already been noted by such scholars as Max van Berchem and K. A. C. Creswell.9 Over a century ago van Berchem declared that the building was "enti?rement restaur?e ? l'?poque turque et n'offre d'autre int?r?t arch?ologique que la date de sa fondation,"10 while Creswell reported that the two sets of doors were "decorated with good crisp Arabesque carving of the Fatimide period, and may well be the original ones."11 A close reexamination of the doors sheds surprising light not only on a lost
When we started studying Islamic art some thirty years ago, there were no good introductory textb... more When we started studying Islamic art some thirty years ago, there were no good introductory textbooks that undergraduates 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 publications. For example, K.A.C. Creswell's massive tomes implied 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 Mamluk sequence of sultans persisted until 1517 and there was ample evidence for a glorious tradition of Islamic architecture in many lands besides Egypt.' The venerable Survey of wieldy neologisms have not found widespread acceptance.7 Rather, most scholars tacitly accept that the convenient if incorrect term "Islamic" refers not just to the religion of Islam but to the larger culture in which Islam was the dominant-but not sole-religion practiced. Although it looks similar, "Islamic art" is therefore not comparable to such concepts as "Christian" or "Buddhist" art, which are normally understood to refer specifically to religious art. Christian art, for example, does not usually include all the art of Europe between the fall of Rome and the Reformation, nor does Buddhist art encompass all the arts of Asia produced between the Kushans and Kyoto. This important, if simple, distinction is often overlooked. And what about art? Islamic art is generally taken to encompass everything from the enormous congregational mosques and luxury manuscripts commissioned by powerful rulers from great architects and calligrapher-painters to the inlaid metalwares and intricate carpets produced by anonymous urban craftsmen and nomad women. However, much of what man)y historians of Islamic art normally study-inlaid metalwares, luster ceramics, enameled glass, brocaded textiles, and knotted carpets-is not the typical purview of the historian of Western art, who generally considers such handicrafts to be "minor" or "decorative" arts compared with the "nobler" arts of architecture, painting, and sculpture. While architecture is as important in Islamic culture as it was in Western Europe or East Asia, visual representation, which plays such an enormous role in the artistic traditions of Europe and Asia, is a relatively minor and limited component of Islamic culture, and sculpture is virtually unknown. In sum, then, the term "Islamic art" seems to be a convenient misnomer for everything left over from everywhere else. It is most easily defined by what it is not: neither a region, nor a period, nor a school, nor a movement, nor a dynasty, but the visual culture of a place and time when the people (or at least their leaders) espoused a particular religion. Compared with other fields of art history, the study of Islamic art and architecture is relatively new. It was invented at the end of the nineteenth century and was of interest primarily to European and later American scholars." Unlike the study of Chinese art, which Chinese scholars have pursued for centuries, there is no indigenous tradition in any of the Islamic lands of studying Islamic art, with the possible exception of calligraphy, which has enjoyed a special status since the seventh century, and by extension book painting, which was collected since the sixteenth.9 There is no evidence that any artist or patron in the fourteen centuries since the revelation of Islam ever thought of his or her art as "Islamic," and the notion of a distinctly "Islamic" tradition of art and architecture, eventually encompassing the lands between the Atlantic and the Indian oceans, is a product of late nineteenth-and twentieth-century Western scholarship, as is the terminology used to identify it. Until that time, European scholars used such restrictive geographic or ethnic terms as "Indian" ("Hindu"), "Persian," "Turkish," "Arab," "Saracenic," and "Moorish" to describe distinct regional styles current in the Indian subcontinent, the Ottoman Empire, Iran, the Levant, and southern Spain. Such all-embracing terms as "Mahommedan" or "Mohammedan," "Moslem" or "Muslim," and "Islamic" came into favor only when twentieth-century scholars began to look back to a golden age of Islamic culture that they believe had flourished in the eighth and ninth centuries and project it simplistically onto the kaleidoscopic modern world. In short, Islamic art as it exists in the early twenty-first century is largely a creation of Western culture.10 This all-embracing view of Islam and Islamic art was a by-product of European interest in delineating the history of religions, in which the multifarious varieties of human spiritual expression were lumped together in a normative notion of a single "Islam," which could be effectively juxtaposed not only to heterodox "variants" such as "Shiism" and "Sufism" but also, and more importantly in the Western view, to equally normative notions of "Christianity" or "Judaism." This twentieth-century view, enshrined in countless books, is all the odder considering that there is no central authority that can speak for all Muslims, although many might claim to do so. No matter what newspapers-and many books-say, there never was, nor is, a single Islam, and so any attempt to define the essence of a single Islamic art is doomed to failure.1' To the 1970s Western views of Islam and its culture were formed in the crucible of colonialism, as foreign powers expanded economically and politically into the region during a period when traditional local powers-notably, the Ottoman Empire in the eastern Mediterranean and the Mughals in northern India-were weakening. Colonialism was not limited to Western European imperialists. In the nineteenth century the Chinese and the Russians absorbed the Muslim khanates of Central Asia. The Chinese province of Xinjiang (literally, "New Territories") was carved out of Silk Road oases controlled for the last millennium by Muslims. The Russians, who sought warm-water ports, pushed south into Central Asia, Iran, and Afghanistan. Colonial expansion, which was initially motivated by a desire for raw materials and markets for manufactured goods, was enormously complicated in the twentieth century by the discovery of huge deposits of petroleum throughout the region, from the Algerian Sahara through Kurdistan and the Arabian Peninsula to Sumatra, and its consequent development as the world's major source of energy. These global events had several ramifications for the study of Islamic art. For at least a millennium, European travelers had brought back souvenirs of Islamic handicraft and given them new meanings. Itienne de Blois, commander of the First Crusade along with his brothers Godefroy de Bouillon and Baudoin, returned to France and became patron of the abbey of St-Josse near Caen. He apparently brought back with him the glorious samite saddlecloth made in northeastern Iran for the commander Abu Mansur Bakhtegin in the late tenth century (Fig. 1), for it was used to wrap the bones of the saint when he was reburied in 1134.12 The spectacular rockcrystal ewer made in Egypt for the Fatimid caliph al-Aziz (r. 975-96) must have had a similar history before it became a prized relic in the treasury of S. Marco.'3 During the sack of C6rdoba in 1010, Catalan mercenaries probably looted the
... Apart from the few instances when a ruler was won over to Isma&am... more ... Apart from the few instances when a ruler was won over to Isma'ilism, its pro-ponents concentrated mainly on the mass of ordinary people. The daC Abu CAbd Allah won his first converts in North Africa among Kutama Berbers, not among the ulema of Qayrawan. ...
... The present study makes use of that documentation in presenting a thorough physical de-script... more ... The present study makes use of that documentation in presenting a thorough physical de-scription of the monument near Sarvistan in order to determine its position in the history of Persianarchitecture. The dearth of relevant contemporary sources enhances the importance of ...
... Apart from the few instances when a ruler was won over to Isma&am... more ... Apart from the few instances when a ruler was won over to Isma'ilism, its pro-ponents concentrated mainly on the mass of ordinary people. The daC Abu CAbd Allah won his first converts in North Africa among Kutama Berbers, not among the ulema of Qayrawan. ...
... The Nasser D. Khalili Collection of Islamic Art. Post a Comment. CONTRIBUTORS: Author: Raby, ... more ... The Nasser D. Khalili Collection of Islamic Art. Post a Comment. CONTRIBUTORS: Author: Raby, Julian. ... PAGES (INTRO/BODY): SUBJECT(S): Nasser D. Khalili Collection of Islamic Art; Catalogs. DISCIPLINE: No discipline assigned. LC NUMBER: N6264.G7 L667 1992. HTTP: ...
... d. 652-53); this would suggest that the drawing came from an early Islamic book about ... at ... more ... d. 652-53); this would suggest that the drawing came from an early Islamic book about ... at this date.32 The drawings have little or nothing to do with contemporary representations on ... or elev-enth-century Egypt, for example, would have learned to draw on ceramics by practicing ...
... Ml 'Cordoba Oranadaf (Aniuba Biskra :/ .Damascus &am... more ... Ml 'Cordoba Oranadaf (Aniuba Biskra :/ .Damascus 'Baqh '7J "Jerusalem Karba Naj THE ISLAMIC WORLD 15OO18OO ... It may be more difficult to perceive that such works as the blue-and-white ceramic charger [295], the inlaid brass basin made for al-Nasir Muhammad [129 ...
A revisionist history of the minaret, the tower attached to a mosque, suggesting that it was inve... more A revisionist history of the minaret, the tower attached to a mosque, suggesting that it was invented, not for the call to prayer but as a symbol of Islam, not by the Umayyads in the 7th century but by the Abbasids in the 8th.
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