What is Islamic Art

(there is no God but God). Yusuf thereby removes the Godhead (his aleph and his penis) inherent in him as a prophet from the“No, ...

meditation is described through the metaphor of“massaging the clay of Adam with my hands,”similarly combining the form of man–ma ...

You will not attain to taste the draught of Meaning (ma’ni) Do not, though, tarry overlong with the Figure (surat) But bring you ...

story a group of women converts through the utterances of Yusuf–his discourse of the law–here, a group of women converts through ...

Figure 11Anonymous,Man up a Pear Tree Who Saw His Wife and Her Lover Together, from aMasnaviby Jalal al-Din Rumi, 1530. The Brit ...

respected Shaykh San’an of Mecca begins to see dreams in which he lives in Constantinople and bows before an idol. Likening hims ...

The old wine sidled through the old man’s veins And like a twisting compass turned his brains; Old wine, young love, a lover far ...

In both parables, the interplay of dream, palace, sexuality, and idolatry uses materiality, the image, and the idol. Far from pr ...

offered a far broader discursive range through which artists and audiences alike could at once partake in the attraction of the ...

illustrations of Nizami’sKhamsa(see Chapter 3), the image offers a sophisticated meditation on the interplay between licit and f ...

painting in illustrated manuscripts, Margaret Shortle explains,“It is not the beloved...who causes desire in the audience; it is ...

as an independent sexual agent, in possession of her own fortune, able to arrange her own betrothal, and expresses lust. Islamic ...

the elevation of that which is abject in normal life renders it divine by abasing the servant of God. Yet this works only for Su ...

8.3 Joseph and Potiphar’s Wife in Post-Reformation Europe Whereas Islamic painters often worked closely with texts that physical ...

more sympathetic to the wife, and perhaps to Catholicism as well–as suggested by the humanistic rendering of the nudes.^93 Lucas ...

Figure 14Sebald Beham,Joseph and Potiphar’s Wife, print, 1544. Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Kupferstichkabinett, Inv. 424– 4 258 ...

that by Bihzad, European interpretations differ considerably.^95 Rather than conceiving the lovers as engaged in a mutual transc ...

Sex was no game for women, charged with maintaining family honor. Although Artemisia would later marry and become thefirst woman ...

Figure 16Ludovico Cigoli,Joseph and Potiphar’sWife,1610. Forbidden to make reproductions with any tool. © Ministero dei beni e d ...

the young man who backs away from her. His second depiction of the scene (today at the Pushkin Museum) appears even more somber, ...