What is Islamic Art

absent object. It thereby precludes inward mimesis, in which the object touches the heart of the subject. Similarly, demonstrati ...

7 The Transcendent Image Thefield of Islamic art history grew in tandem with European access to the material culture of regions ...

few days later her son is attacked by foreign armies, who then kidnap his wife. Hefinds refuge in Alexander’s camp. His advisor ...

semi-nomadic Turkic dynasties, and also probably underscoring the offi- cial, public, and non-romantic nature of their interacti ...

The trope of the image as proof proliferated even more widely as an indicator of belief in Islamic prophecy for foreign rulers.T ...

ruler. Unable to bear the distance from her spiritual master, Rumi, she hires a fellow disciple, the Christian painter‘Ayn al-Da ...

The commentary echoes the Quran’s frequent reference to non-believers as blind, as in:“It is not people’s eyes that are blind, b ...

plenitude of a reality increasingly impinged upon by the virtual. Culture inscribes the boundaries of reality. An understanding ...

clouds and attentive angels on his way to heaven is quite common, this painting also shows the origin of the goldenflame on a st ...

beloved, A’isha reported that the Prophet said to her,“You have been shown to me twice in a dream, I saw you pictured on a piece ...

rational spirit.”^33 In contrast to the modern understanding of the dream as ephemeral and irrational, this discourse ascribes l ...

ephemeral current lives, it becomes the permanent postmortem world. As al-Ghazali explains in hisAlchemy of Happiness: [The huma ...

distinction between the creation of humans from clay, like pottery, and the jinn, out of smokelessfire (Q55:14–20). A smokeless, ...

the noun‘ajabwith rejection of that which is perceived strange or abnor- mal, he associates the verb with chaotic temptation and ...

binary pairing to reveal a hidden hierarchy within,barzakhis the space of the dream or the mirror via which, through an inversio ...

Several centuries later, the popular and last great book of dream inter- pretation, written by the Ottoman Hanafijurist‘Abdalgha ...

subset of rare and wondrous things (‘ajab).^56 The moniker was adopted by Sufipoets who took on the identity of the excluded to ...

leaves to stray) 18. You would have thought they were awake, though they lay asleep. We turned them over, to the right and the l ...

The question of idolatry shifts from the literal worship of objects as divine to the exaltation of forms and practices as unassa ...

Figure 8Anonymous,The Hanging of Mansur al-Hallaj, from theDivanby Khosrau Dihlavi, Allahabad, India, 1602. The Walters Art Muse ...