primary artistic vehicle in the Islamic world.^65 The preeminent philoso-
pher Abu‘Ali al-Husain ibn Sina (980–1037) describes poetry as imagina-
tive speech that addresses the soul directly, producing feelings of pleasure
and astonishment. He suggests that the very fact that it is considered
a‘weak’form of rational thought in the sciences of logic enables it to
appeal to and reflect intuitive sensibilities.^66 Thus it often reveals that
which is assumed rather than explained, providing insight into the inti-
mate, internal space of perception. Dust Muhammad exhorted his readers
to refer to the poetic tradition to understand the functions of art.^67 This
suggestion informs the centrality of poetry in this book as expressing
cultural roles for perception. Rather than following a story determined
by a historical sequence based on when and where objects were produced,
this book examines how texts frame encounters with cultural experience. It
examines poetry in its own right as productive of images, and then inter-
prets visual illustrations of this poetry as a further source of meaning, often
altering, emphasizing, or refining meanings in the poetic text.
This contrasts dominant empirical art historical methods favoring doc-
umentary and material sources, emphasizing issues of production and
patronage, and preferring secular to spiritual knowledge as a means of
understanding the world. Thus the question‘What is Islamic about Islamic
art?’has not been central to academic art history, even as the textual turn
since the 1990s has energized thefield.^68 Spiritualist attempts to familiarize
Islam through appeals to mysticism were dismissed as essentializing.^69 Yet if
the risk of thinking about Islamic art as Islamic is to essentialize everything
Islamic as religious, then the risk of thinking of Islamic art only through
a secular lens is to ignore the centrality of faith in human experience. Islamic
art becomes something external to Muslims that paradoxically insists on
representing them.
The peripheralization of Islam from discourses of Islamic art results from
a secular privatization and restriction of religion to specific times and places.
Rather, Islam–like all religions and ideologies–determines epistemic
frameworks through which to experience the world. Just as European
Christianity underpins the episteme of art history, Islamic discourses under-
pin a distinct episteme.
This episteme requires a new vocabulary of engagement. This need
resembles the critical turn of the‘new’art history of the 1980s, in which
Norman Bryson called for an art history that reconsiders its terms, asking,
(^65) Plato, 2000 : 83. (^66) Lelli, 2014. (^67) Roxburgh, 2001 : 177. (^68) Necipoğlu, 2012 :4.
(^69) Massignon, 1921 ; Akkach,2005a:9–17; Lenssen, 2008.
Islam, Poetry, and Perceptual Culture 25