“What is a painting? What is its relation to perception? To power? To
tradition?”^70 At the time, this call informed the growth of visual cultural
studies, applying analytical techniques previously reserved for art to the
rest of visual experience. An Islamic episteme must move further, beyond
an oculocentric premise, and toward an expanded appreciation of the
senses. It must ask not‘what makes an image Islamic?’but‘what is an
image?’Not‘how is ornament used in Islam?’but‘how does surface
function beyond our designation as ornament?’Not‘why did Islamic art
lack realism?’or‘how did Islamic art develop realism?’but‘what consti-
tutes reality?’Recent art history has emphasized historiography as a means
of recognizing the contingency of the discipline. Yet art historians have not
yet worked out how to dismantle and remodel the walls and passages
defining the norms and exclusions of its disciplinary episteme under
a colonial mindset. We must conceive of these less as fortresses than as
stage sets, mobile structures that enable and restrict the performances of
our thought.
To this end, this book provisionally relinquishes the study of‘art history’
by exploring an alternative episteme conceived as‘perceptual culture.’
Perceptual culture comprises the culturally informed reception of created
entities not preordained through hierarchies of senses, materials, or mate-
riality. In contrast to European oculocentrism, it refers to a multisensory
realm such as that expressed by al-Hujwiri:
The means of acquiring knowledge arefive: hearing, sight, taste, smell, and touch.
God has created for the mind thesefive avenues, and has made every kind of
knowledge depend on one of them. Four of thefive senses are situated in a special
organ, but one, namely touch, is diffused over the whole body. It is possible,
however, that this diffusion...may be shared by any of the other senses...God
has sent Apostles with true evidences, but belief in His Apostles does not become
obligatory until the obligatoriness of knowing God is achieved by hearing.^71
When we focus on visuality alone, we can understand how to situate
objects from other cultures in our own categories; but to understand
other cultures, such as those of Islam, we need to be open to senses beyond
the visual, not divided by mind and body, and at times not even localized.
Perceptual culture emerges not from what is produced, but from culturally
informed reception. It includes not only beautiful things such as paintings,
sculpture, tiles, carpets, or vessels normally considered in Islamic art
history, but also music, geometries, and dream images. While not(^70) Bryson, 1983 : xi. (^71) al-Hujwiri, 1959 : 393.
26 From Islamic Art to Perceptual Culture