Supplementing traditional categories such as period and style governing
established art-historical analysis, the trans-temporal and trans-regional
discourse of‘adabexpresses the multiple anamorphic possibilities of exist-
ing outside binary frameworks such as us and them, then and now. This
approach allows for the anamorphosis governing cultural identifications
and boundaries to shift. Donald Preziosi points out that“art history and
museums of art consequently establish certain conditions of reading
objects and images in such a way as to foreground the rhetorical economies
of metaphorical and metonymic relationships. Both situate their users
(operators) in anamorphic positions from which the‘history’of art may
be seen as unfolding, almost magically, before their eyes.”^61 Yet an ana-
morphic position can look from multiple sides. It is queer. Its inherent
openness to change offers the strength of possibility rather than the
instability of requiring afixed position to recognize a single truth.
Poetry provides a powerful cultural substrate for such a position because
its readership frequently transcends time and space in circulating the
language of cultivated faith. Occupying the same mental space as memor-
ized passages of the Quran, to which it frequently referred, memorization
enhanced the cultural power of poetry. As Nile Green explains:
The Quran was a text‘recited’in speech, preferably from memory, and the learning
habits that surrounded it affected wider attitudes towards book-learning. The self-
replicating traditions of Quran learners were long lasting and widespread, incul-
cating attitudes among the religious classes that valued internalizing books over
owning them. In a period of hand-produced books, readers seem to have read more
deeply than widely.^62
This had a powerful effect on all aspects of literary culture, in which poetry
circulated through appropriate quotation and recognition reinforcing
a shared cultural canon. This circulation of knowledge was part of
a process of self-reflexive cultural production sustained between past and
present, whether in the form of literary traditions, histories, or dreams and
visions of departed sages.^63 Performed at social gatherings, often accom-
panied by music and enjoyed with food and drink, poetry circulated
socially and legitimated participation in elite circles.^64
Regarding perception, poetry provided meanings exceeding those of
demonstrative texts. Although Quranic passages (Q26:224–227) decried
poets analogously with Plato’s critique of sophistry, poetry remained the(^61) Preziosi, 1992 : 382. (^62) Green, 2010 : 244–245. (^63) Green, 2003 : 288.
(^64) Shortle, 2018 :45–48, 54.
24 From Islamic Art to Perceptual Culture