the painting–text brings painting into being, painting renders text visible,
and thought makes the Real seen. Sight comes not from looking outward,
but looking inward by closing one eye. Thus the book in the artist’s hand
need not be open to be‘seen,’as true sight comes throughqalam–the
brush, the pen, and also as a play onkalam, the sophisticated speech of
philosophical inquiry. The envious companion is humanity, unable to
match the Divine, but also those who understand visual representation as
superficial signs rather than engaging with it through the internal senses.
Far from being uninterpretable, as might be inferred from the reluctance of
Islamic art historians to discuss the meanings proliferating in such images,
the painting participates in an extensive intellectual tradition circulating
between countless texts that constitute the Islamic world. These texts
neither describe nor precede that world; like Plato’sPhaedrusconjuring
the world in which the dialogue takes place, musicians conjuring their
audiences, or stories that conjure competitions and paintings, these texts
bring that real world into being. The world in which we live is not built by
history, but by the narratives through which we narrate our perception of
and responses to it. Literary rather than historical, this information does
not match the types of questions favored in the secularist legacy of the
discipline, averting its gaze from the philosophical or religious implications
of mimesis. This does not deny the worldly aspect of artworks so much as
recognize that perception takes place in a discursivefield deeply informed
by widely circulated spiritual meanings, precluding the distinction between
secular and religious knowledge.
Aiming to engage non-Western knowledge within art-historical meth-
ods, Elkins maintains the need to distinguish between these epistemes:
Calligraphers and Paintersis profoundly different from Western interests. Is it
possible to imagine a contemporary Western art historian taking this up as a
model? Probably only if the history were written by a devout writer whose purpose
was to show how paintings can be revelations of creation itself: an impossible
notion in the secular, historicized, academic world that supports art history. If
Qadi Ahmad can’t be read as an art-historical text, then in a real sense he can’tbe
understood: we have passed some border here, beyond art history and into another
sphere, where art is a branch of religion.^29
By presuming that only a“devout writer”could understand the text in its
relationship to art, Elkins infers that other cultures are intrinsically
unknowable unless translated into disciplinary terms and categories(^29) Elkins, 2013 : 108.
170 Deceiving Deception